12-Pack Review: ECWA 02/26/00

BEER 1: Ahh yes. Two sweet delicious items on the menu tonight. A cooler full of a mixture of Old Milwaukees and Budweisers is a red and white canned alcohol treat during this Holiday season. And in the VCR is the Super 8 tournament, version 2000, brought to us by those fine Delawarians of the East Coast Wrestling Association. This junior tournament, all in one night, is modeled after the ultimately awesome Japanese spectacular called the Super-J Cup. The Super 8 is All-American and all indy, meaning young, hungry guys not yet exploited by the professional wrestling industry into men-hoes full of steroids and growth hormones and experimental painkillers smuggled over from Mexico. These are guys full of passion for the art of professional wrestling, not the gimmick of sports entertainment. They actually still care about giving the fans their money and time’s worth when they step out under those obnoxious lights in weird outfits, whether it’s 1000 people in wrestling t-shirts or 34 mountain retards with dogshit all over their boots. Young and passionate light-weighted men bouncing across a ring in Delaware, risking brain-smashings and compressed vertebrates just to say they kicked ass in the legendary Super 8 Tournament, which in the past has been won by Richmond’s own former bartender/baseball player Lance Diamond, who had a gimmick enhancement operation in ECW so you may know him as the comedic Simon Diamond instead of as the serious old school technically proficient heel grappler he was born to be. The videotape starts up with all 8 combatants in this jank wearing their yellow Super 8 t-shirt posing in the ring with the not-as-over-the-top as I’d expect. I’ll pretend I didn’t hear the racial remarks made towards Scoot Andrews as he’s the only black guy in the tourney, saying he should have a noose around his neck or a chicken leg in his mouth. ECWA does a nice job of showing highlight clips from past events on a wall screen, nice touch for an indy promotion. Bad modern metal music blares and little girls scream over Jeff Peterson and Trent Acid. Wrestling nerds mark out for Christopher Daniels. MTV-style production in a high school gymnasium, all for grown men fake fighting. America truly is a great place. Out comes a guy in a suit with the trophy, then it’s all the guys. Chad Collyer, a Dean Malenko-trained old school technico from Florida with those gay-looking shiny leather trunks. “The Black Nature Boy” Scoot Andrews, my personal fave in this thing, he’s the black Nature Boy for God’s sake. Jet Jaguar, who looks to be very much a white guy. Sharkboy, with the retarded shark mask and a penchant for biting suckas in the corner, but he’s a good guy from the Midwest, little midget fucker, if he’d only take steroids he’d already be in WCW. Vic Capri, who I’ve never seen before, but he’s supposed to rule, though he looks like your standard asshole with long greasy hair clocking all the chicks you wanted to get with. Trent Acid, a Marilyn Manson type kid from insane Jersey garbage wrestling scene, he’s taken part in a couple of tours of Big Japan wrestling and I’m sure it helped him get better having guys dive off balconies onto him. Jeff Peterson, the wholesome local white boy whom all the girls in the crowd love. “The Fallen Angel” Christopher Daniels, whom all the wrestling nerds in the crowd love, Daniels rules completely, excepting his stupid looking hairstyle. So all the guys are in the ring and they play the national anthem, some non-Hendrix acid rock version, sounds like it could be Yngwie Malmsteen or Joe Satriani or one of those schmucks. Great, everybody gets the fuck out the ring and now we wrassle. First up is Scoot, logical progression from Buddy Rogers to Ric Flair, down the side tangent of Buddy Landell, onto the next generation of wrestler, into the form of Scoot Andrews, that’s the Nature Boy lineage. Makes perfect sense to me. His opponent is Trent Acid, wearing way too much shiny clothing, getting hugs from hoodrats in the front row, coming out to the Backstreet Boys. Surprisingly, Scoot is your bad guy, trying to calm the crowd, and the homoerotic Acid is your fan favorite. BEER SLAMMED for insane backwards suplex off the apron onto floor that drops Scoot on his back and Acid on his neck. MORE BEER SLAMMED as Trent Acid shows he’s a high school dropout doing it all for the potential statutory rape cases in the crowd as he incredibly mindlessly moonsaults off the top rope outside the ring onto the waiting Scoot. In a matter of five minutes, Trent Acid has already established a place in my heart as someone like me; reckless, stupid, and motivated by pussy. And then he goes right back up to the top, only to have Scoot shove him off to the outside ring barrier. Seven minutes and 3 half-retarded bumps by Trent Acid. Scoot monkeyflips out onto him in very un-Nature Boy-like fashion, then jawjacks with some sap in a cowboy hat. Beer 1 finished in honor of double chicken wing suplex.

BEER 2: Trent Acid is a spot machine, getting our first 2 count of the night. Crotched on the second rope, then dropped on the back of his skull by a vicious Scoot, who displays a nice array of suplexes. He locks the chinlock onto the pretty boy to work the crowd into a hatred for a rest minute. The crowd chants “Scoot! There it is!” How come when I see indy shows, I never get anything close to a Scoot Andrews/Trent Acid encounter? The best I remember getting is watching Christian York compress his spinal cord attempting an out of the ring moonsault on Julio Dinero nee Fantastico nee Sanchez the Freakin’ Puerto Rican at the Chesterfield County Fair. Sitdown power bomb by Scoot, both men groggy for the late match double count by the ref signaling the crowd to understand these guys are wore out. Superplex by Scoot gets turned into a top rope gourdbuster by Acid. Scoot catches Acid, flips him around for a fuck-you piledriver that leaves Acid in the ring selling the injury and contemplating the pain he feels and how much he’s a rock star after only one match. Beer drunk to Trent Acid. Out comes Sharkboy. I don’t like Sharkboy, simply because I’ve seen him on MTV. Any wrestler I’ve ever seen on MTV I don’t like. Even that cool-ass Hungarian Barbarian guy on that weird So You Wanna Be A WWF Superstar special last year. El Hijo del Dean Malenko aka Chad Collyer will be Sharkboy’s competition. Seems the motions of this bout are really good, but they lack emotion, everything sort of routine. Speaking of routines, Sharkboy just bit the ass of Collyer. I imagine the Sharkboy mask fitting in better in a Michinoku 6-man match, that is if Sharkboy had the adrenaline rush to work such a match. In the last six years, I’ve probably watched over 2000 hurricanranas from wrestling characters of varying ability. I would not cry at all if I didn’t see another one for the rest of my life. While I was busy thinking how played hurricanranas are, Collyer creaked out a victory, and now he celebrates to AC/DC music. Out comes Jet Jaguar, he looks like a marine, I hope he gets paralyzed. His opponent is the all-around good kid Jeff Peterson, dabbed up in his American flag outfit. I think this kid’s got cancer now and quit wrestling. So I’ve got a bad guy marine looking fuck called Jet Jaguar battling a paperboy in an American flag. I will be drinking beer simply out of boredom. Wait, nice slap by the paperboy. Roly poly back and forth running lucha libre spots going on. Delaware’s nice and all, what with all the casinos and truck stops and methed-out hookers you can murder and leave in riverbeds, but why don’t we have a super junior tourney like this in North Carolina? The South rules everything. Throw Cham Pain and Shannon Moore and Shane Helms and Reckless Youth and some of these newer guys I’ve never heard of floating around the Carolina indies together in an armory one Saturday night and see what happens. Sell beer too. Damn, Peterson just attempts suicide off the top rope onto Jet Faguar. You know it’s scary when the ref runs out to ask the guys if they’re still able to move all limbs. The chumpy patriotic outfit misled me, Jeff Peterson is not afraid to do stupid dives and be a Confederate Mack.

BEER 3: Holy shit, Jet Faguar is using the claw, as immortalized by Blackjack Mulligan and Baron Von Raschke. You know how you can tell Jake the Snake Roberts ruled? By how many Gen-X wrestlers use the DDT. Top rope superplex by Faguar leads to a kick-out. Thought that would’ve done it. I’m guessing Peterson will win now that he kicked out of that monster move. Yep, bouncy pouncy lucha style neckbreaker followed by a gigantic frogsplash leads to, damn another kickout. Wait, wasn’t looking and Jet Faguar scores the victory. Damn, he sucks. I’ll drink beer to the cancer boy in the American flag trying to crack his skull on the ring barrier though. Out comes Vic Capri, hobnobbing it with the chumps in the first row. He is matched up against independent main eventer Christopher Daniels, the Fallen Angel, complete with priest get-up and badly died blonde hair on top. Daniels is one of those rare wrestling specimens, he’s actually creative with it all. Not just in the moves he does, but in how he does them. He busts through the normal spots and tweaks them a little here and there to give it flair. Tells Wolverton, Delaware, he is “God’s gift to professional wrestling.” He cuts a promo that has wrestling nerds marking as he makes reference to his Japanese masked character Curry Man. Damn, I’ve never actually heard a Daniels promo, but he rules at that too. He’s got the crowd planning on getting on their knees and thanking the Lord, he’s got opponents saying their prayers, even the little “the year of our Lord 2000” comment refers back to his Fallen Angel gimmick, holy shit. How come this guy is not on my Monday night television yet? Instead I get the new guys in WCW, all interchangeable and sucky in a Memphis 1980s type of way. Or the WWF and it’s pre-packaged processed superstars, the microwave meal to grandma’s Sunday dinner southern regional wrestling of the late ‘70/early ‘80s. Capri’s not bad, he just dropped Daniels on his neck and then dove out the ring on top of him. I’m not exposed to as much puroresu Japanese crap as I should probably be, but I’m into this “hey, we’re fake fighting wrestling in front of these people, but I’m gonna drop you on your brain just to see how tough you are, and goddamnit, I’m tough enough if you do the shit to me in return, I’m gonna jump up and crack your rib with a stiff kick cuz I’m a fuckin’ bad ass and last night I was drinking whiskey with 3 hot-ass 16-year-olds in a Jacuzzi, you bitch!” See, what I complained about in the Collyer/Sharkboy match, no enthusiasm, is the opposite with Daniels here. Instead of just jumping up with his foot sticking out for the other guy to run into, Daniels jumps up, feet extended too high into the air, then he whips one leg down into the running Capri’s forehead. Not only does it look better when you see it, it feels better energy-wise, Daniels exerting his Chi throughout the gym like a Tai-chi master touching a student and making them flip backwards. Jake Roberts was great at this as well. Crack addiction or not, there should be a place for Jake the Snake Roberts in today’s money-market wrestling industry.

BEER 4: Cocky attitude by Daniels, technical belly-to-belly suplex, this guy is wrestling personified. And as good as he is, he risks it all with an Asai moonsault outside the ring. Non-wrestling fans just don’t know how dangerous a move that is. Capri hasn’t really had a chance to shine in this match, basically a Mulkey brothers squash by Daniels so far. Beautiful tease turn of tide right there: Capri hulks up out of headlock, runs into ropes, ducks the Daniels clothesline, comes back with his own like expected, but Daniels ducks too, and grabs Capri in a German suplex manner, methinks “no comeback, it’s all over”, but Capri flips over the top of Daniels and grabs him from behind, methinks “oh shit, his own suplex”, but then Capri spins Daniels around in the air and sitdown powerbombs him. Beer must be slammed for that retarded arts display. HOLY SHIT! Okay, Capri is doing the never letting go triple suplex thing that Chris Benoit does, but Daniels, in normal creative fashion, reaches his right leg back and blocks the second one, then follows up with elbows to the face hoping for the release. Capri catches him under the arm and suplexes him backwards in one of those release moves that has you thinking “well, the guy looked like he landed on his head but somehow ended up on his face” and I don’t mean on his head like arms down and all, I mean on his head with nothing else there like Michael Irvin’s last football game. It’s over you think, but Daniels does the barely mobile foot on the bottom rope after the 2 count thing. Capri hits a nasty big moonsault. And then Daniels hits some shit. We’ve got the build-up to the climax rapid-fire 2-count parade going on. Double chicken wing suplex? No, Daniels instead drops Capri on his forehead hard on plywood with a pretty piece of tarheel blue fabric pulled across it. It couldn’t’ve felt good. And they top that with the best 20 seconds of wrestling I’ve ever seen: Daniels goes for another one of those knoggin-knocker moves just like that, hooking both arms, but Capri spins around his legs, twists behind Daniels in an abdominal stretch position, pulls Daniels left arm between his legs for that crazy-style suplex, Daniels flips over behind him with monentum however, pops him in the back of the neck, bounces back into the ropes, comes back with momentum for the DDT, but Capri swings him around, Daniels ends up behind him holding him in a Dragon sleeper position, and drops the Last Rites on him, which is a mutant spinning suplex DDT thing that fucks you up. Daniels wins! Daniels wins! And he rules, good lord almighty he rules. BEER MUST BE FINISHED IN THE NAME OF GOD’S GIFT TO WRESTLING.

BEER 5: Slammed in the name of God’s Gift to Wrestling.

BEER 6: In between rounds match. Why is Kevin Kelly involved in this card? Why would any indy promotion want to shit on their genuine wrestling extravaganza by having a crappy WWF second-team announcer get involved? I love crappy wrestling belts, they always look so stupid when you see them up close. None of them will ever compare to the NWA World title belt with the flags and round bolts and shit that Harley Race and Terry Funk and Dusty Rhodes and Ric Flair wore. Backstage nonsense going on widescreen gymnasium style on the wall, explaining the whole promoter good guy vs. evil WWF Kevin Kelly angle. Fuck all that sports entertainment nonsense. Give me Scoot and the Fallen Angel. It’s later, I’m drunker. I can forgive Christopher Daniels his dumb hair just because he’s such a bad-ass. It’s the semi-finals, the crowd is cheering for him even though he’s a heel, and he’s cutting a promo. Jet Faguar got injured last round, so he can’t compete. Daniels calls the ring announcer “Mr. Microphone Stand”, that’s a nice one. Shit, Ace Darling is back out, he’s the suit guy from the beginning. He’s saying this is a shoot and Jet Faguar has got an ice pack on his self. So now we got Ace Darling, northeast indy Hulk Hogan, vs. Christopher Daniels. Darling’s in a Super 8 t-shirt and some Rock striped interview workout pants, giving him that “didn’t know I was gonna wrestle even though I’ve somehow managed to wrestle in every Super 8 tournament so far” look. Christopher Daniels is superstar of the future wrestling the way it oughta be personified. Ace Darling is WWF Shotgun Saturday Night jobber in the main event week after week wrestling personified. Hey, Daniels was wearing his blue-trimmed trunks the first round, now he’s wearing his fuchsia trimmed trunks. See the attention to little details like that. What other wrestler feels that much concern for his career? What other wrestler tweaks it in such odd manners? Christopher Daniels is your hero. Ace Darling suffers from the same boredeom I described earlier, no adrenaline or enthusiasm for what he’s doing that particular night. Luckily, Daniels Last Rites his ass and it’s over. DRINK BEER IN THANKS TO CHRISTOPHER DANIELS FOR ENDING IT QUICK.

BEER 7: It’s the Black Nature Boy Scoot Andrews! And it’s El Hijo del Dean Malenko! Both from Florida, both wrestling in Delaware in front of 126 people. Hey, Scoot is wearing different trunks for the second round as well, a nice touch. Perhaps he is destined to meet Daniels in the indy superstar finals. You can tell these two guys have been through one match already tonight, as everything is a little looser than their respective first matches. Damn, I zoned out on the whole nonsense, and Scoot Andrews wins. That means him versus Christopher Daniels in the finals. And to be honest with you, I’ve seen that match before on Wrestling Power on public access television, so I know it’s good. So that means I’ll drink mad beer whilst I watch it. Scoot Andrews was just a Florida indy guy until this tourney, now he’s a heralded indy star. Then we get a little video thing telling us Kevin Kelly is destroying ECWA from within. A fat black man is clapping his hands and coming out to the ring to a Muddy Waters song. I am expecting his opponent to be some form of Mike Shaw aka Norman the Lunatic aka Bastion Booger. A bald black man in sweatpants does not belong on a Super 8 card. But to the ECWA’s benefit, his opponent is a tag team at odds, and they come out to GNR’s “Welcome to the Jungle”, very nice. The Cheetah Master, Lance Diamond’s bitch, and JJ the Ring-Crew Guy. Fat black man is shaking JJ’s hand. Maybe he’s the guest referee or something. ECWA wrestling is not without it’s screaming teenybopper fans. I’m expecting their opponents to be the Rock-n-Roll Express or the Fantastics. Long young-girl-in-the-crowd-appealing intro posedown by Cheetah, lasting well past the breakdown bridge part of “Welcome to the Jungle”, all the way to the very end “HAANH!” by Axl Rose. Their opponents are The Inferno Kid, one of those non-descript okay but looks like 17 other guys indy wrestlers, and J.R. Ryder, who came in second on that MTV thing that time, which means I hate him. All four guys fight on the floor and fat bald black ref in bad sweatpants is still in the ring looking around at them all. JJ the Ring-Crew Guy wrestles in tight jeans and a blue bandana, that’s style.

BEER 8: You know what’s fucked up to me? There’s people out there in this world that make wrestling rings. And the first one they make is real messed up and broken. So they throw it away or scrap the good parts off it and make another. Eventually they get to the point they make a good ring. And they sell it. For like a thousand dollars. Then they make one that’s tight, goes together just right. And they decide to rent that one. Which means they travel from shitty town to shitty town on weekends throughout the Tennessee/West Virginia/Kentucky/North Carolina mountain region making whatever bucks they can. And they eventually make a newer one, without the wear and tear. So they sell the old one to some money mark. And they’ve got a new ring with fresh black tape around the ring ropes and it’s not all kinked up and plywood lays fairly flat in the corners and it’s got a nice bounce to it. And that’s what they do. And they smoke blunts while wearing hockey jerseys and Scooby-Doo boxer shorts after breaking the damn thing down after a shitty indy card in Pikeville, Kentucky, on their way home in a half-broke Rider truck they bought at an auction. Kevin Kelly gets his team disqualified and the losing good guys get 5 minutes in the ring with KK some how, and fat black ref throws him in the ring, and well-built long-haired fan favorite tag team beats up on the overweight chumpcutted WWF announcer in a white turtleneck. Fat black ref in bad sweatpants clotheslines both good guys. There’s a certain bad attitude towards the black man purveyed here in the ECWA, proof positive that non-southern bastard white trash states like Delaware are the true homes to racism, not my beloved South. Shit, there was a fake Roadkill in the ring for a second. Refs are getting chokeslammed and front row rednecks are getting spit on. The bell rings constantly. Chaos has ensued. Beer must be drunk for chaos, that’s all I really want out of life is chaos, nonsense and unpredictability. Now we got Christopher Daniels versus Scoot Andrews in a super-drunk Raven Super 8 finale. Two good underpaid indy wrasslin retards going at it for underground propers. Scoot Andrews goes back to trunks from the first match against Trent Acid for this finale. Daniels has his first round trunks back on, too. Perhaps a lesson for the future, if a guy switches trunks in the second round he’s gonna win. Daniels and Andrews did the old school test of strength jank, with the shaking finger and all.

BEER 9: You know, I would’ve watched the end of this tape, but my wife finished up a roll of Christmas wrapping paper and me and my daughter took the empty tube and made monkey sounds through it at each other. And cat meows.

BEER 10/11: Didn’t take long for her to tucker out after a day of Christmas shopping with Mumma Mack, so back to wrasslin and alcohol for Pops. I’ve busted out my trusty gigantic Olympia beer glass bought from crazy rural New York man with loads of junk for sale out of his garage, it fits perfectly 2 beers and a dab of generic Giant food store V8 which makes my head hurt less. For this new jam, we’ve got the the super-produced yellow and black motif OMEGA (Organization of Modern Extreme Grappling Arts!), where the Hardy Boyz and 3 Count and Matthews & York and seventeen other guys who haven’t gotten to the big time got their start. A pack of kids who used to flip each other off of trampolines. This shit took place the first week of December, so it’s not that far removed from reality. Nice duct-taped ring, and nice pack of rednecks and wrestling nerds in the crowd. I wonder who the money man behind this shit is? Ah yes, the hotbed of professional wrestling that is known as Southern Pines, North Carolina. With oscillating fans in the corners. Redneck commissioner says “If you want good professional wrestling, and you see the name OMEGA, then you can come on down.” At the risk of sounding homosexual, I must admit that Cham Pain rules my world. Longhaired redneck wrassler with the gimmick of being a male stripper in a see-through shirt and Sabu pants. He’s your OMEGA champ and he’s cutting a fan friendly promo. Surprise number one, as Cham Pain announces there’s gonna be a tourney to take him on for the OMEGA title tonight, Steve Corino struts out with the ECW belt around his waste. Steve Corino is an armory superstar. Though Corino is the heel and talks shit about everything, he has the indy respect to wear yellow sweatbands to go with his black trunks, repeating the color motif of the reborn OMEGA. Nice touch, Mr. Old School. “You come out here with your gay male exotic dancer gear” says Steve Corino, this guy is great. Cham Pain not good at the heated response. Line of the night and I haven’t even watched the whole tape, Corino tells Cham Pain “I know you like to look pretty for all your boyfriends.” As Cham Pain walks off, I notice he has beautiful hair. First match is some kid named Damian Drake versus Tanner Martin. Drake looks un-indy like enough, he seems to have the potential look to be a superstar. Very European looking. Tanner Martin comes out to Limp Bizkit, so he gets paralyzed tonight. A tiny guy with glossy pants, looks to be still in high school. Nice multi-camera production with constant commentary on this Highspots tape. Tanner Martin doesn’t look too bad for a new guy, good array of moves, certain pizzazz to how he does them. This match is almost a wrestling school graduation program, each guy running through what he knows best. “Nice lateral sooo-play,” that’s how Gordon Solie would’ve called that last move. Guys wearing big shiny wrestler pants should not be wrestling in Nikes, that’s just my opinion. Damnit, the bigger less enthusiastic Drake takes out high school Tanner Martin. Not a great match, but nothing wrong with it either, a lot better than most indy offerings. Next match-up features Dewey Cheatum, a Carolina indy regular, one of these young guys who cuts the cheap heat promo about ugly inbred crowds. His opposition is original OMEGA gangster, Black Skull, a super-skinny kid in a retarded mask. North Carolina’s La Parka and Dewey Cheatum will go at it and hopefully threaten to splash brain all over the ringside area. Black Skull is not afraid to be dumb, diving all over the place like a fool. Announcer says “Black Skull drops ‘roids first on the top turnbuckle.” What a tool.

BEER 12/13: I’ve got that drunken haze going on now, where my brain remembers that I’m not stupid, but it can only think stupid things. It’s raining like a bitch outside, the alternator’s broke on my car, we ain’t got no Christmas tree up yet, and Black Skull sucks. Your referee’s name is Boom Winslow. Dewey Cheatum wins as I don’t pay attention. Mike Gunner, a strong looking kid, comes out and calls anybody at all back in the locker room area to come out and take him on. Out comes Scab, your standard Gen-X grunge loser wrestler. Special referee will be Virginia’s indy women star in leopard print shirts Lexie Fyfe. I like the girl referee angle, causing the guys to take the ref lightly, only to have her kick ass and enforce rules like no one else. Lexie says she only refs 3-way matches, and they call out a third opponent, Lazarus. HOLY SHIT! I don’t know what to say. My wife is in the kitchen making Christmas cookies with her friend. Lazarus’ entrance was so bizarre that I had to take the tape into the other room to make them both watch what I’d just seen to make sure I wasn’t tripping. Lazarus comes out to “Crazy” by Britney Spears, with his hair up in pigtails, wearing velvet red pants that are as tight as New York Dolls outfits, he lapdances with the security guards, and for some reason has weird white and silver face make-up. Imagine Sting’s younger brother being overtly gay and running away to North Carolina to wrestle and win the respect of his older wrestling brother. That’s Lazarus. If you are one of my retarded friends I trade retarded videotapes with, you can rest assured you’ll be seeing this bizarreness by springtime. Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus. Nothing I can write right now will explain this phenomenom to you. HE IS FUCKIN’ LIP-SYNCHING BRITNEY SPEARS AND LAP-DANCING ON SECURITY GUARDS! IN FRONT OF LITTLE CHILDREN! AND HE’S THE GOOD GUY! He is Exotic Adrian Street for the year 2000. And if he’s wearing underwear, it’s a g-string, cuz his tight red velvet pants are up his ass. Beer must be slammed. Too bizarre. Shit, the announcer just stole my Adrian Street comparison. So far, OMEGA reborn has shown some good young wrestlers, perhaps they’ll run regular cards and rule once again. Basically, this is your standard fare 3 way match where 2 guys are teaming up against the 1 obviously homosexual guy who has the female referee looking out for him during the match. I’ve seen it a million times. Botched retarded ending equals a victory for the Rainbow Flag. Britney music cranks up and we get victory lapdances for the rednecks in the front row. Next up is a redneck clown in face paint and ripped clothes named Tim something or other. His opponent is High Octane, shooting cap guns wearing a really glittery terrible mask, clapping his hands to Gary Glitter theme music. Him and Lazarus should team up. Someone with money behind the OMEGA rebirth obviously has some tingly feelings for his own sex. Perhaps Pat Patterson is behind the whole thing. Bad move: both wrestlers are wearing black pants and red shirts. That sucks. Just like the Chiefs and Redskins wearing red shirts and white pants in the same game. Slow wrestling makes alcohol-hazed brain lull into inactivity. Time to go in other room and watch Univision. They’ve got the most awesome girls on there. And lots of glitter. And midgets.

12-Pack Reviews: Attempting to Explain Away My Stupidity

So when I was just doing a zine and had no netz to enter, it was back in them days where people still mailed each other bullshit packages full of oddball things. Somewhere during doing my zine, I realized I could sit there, drink beer, and watch wrestling and comment in print form about it while doing so. It had it's moments, definite tangential moments of retarded insight, but it was also going off the foundation of the stupid professional wrestling. When I got a website, I did a ton of these, and even more when I started contributing to the Death Valley Driver Video Review. And I gave up on it, first because I grew crazy tired of wrestling, not so much because it was stupid, because it's always been stupid, but I used to dig the weird sociological nonsense about it. But once the internet went nuts and there was such a thing as an "internet wrestling community", everything got so over-analyzed and microscopically dissected by shut-ins who think they understand fake fighting because they read a bunch of words about fake fighting. Then the fake fighting started to mirror those types of opinions rather than just being weird drug-addled freaks fake fighting in manners to make children scream and old hillbillies want to kill them in the parking lot. I also stopped drinking so much in the past year, which makes these things seem extra retarded to me now, because I actually drank all the beer I claimed I did. It always struck me as odd someone would question that, as if I thought by pretending to drink beer to faceless nerds would make me cooler or increase my own self-esteem... the fact of the matter is alcoholism and a fascination with pro wrestling enabled each other in my life. If either had been cleared from my mind at any point, it probably would've been easier to realize how fucking stupid the other one was.
Anyways, I've got a bunch of these, so I'm gonna start putting them up, one a day at the most, and to be honest, unless you have anything less than even a casual interest in professional wrestling, there's really no need to dig into them, because there's great rants inside, but it'd be like digging for a piece of shrimp in a pile of shit.

S14: Big East Tournament's Top Returning Scorers

I don't think much of the Big East, as that conference was always the natural basketball supremacy conversation rival of the ACC, and being I was geographically tied by my broke ass dad's naive ways to root for UVA, I was also trained to believe ACC basketball was a penultimate form to not be talked down upon. Plus, Big East featured mongoloids like Patrick Ewing, whereas the ACC player was a more refined, upstanding individual, one who would assimilate and succeed within regular society after basketball was done with him. And I was doing all these stupid lists, I tried to keep it related to the state of Virginia, since I'm from Virginia, where ain't shit to do but lounge, but I read the Washington Post in for-real format usually at lunch every day, so they've crossed my wires into paying attention to Georgetown enough to consider them worthy of my time. But I was about halfway through doing this when I was like, "Man, I hate Georgetown," although I do like John Thompson III, since he's from Princeton, and even his dad is not so fucking annoying now that he's not a coach anymore. He seems like a far more decent dude to me, but perhaps when I was young my dad's racist vitriol polluted my outlook. Who the fuck knows? Nonetheless, here are the 14 Big East players with the most points in Big East tournaments going into today's first round tip-off (and oddly enough, only 12 of the Big East's 16 team actually qualify for their conference tournament, so these are only taken from the 12 participating teams, although I doubt anyone on the South Florida Bulls was in contention)...
#1: Eric Devendorf (Syracuse guard, 84 previous Big East tournament points) - Devendorf actually tore his ACL and has been gone most of the season, which has hurt Syracuse immensely. Good, because I can think of no NCAA basketball coach I'd like to see always be on the bubble and never get accepted than Jim Boeheim. He looks like he's part eagle and molests the children of his illegal housekeeper while she's busy cleaning his nappy ass house.
#2: Sam Young (Pittsburgh forward, 62 previous points) - Young is only a junior, but he's also first-team all-Big East, so he'll probably go pro. Pittsburgh seems to be, whenever they are good, one of those teams that seems about to become a major program, but then they're not really yet, so their coaches can get snapped up by more prestigious programs, like UCLA did with Ben Howland a few years back. Young will get off though.
#3: Roy Hibbert (Georgetown center, 59 previous points) - Hibbert came back for his senior year, even though a legit basketball-playing 7'2" dude would've been hot commodity in the NBA draft, although Hibbert does come off a little meek at time. Georgetown won the regular season title, and is a contender for a #1 seed in the NCAAs, probably depending on how they do this weekend. Hibbert always has a Ralph Sampson quality to me - sort of frail, although having three-quarters athleticism at his size makes him seem like a indominitable superstar in the making. I imagine he will be mildly successful in the NBA like Sampson too, because it's hard to imagine such a dove-like personality ripping at rebounds too hard against some of the more menacing monsters in the professional paint. Oh well, at least he's not Shawn Bradley.
#4: Jonathan Wallace (Georgetown guard, 54 previous points) - Wallace and Hibbert make for one helluva a one-two punch, except they had the same one-two last year with a knockout swingman in Jeff Green, so they aren't going to be much better. Still, with two senior all-stars like Wallace and Hibbert, the Hoyas should be able to sell plenty of merchandise to rap fans again real soon. My favorite was the suede baseball hats that had alternating grey and blue quarters.
#5: Terrence Williams (Louisville forward, 50 previous points) - Relentless junior forward for Louisville, but the whole Rick Pitino "I have 12 pretty awesome players let me run them at you crazy style" always seems to end up blowing up at some point before the end of the season. This Louisville team has been heavily hyped all season, but has just skirted around the top ten for the most part, and is getting hyped again as a POSTSEASON THREAT TO JUGGERNAUT MOTHERFUCKERS! I don't believe it because fuck a Rick Pitino.
#6: Levance Fields (Pittsburgh guard, 50 previous points) - Junior point guard who stirs the pot that is any chance the Panthers might have to make noise. A good point guard goes a long ways in tournaments, and the fact he has a solid cast of characters around him bodes well. But like I said above, it's fucking Pittsburgh still.
#7: Wesley Matthews (Marquette guard, 48 previous points) - It is impossible for me to write about Marquette without thinking of that kid from Hoop Dreams who grew up in Cabrini Greens, which is demolished now. But then I saw that one of Matthews' prominent teammates is named Lazar Hayward, which I have to assume was given to him as a mispronounced variation of "laser" as some economically-challenged segments of society are prone to do, and which would give him the best fucking name I've heard of all day.
#8: Ronald Ramon (Pittsburgh guard, 44 previous points) - I know I'm guilty of it as anyone, but all too often when it comes to young black tattooed hip hop in the background athletes, we highlight the negative. Which is why I want to point out Ramon is co-winner of the Sportsmanship Award this year from the Big East. That tiny insignificant piece of information I quickly found google news searching his name means he must be a pretty good kid. I bet his mom sits at every game, wearing his jersey. She raised him right, and with reverence for God, I bet.
#9: Dan Fitzgerald (Marquette forward, 43 previous points) - On a team with guys named Lazar Hayward and Ousmane Barro, a program listing of "Dan Fitzgerald" is pretty unremarkable. However, I think it is a Big East by-law that every team have one Irish kid, in keeping with their northeast demographics.
#10: Scottie Reynolds (Villanova guard, 40 previous points) - Reynolds is only sophomore, meaning he lit up the fucking Big East tournament last year. I know nothing about Villanova except it is in Philly and has a wacky name, which has always made me assume it's a small private school with these awesome basketball recruits from the same blocks all the young Beanie Siegels shoot up, and that it's a thugged out basketball team smack in the middle of an ultra-white college campus. Oh wait, that's a lot of division I colleges.
#11: DaJuan Summers (Georgetown forward, 37 previous points) - Summers is the 3-point threat to go along with Wallace and Hibbert's inside presence. Just like when they beat Louisville last week, if Summers hits his 3s, they will do well. If he comes up cold, there will probably be some of those towel-over-the-head, crying senior camera shots.
#12: Dominic James (Marquette guard, 33 previous points) - Marquette's most energizing presence as a pesky little ball-stealing 3-point-lofting potential dagger. Still, the name is Marquette. That might've won a national title in the '70s, but I don't think kids who grew up on the raw sounds of hip hop are gonna get fired up wearing a "MARQUETTE" on their uniforms.
#13: Mike Cook (Pittsburgh guard/forward, 33 previous points) - Senior who had a season-ending injury early in the year.
#14: Luke Harangody (Notre Dame forward, 31 previous points) - Only a sophomore, and already named Big East player of the year. Also, see last line of write-up for #9, which I think is tripled for Notre Dame since they refuse to join the Big East in football.

S14: MEAC Tournament's Top Returning Scorers

The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference fires up their tournament tonight, and I've always found it odd that the CIAA - a division II conference of HCBUs (for historically black college or university, not the cooling power of an air conditioner) - gets more ESPN "awesome black college it's like old school with afros and shit BOOYA!" love than the two Division I all-black all-strong conferences, of which the MEAC is one. The MEAC tournament is one of the few that have oddball variations to them. MEAC apparently refuses for the most part to play more than two games in one day, meaning the whittling down of 11 teams takes almost the whole week. But these black college things are usually excuses for old guys that would hang out with Cliff Huxtable wearing gold-rimmed Gucci prescription sunglasses to take a week off and do the Scratch-my-Back at the club. But nonetheless, here are the top 14 dudes on rosters running up in this MEAC tourney this week, getting all-black college on your ass to be the play-in game winner eventually against another team that sounds like a church. It's also one of the better shots for a Virginia-based college to get into the tournament, as Hampton is usually competive, and Norfolk State, who's kinda new to Division I, is pretty much like a different tentacle of the same beast that Hampton is a part of.
By the way, if black athletes dominate college basketball, why are the all-black colleges so run-of-the-mill in the NCAA tournament? You would assume they would get all the gangsta ass dudes who fall through the cracks that Bob Huggins doesn't recruit, but no. I guess also the grift rate at a small HCBU is not as G-Unitriffic as a major program would dole out. And you also have to think that white pussy is at a crazy competitve premium on an all-black college, and from my personal observations, blue chip recruits go ga-ga for white pussy. Isn't there like a whole website of pictures of NBA players with random sluts? Well, here's your top 14 returning ball-in-the-bucketers...
#1: Rashad West (Hampton guard, 93 previous MEAC tournament points) - Senior guard is their leading scorer, and since they are one of the better MEAC teams coming into the tournament, he should go buckwild. Then again, the MEAC is usually a non-white (with the exception of a couple of Euros) scrummy melee towards a solitary NCAA berth.
#2: Tony Murphy (Norfolk State guard, 90 previous points) - Another Senior, he is probably the MEAC's most likely to get all Ben Wallace but scores baskets soulful through this tournament. He is a playground shooter type, tossing 'em up like Kobe, but without all the moodiness and enunciation.
#3: Roy Bright (Delaware State forward, 68 previous points) - When a former blue-chipper who was recruited to Cincinnati ends up somewhere like Delware State, you know his thuggish ruggish to the bone. Bright was preseason player of the year for the MEAC, but also recently missed a game with a "tooth ache", which is crazy talk meaning, "fuck y'all, I'mma be me." Were I holding money to waste like retarded this week, I'd be getting me a powder blue #45 Delaware State Bright jersey
#4: Jason Willis (North Carolina A&T forward, 48 previous points) - He is a black guy with a white-sounding name who is the floor leader of a state university that is historically but not necessarily black.
#5: Jon Mason (Florida A&M guard, 47 previous points) - FAMU was the winner of the play-in game last year (or the year before, maybe... who the fuck remembers this minutiae, and if you really need to know you can google it... I work for free here), so I’m sure Jon Mason got his family to videotape that shit and dub it for him. Or maybe they have Tivo already, but call me prejudiced, but I assume if I, a white dude with a college degree in my mid-30s doesn’t have Tivo, his family probably doesn’t either. Of course, I’m partial luddite, and hate mass media bullshit, so that’s a stupid way for me to think.
#6: Tywain McKee (Coppin State guard, 47 previous points) - McKee is your average little pesky ass guard who steals and shoots and has led Coppin State on a tear this year once conference play started. I have always liked that name Coppin State more than most any other college team, because it reminds me of copperheads, and that’s the only type of poisonous snake I’ve handled in pseudo-religious ceremonies.
#7: Derrick Davis (South Carolina State guard, 47 previous points) - Although technically on the roster, Derrick Davis was dismissed from the team in December for violating unspecified team rules. Apparently a couple dudes have been dismissed from the team, and they suggest the coach is a punk ass too emotionally distant from his players, but the A.D. and coach and shit hold true to the “team rules blah blah blah” line. I guess I really shouldn’t have included Davis on the list because of all this, but I don’t feel like going back and figuring out who was 15th to move up to 14th and all that.
#8: Adrian Woodard (Hampton forward, 41 previous points) - Senior forward who plays that solid backbone type role for the team, as the old dude who’s seen it all, at least through the frame of reference of a small-time college basketball player.
#9: Steven Rush (North Carolina A&T guard, 40 previous points) - You gotta figure for a North Carolina high school superstar, Duke/UNC is the upper-tier. If they pass you over, you probably hope for the N.C. State/Wake Forest second-tier. If nothing from there, you hit the melee of whatever of the 300 colleges in the state wants you with the nicest free car. I would figure N.C. A&T, being one of a slew of former CIAA schools in this conference, is like a ‘01 Acura type team, but with $1200 rims to shine it up real nice.
#10: Ed Tyson (Maryland-Eastern Shore forward/center, 39 previous points) - He is a leading scorer in the MEAC, and what makes MD-Eastern Shore relevant at all, and also only a junior, meaning he will be way up this list next year if I remain all O.C.D. about stupid shit like this long enough to do them yearly.
#11: Leslie Robinson (Florida A&M guard, 35 previous points) - Robinson is the conscience-free shooter that Jon Mason, mentioned above, feeds.
#12: Boubacar Coly (Morgan State forward, 31 previous points) - Senior big man by small league standards, but most importantly has the best name I’ve come across. I would assume he’s from a Muslimized African nation, making rash generalizations about the name Boubacar. My favorite name for a baller all-time was Duke’s Alaa Abdelnaby, who later became DJ Khaled. And now you know the rest of the story.
#13: Corey Lyons (Norfolk State guard/forward, 30 previous points) - Tony Murphy’s second fiddle.
#14: Antwan Harrison (Coppin State forward, 28 previous points) - COPPERHEADS! He who has mad faith can handle serpents and drink poison and shit, and God protects them motherfuckers, even if the devilish and soulless are all like, “Haha, look at those hillbillies! What do they know about real life?” WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT REAL LIFE, SERPENT-SOULED CITY DWELLER?

MNZ: New York Magazine March 3, 2008

This had stupid Chelsea Clinton on the cover, but had an article inside about the death of Sean Bell (that's the dude that got shot the night before his wedding in NYC outside a strip club). The article pretty much just affirmed everything I already suspected, even though I didn't know hardly any details about the story - cops are idiots, and wannabe thugs ended up getting shot at by idiot cops, including one who pumped 31 rounds who was of course the white one. Al Sharpton is involved, and I haven't seen any funny drunk Al Sharpton interviews in over two years, which is making my love of the fat man sort of drop off. He seems too serious and ambulance-chaser-like, like a New York city centralized version of Jesse Jackson rather than a freaky permed hair R&B aficionado who dabbles in dark-skinned rabble-rousing. The odd thing about this article though is it all sort of built up to the end, where it started mentioned Bell's widow (although technically she's not a widow), who seems to be moving towards an activist nature, making you feel like something good may have come from all this senseless sensational manslaughtering. Except as soon as they start to give you some info on her, the article is over. Just like that. That strip club the Bell dude got shot outside of, it looks like a swank ass joint. Having so few strip clubs in Virginia, we don't have the sheer mass of perverted humanity to have hardcore dank-ass run-down strip clubs like that (although they do in West Virginia!).
I could barely even get into the Chelsea Clinton article. I'm as sick of the stupid fucking Clinton family as I am the stupid fucking Bush family.

Carbon 14 article: All-American Story of Killing Dogs and Wrecking Cars for Fun

(This also was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll. This is one of my favorite things I wrote in the past two years, and I sent it to an old professor to get a letter of recommendation for some bullshit and she stopped talking to me afterwards. People get shook up over you admitting you slit a dog's throat.)
My wife and I both had our respective dogs before we became attached ourselves; in fact, one of our first “dates” was after some party, taking what was left of a half-gallon of Jack Daniels and what was left of a quarter bag of kind bud, rounding up both our dogs and “borrowing” a friend’s minivan to go to Montana. I finally passed out behind a K-Mart somewhere near the West Virginia state line.
Once we actually were married, the dogs ran together for years, making it to almost ten years apiece, before they both died in the tragic ways dogs in the country always die – getting hit by trucks or mauled by pit bulls or always something fucked up. So we looked a little too easily for new dogs to replace these old ones.
The first one to come along was a small, scared hunting dog who came from the woods, cowering in anticipation of beatdowns, wagging her tail, looking for food. I didn’t really want her, but the wife and kids, even though she’d never get close enough for you to pet her, had attached themselves to this stray. That became our first new dog – Burdock. You could hardly ever touch her, and if you did it was because you cornered her and she’d cower down onto her belly, holding her head under her body, but still wagging her tail, the classic runaway beaten stray.
We acquired our second dog to complete the new pair from my youngest sister. Where I grew up – Farmville, Virginia – is a hopeless shithole where factories have plywood windows and folks’ favorite leisure activities are testing life’s limits through suicidal recklessness. This may involved machines or drugs. My youngest sister had gotten wrapped up the local art of meth abuse, leaving the house only to go to her job as a waitress, her and her boyfriend holed up in their shitty cave-like house along a back road, indulging beyond their limits to pull back. Turned out her boyfriend had also started dabbling in crack use as well, and the whole time they had this part lab, part chow, big yellow goof of a dog named Buddy who basically stayed chained up at the front door so as to scare away all the more thievish members of the black folks who lived nearby. One night, while driving home from something or another, my sister dropped her cigarette in the car, and her boyfriend held the wheel while she fished for it. He decided it better to slam the wheel to the left and smash them into a tree because he had, without her knowing, been stealing thousands of dollars from his job to help keep up his taste for crack rocks. Car burned up, destroyed half of what my sister owned, he ran off and disappeared and the cops explained they were looking for him, sister got her wake up call and moved back home to get herself back together. So we took in Buddy.
Now previously, before they had moved into the shithole they lived in, Buddy was riding in transit in the back of a pick-up truck, which he dove out of, hobbling off into the woods miles away from where he left and where he was going. They looked and looked for him, but never found him. Three weeks later, he came limping down the road, goofy as ever, and he had made it to his new home. My sister’s boyfriend had found him a few years earlier from some other similar mangled discovery, so Buddy was a sort of impervious freak of an animal, more feral than pet-like, though friendly.
Buddy and Burdock – our new pair of dogs – never worked. They ran the roads around the farms we lived near too much, dragging home deer carcasses, coming home with scrapes from scraps, and just being general nuisances. They scared my kids half the time, and when they dragged in an unskinned baby deer I realized they weren’t just finding hunting leftovers in the woods but actually running down weaker deer. I never could see the logic in having a dog in a rural setting and keeping them penned up or chained, but I tried to train them. No luck though. Buddy’d chase every motorcycle or dump truck that drove past and Burdock came home with trash or critters in her mouth all the time. I waited for the day for some redneck hot shot trying to be Jeremy McGrath on his crotch rocket to wipe out because the dogs dove out the tall grass in the ditch, trying to bite his rear tire.
I had tried half-assedly to find somewhere for the dogs to go, asking around and calling the local shelter, which was always booked beyond capacity. The last straw came when I got home one day and my wife was down in the field, hollering for me. We have three goats, and we don’t milk them, but I’ve become attached to them. Goats are weird creatures, and a lot of fun to play with, though they’ll clip your knee from behind like a mid-‘70s middle linebacker. Growing up a metalhead, it seemed so perfect to have these weird album-cover like creatures, and I forever wanted to name them things like Exodus or Kreator or Cirith Ungol or some other band from my youthful doodles of skeletons thrashing stages in front of a thousand impaled, decapitated bodies on notebook paper meant for math problems. Having two daughters and a wife though, the goats ended up with names like Carrot or Gingerbread or Lavendar all the time.
Well, the dogs, who had gotten more feral than we realized, cornered our oldest goat in the pasture and mauled her. My wife fought them off and was holding them at bay, standing protectively over the dying goat, holding our two-year-old, who for months would ask in broken child talk, “Goat hurt? Goat die?” I grabbed both dogs and threw them in a couple rabbit hutches I found in a dumpster one time, and went down to tend to the goat, who had bled a lot and had innards dragging along underneath her. I’ve always been the one to feed and play with the goats and I’ve got a weight bench out there by their pen, so I’ll get high and lift weights and sit in my chair and just hang out at the edge of this field with the goats a lot of the time, so they became attached to me, as goats are very social creatures. This goat perked up when I got there, so instead of dying like she should’ve easily done, she just kind of wobbled on her gnarled-up legs, looking at me like, “Yo, fix this shit.” There was nothing I could do, and I didn’t have money enough to do things like pay a phone bill, much less spend it getting some timid animal lover to overcharge me to act like my goat was my grandfather and sew her and operate her and all that crap. After about an hour and it getting dark, it was obvious the goat wasn’t going to go on her own, so I threw a towel over her head, and she was pretty weak from blood loss, so I leaned on top of her, suffocating her to finish what the dogs had started. A friend who has farm animals told me the quickest way was to slit their throats or shoot them, but I don’t keep guns and couldn’t quite build myself up to using my Marine Ka-bar knife to slice the family’s elder goat.
The problem now was the dogs had to go as well. As a kid growing up, we had stray dog killings from time to time, when we’d look around and realize we had about seven half-wild mange-ridden beasts running around the yard all the time, and my dad and his buddy would pull out pistols and shoot them all down when necessary. Like I said, I don’t keep guns, so the knife was the only way to go, and that seemed pretty fucked up to me. I took the smaller dog – Burdock – with a rope tied around her neck as a lead as neither dog had a collar, and took her back into the woods behind my house. I thought to myself how easy in physical effort (not in mental effort) it had been to choke out the goat, so I mistakenly thought I could just strangle this little stray hunting dog, even though I had my knife with me. I tightened the rope and wrapped it around my fist and pulled, pushing against the back of the dog’s neck, straddling it out in the pitch black woods, and no matter how hard I did this, the dog never would die. I’d let up to see what was going on, and the dog would whimper meekly and wag her tail. Here I was, a grown educated man, sitting on top of a dog who’s whole life had been beatdowns and torture, trying to strangle her. It creeped me out, like I was some degenerate killing a hooker, putting me far too in touch with some primal shit inside us all. Finally, after about ten minutes of this, when I realized there was no turning back because I’d probably brain damaged the dog so I couldn’t just let the rope loose and have her wobble around like a halfwit now, I had to slit her throat with the knife. Now I’ve cut deer before that have been dead for a short time already, but never cut the throat of a live animal. Sitting there in the heavy dark on a stump, wanting to make sure the dog died, and hearing the sounds of blood pumping through a gaping slash across the neck… it was some fucked-up sounding shit that etched right into my heart. There was no way I could do that to the bigger dog, the one that had been chained up outside my sister’s house for years. Maybe I’m too weak or too emotional, but I didn’t really want to start making a practice nor even one more memory of doing shit like this to a dog.
So I pulled the bloody rope lead off of Burdock, buried her, and put it on Buddy, driving him to the shelter that was forever overfull in the middle of the night, and looping his ass to the front gate for them to find in the morning. It might not have been right in their eyes, but they’d probably mind that less than me killing his ass with a foot-long blade.
The whole incident, though normal old school farm activity, knocked my non-old school non-farming ass out of whack. The creepy degenerate killing a hooker parallel kept bouncing around in my head, and I just didn’t feel right. I felt like a piece of shit about the whole ordeal, even though I did what I had to do.
Anyways, I had been building myself up for months for a spring road trip out to rural Illinois to this giant demolition derby called Metal Mayhem, with a $10,000 purse. It’s one of the biggest demo derbies of the year, with almost 200 cars, and me and my boy Brown were hyped. I was hoping this trip, and just wandering the road free of responsibility, even if just for four or five days, might wash me of my guilt.
Going to the midwest was interesting, as I’d never been out there. Chicago creeped me out in its endless sprawl and sterilized appearance. My mother was actually born in Chicago, and it was strange to imagine I could’ve been bred here instead of rural Virginia. Before and after Chicago on the trip though, the midwest just tweaked me and Brown out, as it was nothing but flatland, forever.
Demo derbies are big-time in this part of the country. Whereas back home, they might have five or six in the whole state of Virginia all year long, in the midwest, demo derbies are big affairs, and crews of guys will actually form teams of drivers and travel a couple of state in any direction to go for bigger trophies and meager pay-offs. The make-up of the land has to have something to do with it, because back home with the hills and mountains and curves and creeks, you’d be hard-pressed to drive for half an hour without seeing a plastic bouquet on a guard rail or wooden cross in a ditch where someone died in a car wreck. Out in the midwest, the roads are so straight and the land so flat, I imagine it’s hard to really wreck a car bad enough to fuck yourself up, so the demo derby gives these guys, who all seemed to be pretty young, to test life’s limits through recklessness, just like the folks back home.
The day of the derby starting up, it was drizzling and cold, just pure miserable weather, which also made the pits muddier and slower, so the 40 car overflow heat for $2500 we were watching took almost three hours to finish up. This was going to take forever. It was great enjoyment watching how cars could become so mangled, with tie rods broken and one car even having its tire turned sideways so one wheel laid on the ground like a frisbee, and the engine still powered through, forcing the smashed metal to move around further than it ever should. But demo derbies are like porn in that any sane person doesn’t need to sit there and watch eight hours straight. This was at the Ogle County Fairgrounds in nowhere, Illinois, families all hunched together in the grandstands, sad sacks like us standing around against the concrete railings getting rained on and mud splattering at us from the fight pit. Me and Brown made a pit stop out to the car to pull a couple beers out the cooler, and sitting in the car, raining, miserable flatland, we decided fuck it, we’d go back to the hotel and get good and fucked-up and just come back tomorrow for the second day when hopefully the weather would be better.
On the way back, we stopped at some dive called Labon’s Oasis for a beer or two. It was a beautiful place – biker-style rednecks sitting around in satin jackets drinking Old Style tall cans. I put “Longhaired Redneck” on the jukebox, and we drank a couple, soaking in the local vibe. All these guys and girls looked like the type of folks who would’ve ran with my parents, except all these people talked funny, with that northern midwestern accent. And the jukebox had nothing but outlaw country and southern rock, full of my homeland twang. I found the whole thing amusing, as I’m sure if we had stayed all night, one of these guys would’ve eventually talked shit to my dreadlocked ass since I was a stranger. But for now, I just flashed my chipped-tooth smile, wild dimple behind a unkempt beard, got a knowing grin from the sad waitress while we settled up, and we went back to the hotel.
The next day it was raining even harder, so we decided to meander back towards home, so we didn’t have to drive twelve hours on Monday. And most of the midwest was not to our liking. We had occasional joys – riding through a Hispanic part of southside Chicago where folks obviously understood the importance of loungin’, and we got a shit-ass room in Dayton, Ohio, where we were surrounded by the comforts of a ghetto with bass-thumping by now and then and dingy Chinese buffets and check-cashing joints and the like. Tweaked out chicks would walk through the hotel parking lot, two of them catching me opening the door to stand there and drink a beer and trying to come in to wait for their ride, which in all likelihood would’ve been wherever we drove them. Fuck all that. I know tweaker chicks, and they never look as good as they remember themselves looking, and it’s never worth the trouble.
The next day, after what seemed like forever driving along 35 south through Ohio, we started to see signs of the land having depth to it and not just being stamped into long square fields. The four-lanes of 35 through Ohio narrowed down to two once we crossed into West Virginia, and it started to look like home again. Me and Brown started to unclench. Sometimes going on a road trip is good for nothing more than reminding you of what you love about where you ended up in life. Piedmont Virginia/North Carolina has been my home my whole life, except for brief forays in one direction or another, and whenever I get back towards that part of the country, whether in my own car or someone else’s or on a Greyhound, it feels like home more and more each time. Shit, I’m raising my own kids there now.
About half an hour into West Virginia, we saw a van pulled over on the side of the road with a lady frantically waving her arms. There were a couple cars in front of us and a couple behind, and the ones in front kept on trucking. Me and Brown decided to turn around and see what was up, and the car behind us honked at us for taking so long to find somewhere to turn around. When we got back to where the van was, a tractor and trailer had pulled over already with the driver running back to the van full speed. I pulled behind him just in time to see him reach in the back of the van and a body fall out, head first, into the gravel, feet still in the van. I ran over and asked if anybody had called 911, and the driver pointed me to his truck to get his cell phone. After calling, I handed the phone off to the frantic lady, because I didn’t know where the fuck I was. This kid, probably about fifteen, and with cut marks all over his arms already, had somehow wrapped the seat belt around his neck in an attempt to commit suicide while no one was paying attention to him. He was lifeless, no pulse, with his eyes open and glazed over, just like my goat’s looked after I choked her, foaming at the mouth. But a minute or so after the truck driver had cut the belt from around his neck, he started choking and gasping a little and his pulse came back and he was still alive. There was a purple ring around his throat from where he’d tied himself, and he just looked all mangled. As he came to, his first words were, “Am I dead?” And we told him no and made him lay there and wiped water on his head, and he started to get all freaked out, asking about his mom and about what happened and how he didn’t mean to do it, and I just told him to calm down, don’t worry about none of that shit right now. He just laid there, feet still in the van, sobbing lightly. He asked, “Am I going to be all right?” and the frantic lady who had been driving the van said, “You’re going to be just fine. These angels stopped and helped you.” She looked at me and the truck driver, “Every morning, I pray for angels, and they came today.” And she hugged us and the volunteer rescue squad showed up, so me and Brown cleared the fuck out quickly, anonymously.
Oddly enough, and even though I didn’t really do anything, that incident seemed to have righted me after sitting on top of a dying dog’s back in the dark. I don’t feel like there was anything special about it, nor do I feel like I did myself any karmic good by stopping along some foreign road to have a small hand in keeping some sad kid from killing himself, but I feel like I got myself even-keeled again. That old bullshit cliché is life’s a gamble, and clichés tend to be true, but in most gambles, there’s a lot more losing than winning, so that the house comes out on top. I feel like if I can get through all this bullshit called life and deal with all the bad hands it feels like I’m always dealt coming from where I come from, and relatedly thinking the way I think, if I can come out even, then I’m doing pretty damned good.
EPILOGUE: I went to that local shelter looking for some kittens to get as a surprise for my daughters the other week, and on their little dry erase board it had written on it “Buddy adopted”. Now, my Buddy had no name tag, so that couldn’t have been him; but also knowing his history of dodging all the death that surrounds him, it might be, and he’s probably getting into the trash in someone’s back yard right now.
Also, the biggest demolition derby that happens in Virginia is going on next week at a local fair, the same place I go to the dirt track races from time to time. It’ll be nice to watch cars destroy each other in comfortable environs where people have the same bad accent I do and I can see the blue ridge skyline in the distance.

Carbon 14 article: Uncarny Wrestling

(I don't keep good records of things, but this was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll.)
I’m old school, so sometimes I like to just lay in the bathtub and read something or other and try to talk my wife into scrubbing my back, which she never does because she’s got a convoluted post-liberation notion that scrubbing your life partner’s back is submissive in some way. So I usually just lay there by myself, reading whatever’s come in the mail lately. The other night I was digging into this article in the March 2007 issue of Skin & Ink magazine, that had a long in-depth retelling of Captain Don Leslie’s life as a tattooed, sword swallowing, circus freak, who’s now dying of mouth cancer and at the end of a long, winding, and colorful life – with all of those adjectives meant literally as well as figuratively. The early part of his life, he had joined the circus and was just working a performers’ concession stand, but he had become captivated by watching the sword swallower work, to the point he would sneak it to watch the dude every day, not because it was fake or to figure out the trick or anything like that, but just because it was such a great thing – to swallow daggers and swords in front of these local bumpkins who had shelled out hard-earned dollars to watch the freak parade.
Eventually, that particular circus’s sword swallower taught Capt. Don the work, but this first sword swallower apparently was not so great, as Capt. Don, even though he didn’t need to, would feign chocking and gagging sounds as he thought that was how it was supposed to be done. A few years later, when being at his own gig, a midget freak watched Capt. Don and was shocked at how amateur his performance was, so told him he’d set up a fellow sword swallowing friend who would be performing nearby to come and check things out. This guy was Alex Linton, who at the time was the Guinness Book of World Records sword swallower. (Ahh… that childhood dream we all had to get into the Guinness Book for something, whether dribbling a basketball or growing our fingernails or eating a bicycle – it called the inner-carny in all of us.) Linton took to Capt. Don, taught him better techniques, and they developed a friendship that carried on into winter lay-offs from individual performing circuits where they would reconnect in Sarasota, where a lot of freaks wintered, and Linton would tell Capt. Don of great sword swallowers from the circus circuit’s past. At the time, Linton was a good thirty-some years the elder to Capt. Don, and he was passing on the stories of these legendary performers who were thirty-some years his own elder – an oral history of people who were near-perfect at something they had dedicated themselves to wholeheartedly, and whom no written word probably had ever been printed over.
This got me to thinking about the concept of the secret oral history and shared secrets involved in carnival-based performances, and how this relates to wrestling, or more specifically, how this relates to my recent conclusion that I don’t really care too much for the professional wrestling, itself a carnival-based performance at its root.
Pro wrestling lost the “It’s real!” charade, publicly, in the past twenty-five years, but that veil had been ripped away long before that 20/20 expose where John Stossel’s little weasel-voiced head got the hearing knocked out of one side of it. (To be fair, John Stossel is just as carny as any wrestler ever was, pretending he helps and cares in his role as fear-mongering household television journalist, and I guess he deserves credit, because his con will probably far outlast any con the wrestling industry can repackage itself into in the coming decades.) I doubt seriously the people of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s thought of a Harley Race or Ric Flair as an athletic parallel to Muhammad Ali or even Larry Holmes. People have known, or at best at least suspected, that wrestling was fake all along for quite some time. But the performance was executed in such a manner that… I don’t know, you just wouldn’t question it because so much had been put into doing it, I’m not sure what made people just go along. I guess that’s what’s drawn me to the wrestling all along, the WHY is this happening?
Post-kayfabe-breaking, the wrestling fan in the past decade or so has dwindled in the tangible world, but has thrived online, so that at most wrestling events, you can break the crowd down into two separate forms of retarded people – one half is physically retarded and probably still has the mental capacity to believe it’s real shit going on inside the squared circle, and I guess they help me enjoy the live wrestling experience a bit, because the other half is the social retard, chanting and yelling clever insider quips, and generally tweaking my own nerves a little too much. This is most likely a results of my own egotism, thinking I’m too good to hang out with the internet wrestling nerd who tends to be the type who loves comic books and actually knows the name of theme songs to Jap cartoons.
The internet wrestling nerd accepts the fact that the professional wrestling is not, nor ever was, real in any sense, and tends to take a scientific approach, considering himself (always himself, and usually not a very attractive himself) a student of the pseudo-sport, and often will be heard saying he “needs” to see this obscure match or some Best of So-and-So in Amarillo 1977 triple DVD set, which is nothing more than absolutely every appearance of So-and-So that the dude who put the collection together could find, with no actual attention being paid to what was best or not best, just a gluttonous grand buffet of one freaky slice of the pseudo-sport.
Within the internet-based Wrestling Nerddom, this creates a backlash where others abandon this scientific attitude and become the ironic lovers of the more strange and stupid gimmicks like Umaga or The Boogeyman, simply because it falls outside of the realm of science, and causes these contrarians great glee to have the analysis-based nerds struggle to explain something.
And with me being, unfortunately, a denizen of the Wrestling Nerddom myself (www.deathvalleydriver.com), I have at times complained about how shitty the wrestling now is compared to whatever it was when I used to still see whatever it was I saw in it. I’ve never really been able to figure out why this was, because it wasn’t as simple as people still pretended it was real, though the easy admission of it not being real combat certainly did add a homoerotic bad taste to sitting around watching sweaty men grapple with each other. But while reading the piece about Captain Don Leslie, I realized that what it is that made me love wrestling, and why I probably hate it now, is not the real or fake, or how it’s done, but the WHY was this happening? And this applies to whether it be pro wrestling or slight-of-hand magician or a sword swallower at the freak show. WHY were these things happening? Why would people pretend to swallow a sword to make a bunch of local bumpkins “ooh” and “ahh” for fifty cents a head? Why would two big guys actually beat each other in a simulated athletic competition, and why would all these other people sitting ringside be so captivated by it? Why was all this happening?
This got me to thinking further about the freak show, featuring sword swallowers and bearded ladies and strong midgets and the such, which would have been run by a promoter. I am assuming the freaks made a decent enough living for being freaky, but I doubt any of them were living high on the hog at all. It was scraps of money – nothing great – but you got to travel around and look at a bunch of weird-looking people be shocked or awed by what you did. And the dude who made the real money off this was the promoter or circus-owner or whoever was running the whole set-up. And it seems the performers were drawn in with a cult-like religious aspect to what they were doing – complete with the passing of inner-secrets and traditions, to make one feel like they were a part of something small and select. And reading about Capt. Don talk of hearing thirty-five years ago from Alex Linton about great sword swallowers from thirty-five years before that… and all this happening outside of earshot of anybody else who need not know these things, that all added to the Why. It allowed a performer like Capt. Don to completely believe in what he was doing, even if what he was doing may not have been what it was perceived to be exactly. This is not to suggest all carnival-based performances are faked, but just that when you add history and cult religion undertones to the performer’s mind, it becomes far more than just what he is doing on the stage, which separated jobs like this from just being a Starbucks or Kinko’s employee or someone sitting in a cubicle shuffling numbers back and forth. One was there to make the bumpkins believe in what was happening, or at least if they didn’t believe it, do it in such grand and well-executed fashion that they dare not ask if it wasn’t really what it looked like, because you’d be insulting the freak carny wrestler midget dagger eater by doing so.
And I would think it’s safe to say that with the professional wrestling being well-established cable TV programming and not something set up in a tent in a field on the outskirts of town, it’s far more of a regular business now than it would’ve been when closer to its circus roots. But even up into the ‘80s, before 20/20 feigning newsworthiness, wrestling’s traditions were carried on in the same way. Wrestlers heard stories from others and learned the subtle details – how to say this or that to an old lady in the front row or how to fall flat on your face on concrete directly in front of little kids – and the old-timers passed these lessons, and these legends of previous purveyors of this secret art, onto the next generation. Some people learned from really shitty old wrestlers (like Capt. Don’s first sword swallowing teacher), and some learned from better ones. Sometimes the guy who looked great in the ring was barely coherent when it came to teaching anyone else what must have just come naturally to him. And sometimes a guy who never did much more than work a three-town circuit for ten years might’ve been the best at laying out the subtle nuances of that little circuit. And the promoters promoted it all to the public, while promoting the special cult-like secret of it all to the wrestlers, to pull them into the religion of the wrestler. Thus, the promoter could make his money off both ends of the bargain – public and wrestlers – to varying degrees, but everyone went home happy at the end of the day. (And who gives a fuck about the end of the life? You have a good run riding the roads and get some ass and scars and great stories out of it, in my opinion, you’re better off than having a padded bank account.)
But we’re twenty-five years removed from this line of thinking, as if it being real or fake was the entire point of it all – the answer to Why – and it’s moved to more of just a merchandising machine, with indie promotions not as concerned about live audiences as they are with DVD sales. I think this misses the whole Why, which like I said, is probably unexplainable, and that frustrates peoples. The unexplained is why we have religion and science, to keep our little minds from fretting over things like this. But still, twenty-five years removed, wrestlers are far more casual about chatting with internet fans on how things are laid out, and pretty much anyone can pay a wad of money to a plethora of wrestlers with varying degrees of personal success to “live their dream” and be trained to be a wrestler or referee on a smaller level. And this has created more and more wrestlers who know it’s fake and never feel the need to ever pretend otherwise too hard, which is fine I guess, but they go through the motions of a wrestling match and try to make it look beautiful to the filter of an analytical mind, turning it to science, abandoning the Why.
This reminds me of this dude who is friends of friends – Penn Rollins – who’s some sort of celebrated minor figure as “seminal member” of math rock (prog punk?) bands from years ago. For Rollins, playing guitar has little to do with feeling or spirit; it’s just points on the guitar that he’s assigned numbers to so he’ll learn a riff, memorize the numerical sequences to put these together, and then proceed to follow the sequence on his guitar neck, to a tee. It allows him the ability to add different mathematical sequences that might seem odd or intriguing to the average musical ear, but there’s no magic or muse involved in the process whatsoever – all pure analysis. And to the analytical mind, it sounds awesome and seems like dude is the greatest guitar player who never got known on a large scale.
This is the wrestler of today – numbers in a sequence strung together so that analysis will find it to be highly acceptable.
And that’s how I realized why I hate wrestling now when I used to love it, because there is no more Why to it anymore. What is happening is far too obvious, and it doesn’t matter how hard two guys actually hit each other in the jaw or kick each other in the back, it’s still all too obvious. And that makes it looks fuckin’ stupid.

Carbon 14 article: Little Red Hendricks & His Damned Roommates

(I don't keep good records of things, but this was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll.)
Even though Carbon 14 can be chock full of adult-oriented material, me being the father of two children and understanding the new-fangled nature of young families steeped in the filthy rock-n-roll environment of post-hip hop America, I know there’s kids toddling around well-kept apartments in bad neighborhoods and in ranch houses that came cheap here and there who have copies of the Carbon 14 laying around their folks’ house, because when you’re kid-friendlying up the house in the morning (which is around 10), cleaning up empty beer bottles and emptying ash trays is obvious, but censoring the literature left lying around is not so obvious. Well, I figured I’d kick in a little something for the kids this issue, so once they get tired trying to figure out what’s going in the Justice Howard pictorials or why the cartoon people in King Velveeda’s pages are poking at each other the way they are, they’d have something to read. You older kids read to the younger ones, because reading is basis for hope for a better future and shit. So here’s a story for you kids…
Once upon a time, there was this dude named Little Red Hendricks, who was a short dude, and he lived with his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend on a farm, where they worked as laborers and shared a dilapidated doublewide the old tobacco farmer kept on the property for his laborers. Except what had happened was, the old tobacco farmer had always been losing money lately, because the companies that bought his crops added cancer to it to exploit it for their own gain, and then the lawyers who look for crap like that to exploit for their own gain got wind of it and made money off the obvious, and what all this meant was that the fast-talking old-timey dude at the tobacco auctions didn’t have to talk fast for so long anymore because the prices were driven down. So the old tobacco farmer sold off his farm to agribusiness that was gonna grow genetically rockified soybeans for use in Funyuns, and Little Red Hendricks and his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend, who had lived in the dilapidated doublewide for at least like a year-and-a-half, moved to the nearby city, to sort of try and find some new work.
It was the beginning of the month on a weekend in the city, which had a big college right there where they moved at, so college kids had all moved to new apartments for coming back to college in August, and there was tons of awesome shit in trash cans or piles in alleys, because the college kids would just throw what they thought was crap away, not realizing one man’s crap is another man’s some awesome shit. It was Friday, and there really isn’t any use looking for a job on a Friday because it just means you didn’t find a job earlier in the week and all the good stuff they save up for the Sunday paper anyways, so Little Red Hendricks was walking through the alleys, looking for good shit to put in his new apartment that he shared with his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend that his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend’s aunt had paid the first and last month rent for them on a one-year lease. About two blocks from their new crib, Red found a sweet-ass four-piece sectional sofa in the alley, that had been reupholstered in black and white leopard print fabric. Red dragged it behind an alley garage and covered it with some plastic he found at a construction site dumpster down at the other end, and went back to his apartment to get some help bringing it back.
“Hey, I found a brand new-looking four-piece couch down this alley,” Little Red Hendricks told his cousin, Goosebird Hendricks. Goosebird rolled his eyes.
“Damn, Red, we already got that nice-ass couch in the living room we took off that ol’ farmer dude because he didn’t want to have to move it. We don’t need another couch.”
“I know that, Goosebird, but I thought this one would be nice for putting on the back porch so we could lounge back there and look out on the city and the alley and all that. Why don’t you help me move it down here?”
“Damn, Red, I’m fixin’ to walk down to that campus and watch the college girls walking by. I ain’t gonna help you carry that thing up here.”
“Alright, where your man at?”
“Bulldog? Oh, they’re in the back watching the TV.”
So Little Red Hendricks went to the back room to see if he could find someone to help him bring the sofa back to the apartment. Bulldog got his name because he was sort of fat and his face was all scrunched up looking because of that. He and his girlfriend, Kat, were sitting on the nice sofa they already had watching Montel Williams.
“Hey, Bulldog, I found this nice couch up the street in the alley. Can you help me carry it back down here?”
Bulldog looked over with eyes like a Chinaman. “Do what?”
“Can you help me carry this four-piece sofa I found in the alley down here from up the road?”
“Aw man, Red, I just got high. I ain’t walking up there and sweating and shit to carry some raggedy-ass couch you found in an alley, man.”
Red looked at Kat. “What about you, Kat? Will you help me?”
“Hell naw, Red. Jerry Springer’s ‘bout to come on.”
So Little Red Hendricks went back to the sofa, uncovered one piece, hoisted it up onto his left shoulder and toted it back to the apartment for the back balcony porch. Then he went back and go the second part of it, toting that one back as well. The third piece was a large center piece and heavier than the others, but Little Red Hendricks shifted it up onto his strong little shoulders and wobbled back to the apartment with it. Finally, he carried the last section home, and after that big center piece, this last one was light as a feather. It was while carrying this last piece home, he passed a flyer on a telephone pole for a plasma clinic nearby that paid $25 to a first-time donor. The clinic’s address was like fifteen blocks away, but $25 was $25. Red dragged the last piece of the sofa out onto the balcony porch in the back of the house, set it all up in place, and put two milk crates side-by-side in front of it for a table.
He went back downstairs where Goosebird was making a mayonnaise and hot mustard sandwich. “Hey, Goosebird, I saw a flyer where we can give blood and get $25 today. You wanna go down there with me?”
“Where’s it at?”
“Just past 9th Street.”
“Damn, Red, I ain’t walking all the way down there to give no damn blood. I don’t even like no needles. You know the government’s giving people diseases on purpose in places like that anyways.”
“Do what?”
“Yeah, for real. I saw that shit on TV one time.”
“Whatever, Goose, you’re acting silly. Where’s Bulldog?”
“They’re in the back, watching TV.”
Little Red Hendricks went to the back room, where Bulldog and Kat were still sitting.
“Hey Bulldog, I know a place we can both go and hit a quick lick for $25 each.”
“How long is it gonna take?”
“I don’t know, like an hour or so.”
“Where?”
“Down past 9th Street.”
“Hell naw, Red. I ain’t walking all the way down there. It’s hot as a mug out there.”
Red looked at Kat. “What about you, Kat? You wanna walk down there with me and make some money real quick?”
“Huh? Nah, Red. Springer’s on, and that Maury Povich dude is gonna come on next.” So Red turned to the door to leave.
Bulldog hollered out, “Hey Red, you gonna go down there and do that still?”
“Yeah, Bulldog. Why, you change your mind?”
“Hell naw, Red. I was just gonna see if you could pick me up a peach blunt on the way back.” Red just turned and kept on walking out. “Make sure you get a philly blunt, and not no white owl,” Bulldog called out behind him.
Little Red Hendricks walked all the way down to the plasma clinic, and waited around for a while, then answered all the stupid questions, and the nurse lady was even nice enough to pretend he brought in an ad from the newspaper for an extra ten bucks, so Red was gonna get $35. He sat in the main room and they hooked the machine up to him that took his white blood cells out and replaced it with some cold liquid, and they had cable on the TV monitors, which was showing Good Times, one of the later ones where J.J.’s sister was married to that light-skinned dude who did the cartoon voices all the time. Little Red Hendricks finished up fast, squeezing his palm in and out of fists the whole time, got his $35 in cash money, and walked home. On the way back, he asked some dude he passed where the nearest grocery store was at.
“Well, you got that corner store on 3rd, but if you walk on over past Main Street towards that big baseball field by the college, they got a big grocery store over there, with vegetables and everything.” Little Red Hendricks thanked the stranger, and went back to his apartment, where Goosebird was peeking out the kitchen window at the house next door.
“Hey, Goose, I’m gonna walk over to a store over by that big baseball field. You wanna roll with?”
“What for, Red?”
“In case I need help carrying something back.”
“Naw, Red. I ain’t your slave. Besides, I’m busy,” and he peeked back out the curtain, which was a piece of orange fabric that Kat had stapled over the window at the top.
Little Red Hendricks walked to the back room where he heard Bulldog and Kat laughing.
“Bulldog, I’m gonna walk over to the store by that baseball field. What’re you doing?”
He looked up with the eyes of a tired Chinaman. “I ain’t walking nowhere like that, Red. You must be crazy. I’m gonna sit right here on my big ass and watch Cops.”
“What about you, Kat? You wanna walk with me to the store?”
“We’re watching Cops right now, Red. You know we like to watch Cops.”
So Little Red Hendricks walked all the way over to the strip mall. He cut through a couple of alleys to make the trip shorter, where he passed a young, dark-as-night dreaded dude. Making eye contact, on a lark, since the kid looked thuggish but had gentle honest eyes, Red asked if the kid knew where he could get some weed. The kid already had him covered, so after Red promised he wasn’t the police, he bought himself a dimebag. At the grocery store, he grabbed a case of Natural Ice, and a peach white owl. He was gonna get some chicken from the deli, but he saw a Burger King across the street outside, so he just paid for his case of beer and blunt and went to the Burger King, where he got a Triple Whopper value meal, king-sized, and still had like seven dollars leftover. He walked all the way back to the apartment, waiting to eat his fast food and drink a beer on the couch he dragged home today. When he walked in the door, Goosebird was trimming his beard in the bathroom mirror, and smelled the food when Red walked past. He followed the smell.
Red walked through the back room to take the stairs up to the back balcony porch. Bulldog saw him walk through with the case of beer and jumped up to see what was going on. Kat cut off the second episode of Cops and followed as well.
Little Red Hendricks sat down on the four-piece sectional sofa he had dragged back piece by piece, tucked the case of beer beside the end of the couch, pulling out one can and popping the top, and took his king-sized value meal out the bag, ripping the bag open to dump his fries out on along with some ketchup. He saw Goosebird, Bulldog, and Kat standing at the door, surveying the scene.
“Who will help me eat this Whopper and drink up all these beers and smoke this blunt I’m about to roll, chilling out on this zebra-printed couch?”
“I WILL! I WILL! I WILL!” they all said together, excitedly.
“Oh no you won’t. Ain’t nobody help me carry this couch up here, and ain’t nobody go with me to the clinic, and ain’t nobody even wanna walk to the store either.” And Little Red Hendricks sat there comfortably, ate his burger, got high, and drunk as hell to boot, and didn’t share any of it with nobody.

S14: CAA Tournament's Top Returning Scorers

The Colonial Athletic Association is my local area's mid-major basketball conference, home to my alma mater VCU, and the small-time hoops league that's made noise in the NCAA tourney the past couple years. George Mason had their wacky run to the Final Four two years ago, and then VCU upset Duke last year. Their conference tourney started today in Richmond, and hopefully if motherfuckers pay their bills to me, me and my man D-mo will ride up to catch the semifinals on Sunday.
Anyways, a theme I wanted to run with in the sporting 14 categories, is guys who have scored the most points the previous 3 seasons in conference tournaments. Traditional basketball lifetimes for a college player were four straight years, although with red-shirting and early exit for the NBA (which usually doesn't affect the CAA), that's all shot to hell. So what I did was go back through the previous three years' worth of CAA conference tournaments, and come up with a list of the top 14 scorers in those tournaments who are on a team again this year, returning to battle it out for a title that means nothing outside of the 12 schools involved, and is the only guaranteed way any of these teams have to getting into March Madness.
#1: Antoine Agudio (Hofstra guard, 106 previous CAA tournament points) - Agudio is Hofstra's all-time leading scorer and the CAA's leading scorer this year. A scrappy little sculpted-beard Puerto Rican dude, I imagine after his senior year runs it's course in the Richmond Coliseum this year (as Hofstra has it's worse regular season record in five years), he'll poke around minor league basketball for a number of years, because when you score tons of points, making little money playing basketball in little towns or overseas is far better than just going back home and using your business degree or whatever the fuck to run a construction company.
#2: Will Thomas (George Mason forward, 83 previous points) - Part of the Patriots' crazy appearance in the Final Four a couple years back, getting his last run. George Mason is a #2 seed, and has a couple of senior leaders who have more post-season experience than anybody after the previous couple years, so they should cause some damage. And even though I list him as a forward, at 6'7", and with his talent, he's about as imposing an inside threat as there is in the CAA, where the only 7-footers who ever come through usually have long Eastern European names lacking on vowels.
#3: T.J. Carter (UNC-Wilmington guard, 76 previous points) - Was CAA tourney player of the year two years ago when they beat George Mason for the conference title, but missed last year due to injury, which makes his placement this high on the list pretty impressive. The Seahawks are the #2 seed coming into the tournament, and if they fire on all cylinders behind Carter, stand a chance to walk away with nets hanging around their necks on Monday night.
#4: Folarin Campbell (George Mason guard, 70 previous points) - Another key roleplayer from that GMU Final Four team, now along with Thomas providing the senior leadership on this team. I think he was the dude that had the awesome afro then, but the press guide pics of this dude are close-cut standard respectable black guy hair, so I'm not sure. A guy named Folarin with a ragged fro is something I can get behind, but regular hair? Not so much. I support freak flags flying.
#5: Dre Smith (George Mason guard, 69 previous points) - Only a junior, and it's odd to realize that even with three of the top five returning scorers in this year's CAA tourney, George Mason has not won this thing in 7 years. But it also highlights the same thing that helped them get to the Final Four two years ago: that this is a team full of contributors who can all step in and take each other's places. It's not as deep in the respect as it was in '06, but it's a team trait nonetheless.
#6: Eric Maynor (VCU guard, 55 previous points) - CAA player of the year, and the guy who made all the headlines last year by single-handedly getting VCU the conference championship (he scored the final six points in the championship game against George Mason, in amazing fashion), and then by daggering Duke with a last second game-winner in the NCAA tournament, which as a fan, was the most heart-palpitating moment I've ever experienced. Being a graduate of VCU is nothing I'm proud of or anything, like I don't roll around with sweatshirts and shit, but I will always root for the basketball team, even though I know they are in all likelihood coddled thugs with four babies who attend less classes than I did in semesters where I disappeared after my financial aid check cleared the bank. Maynor is actually so good that there is talk he may declare for the NBA draft, even though he has one more year of eligibility. He is, at this point, prognosticated as one of the top five or so point guards, meaning he could be a high second round pick. Coming from the CAA, for someone to even to be considering leaving early is amazing. Anthony Grant, coach of the VCU Rams, who will be gone probably at the end of this season to a higher profile job, like he almost took last year before Billy Donovan decided to stay at Florida, and Eric Maynor lucked into each other, because although both have individual talents as a coach and player, they've helped make each other far more marketable at the next level.
#7: Brian Henderson (Old Dominion guard, 53 previous points) - The senior floorleader on a team that was struggling and now starts three freshmen. He is not an imposing gamebreaker so much as a guy who has contributed ever since his own freshman year.
#8: Leonard Mendez (Georgia State guard, 50 previous points) - Two of the most exciting points scored in last year's tournament were Mendez's well-beyond-the-arc buzzer beater to down William & Mary to end the first round last year. They meet again, and Mendez again is a merciless small college point scorer, not afraid to throw it up. Georgia State, however, has never been much more than an afterthought in their limited time in the CAA. This year will be no different.
#9: Frank Elegar (Drexel center, 49 previous points) - At 6'9", he is about as close to a true center the CAA has, and leads the league in rebounds and blocked shots. His presence should not be felt beyond the first day, with Drexel being a #10 seed, though.
#10: Todd Hendley (UNC-Wilmington forward, 45 previous points) - Solid starter for the Seahawks, who have a wave of interchangeable scorers after their immediate top threat of T.J. Carter. Another senior, like everybody on this list thus far except for Maynor and Dre Smith.
#11: Michael Anderson (VCU forward, 42 previous points) - Another senior, enjoying his best year to date at VCU. You figure in a mid-major conference tournament like this, him being a senior, and VCU only having to ride five minutes to the tournament site from campus, should all factor into him being ephedrined up for this weekend.
#12: Herb Courtney (Delaware forward, 38 previous points) - Solid player for a team not really in the hunt to win it all this weekend. Courtney comes in on a roll, but four games in four days seems impossible for Delaware, a #7 seed in this tourney. But I guess that's why they call it madness, because anything is possible.
#13: Deven Dickerson (Georgia State center, 33 previous points) - It's amazing a team with such little tournament presence as Georgia State could end up with two guys in the top 14, much less their low-scoring center, who must've had a game somewhere along the way the past two years where he went nuts, because him being here goes against all conventional logic, as he's probably not even considered a major threat in his first round game today, much less in the tournament as a whole.
#14: Darryl Monroe (George Mason guard, 32 previous points) - He is listed on their roster, but the capsule previews in the local papers make no mention of him, so he must be injured or some shit. But if he is on their stupid team roster, then he is eligible for my list of sports dorkery.

MNZ: Oxford American Spring 2006 issue 53

Found this in the free bin outside the library and automatically grabbed that bizzlenitch. The Oxford American is filled with retarded pretentiousness, which all at once completely pisses me off and also gives me great hope to one day be paid to wax long-windedly about the idiotic things I have filled my sharp drunkard brain with. This is one of their Best of the South issues, which are always goofy as fuck. But there is an article on that Billy Mitchell dude from the King of Kong documentary that’s out now that you should probably see. He’s the mullet guy who is adamant about keeping his Donkey Kong record. The movie is a great movie, even with your expectations about “Haha, these nerds,” since it’s about grown dudes playing Donkey Kong. And the article in this magazine about him, and him being the first person to ever play a perfect game of Pac-Man, is just as great. In fact, it made me wish the documentary had explored Billy Mitchell more instead of just leaving him as this weird, self-important freak stuck in the ‘80s. He is obviously a mastermind that somehow got warped, except in the process of the warping, his mind stayed sharp, just he uses it for queer instead of good. Although I don’t think he’s queer at all, and he would probably condescend at me if he heard me say it.
Had I money to waste, Oxford American would be like in top five magazines to subscribe to, although I am 95% certain I would regret that decisions two issues in.

S14: introduction to new dork feature

#1: I had originally set up a separate blog for this Sporting 14 idea, where I list 14 things of a sporting nature, and oftentimes of a dorked out calculated obsessive compulsive disorderly nature, thinking other people may eventually join me in such a thematic blog. But let’s be serious, no one else ever shares your own retarded vision (assuming you even have a vision, as most seem to be the walking fucked lately), so why bother? I’m going through the manual motions of bringing a bunch of stupid things from other blogs back into rojonekku to have one compendium of Raven’s multi-faceted stupidiocy odyssey, so I might as well just start this one here as well and not waste the months.
#2: When I was a kid, I had thousands of baseball cards. I would put them bitches in order by like ERA for pitchers and batting average for batters. For days. And as soon as I was done, for like an hour I’d bask in the glory of my success, and then I’d re-order them by year. Or I’d pick out ones that you could see the dude’s number and put them in number order and split them up randomly onto teams. Bask, repeat in some other different order. Constantly. This is some of the same, except I’m far too old enough to know better.
#3: I always like sports, but probably not what you like, and it fills my AM airwaves and brainwashes me into arguments over the minutiae, and oftentimes stat geeks don’t stat up the stupid shit I think of, so I figured I’d fill that void, for myself.
#4: Math is fundamental, and I still love math even though I don’t ever do it except practicing my rainman lite in my head from time to time. There used to be this dude named Sandor on Grace Street in Richmond who had a used book store (meaning he sold old porn mags) and he was autistic and would always be playing like big band music off the AM radio, and you’d carry like four or five magazines and he’d just say the prices out loud and figure up tax and tell you the total just like that. I remember years later, I read about someone robbing his store and shooting at him, and that bothered me. I don’t like weird autistic dudes who sold me porn getting shot at during armed robberies in my ideal world.
#5: I am a believer in numerology and that all things are fixed and even chaos has order, so when you scratch at numbers all the time, eventually you figure out things they didn’t expect you to figure out. And when I say “they”, I mean those who control everything, whether they be lizards or aliens or jews or whatever.
#6: I secretly want to be one of those dumbasses who write for ESPN page 2, and I figure this is a good gimmick.
#7: One day when I was skipping work, I sat around in the Northside Library reading Hey Rube by Hunter S. Thompson. HST is one of my all-time faves when it comes to retarded words, but man, his sports columns in that Hey Rube fucking sucked. I know it’s theorized he was suicided for getting too close to the truth about homo escorts and senators and bohemian grove and all, but I think he just realized his time was done and all his self-destructiveness hadn’t done the job, so he had to take it into his own hands, or accelerate things.
#8: I have drank more than a 35-year-old man should have drank by this point, not to mention all the LSD I used to take when I was selling it in college, so making good decisions is not always part of my repertoire.
#9: I don’t play video games nor watch TV really, so I need some form of mindless bullshit to suck away the days of my life so that I don’t think too hard about my lack of actual soul-satisfying moments that would cause me to question being a productive little fuckface wasting away my life.
#10: I was gonna say, “In honor of #14...” but then I couldn’t think of a numbered fourteen athlete who I unnecessarily idolized because of the way he played a game on my television set. But still, the thought is there.
#11: Thinking up 14 reasons to do this is real hard, especially when most of the lists will end up being some nonsense numerical thing I spent like five hours tabulating using the internet’s endless amount of useless knowledge, and it’s really fucking dorky when I think about it too hard. And sad. So even beyond like the first three reasons, there is no reason. But I’ve created this 14 gimmick, so I have to force myself to stick with it, even in the beginning. Which is also ridiculous, because I always stifle myself with these odd parameters that really don’t mean anything.
#12: This thing will ultimately explain itself, except it will get lost and mixed in with all the other nonsense. That, in itself, is funny to me, because someone will come because of beerbox haiku and find lists of some retarded basketball college nature, or they’ll come to read the unfinished EWA Hot 100 Jamz of All-Time list, and automatically get skeeved out by my obvious fruitiness.
#13: I do it for the kids, to hopefully steer them away from looking at the internet porn, to save it for me. I don’t like when I find a really hot girl to masturbate at if other people look at her, even though I know that’s the whole point of her being photographed naked. Still, it upsets me. What I have with her is special.
#14: Ha! I did it. Wait till you see how fucking stupid some of these lists are gonna be. I’m shooting for like 2 to 3 a week, but I’m sure that will wax on and wane off according to my real life dictations of stress and hatefulness, not to mention once it gets warm and me and the old lady start having sex out in the back yard under the apple trees again.

rebirth

So I'm starting this blog back up as a home to a bunch of odd projects I've done. I am going through the manual ass project of importing posts from other places. Not that anyone is here to see this, but just in case robots are tracking my actions, I want this written for them to understand.