-CD-
You never realize how much you miss something until it's gone, until a thing that has been a part of your life for as long as you can remember vanishes into thin air. Gone in an instant. Sometimes it's a relief, sometimes it's a pain, and sometimes it's something so dire you wonder how you're ever going to get along without it.
So when a constant companion unexpectedly slipped back into my life I was overwhelmed with emotion, relief, joy. I'd lost something that had been alongside me every step of the way since having fled a dark elf insurrection years upon years ago up until I found myself stolen away from my home and dropped into an unfamiliar world.
I could ruminate on my feelings and plumb the depths of emotion (and no doubt my incestuous fascination with an absent mother figure according to Freud) later. For the moment I had business to attend to.
You hear various figures about exactly how much of the human body is made of water, sixty, seventy, eighty, some batshit insane google results somewhere up in the 90's and probably some Steiner match clocking it in at 141 ⅔ percent water. Whatever the truth is, there's enough water there for my innate ties to the element of water to get a pretty good fix on people.
Being there are all of three people in the hotel that fit into the band of heights and weights, and they're all on the ULW roster, it's not hard to find a particular person in a particular building once you know your boss buys hotels rooms in bulk, usually trying to finagle a bereavement discount.
So once I found my target it was just a matter of waiting until he had to hit the ice machine down the hall to refill the baggie keeping the swelling down from having your face impacted into your own title belt.
I am nothing if not a dramatic mistress of timing and optimal impact. Feel out my target turning his head passed the recently mopped floor as he fills up his complementary bucket, link the water on the floor to that I've spread around for the purposes of facilitating our little meeting, link the two via magic and boom.
Jason King jumps about six feet in the air upon finding me in all my seven foot, three hundred pound, bright blue majesty standing nonchalantly just outside his field of view.
It's the Batman thing; if you could appear and disappear from sight with nobody noticing you'd do exactly what I do in taking advantage of this gift slash training at any and every opportunity.
My reflexes are also quick enough to reach out and prevent the bucket from crashing to the floor with a quick sweep of my tail, balancing it perfectly.
"Hiiiii, Jason!" I saw with a huge grin on my face.
"Kalinda." he says, taking a deep breath. "I didn't think you were staying at the hotel. You tend to book your own accomidations."
"I teleport between the arenas and home. Pretty easy to hop back and forth when you can measure your commute in milliseconds. I just need two patches of water with enough surface area to get through and boom." I say with a grin.
Despite the fact that I do it on international television several times a month everyone seems to forget about my puddle-portation ability. Just like, somehow, a woman can forget having ice cold air forced into her lungs by a kiss of death, as well as her lunchroom conversation with a talking dragon-cat the size of a pony and dub me a "fake dragon."
"So why are you dropping by NOW?" Jason asks, just a little bit of heat in his eyes that translates into his voice.
I said I'd have his back earlier tonight. New Eden pitched a bitchfit and because Willow Wilkes and her pwcious widdle feewings cannot tolerate anything bad happening to her EVER and requiring massive, overcompensating vengeance for eternity, beat the fuck out of Jackson Adams, and then Jason as a cherry on top for good measure.
"Because I fuckin' watch the product and know how this thing usually goes down. Unless two wrestlers are travel buddies, the moment the show goes off the air everybody schlups back to the hotel, are basically dead tired, go to sleep, trickle out and go home or to the next town or whatever, and nothing ever gets resolved until TV time the next week. Or two weeks. Or two weeks plus whatever we get bumped out of the way for tennis, dog shows, and TV production managers hitting the sauce too hard." I say. I can't help it, I've got a big ol grin on my face and I'm doing my best to not giggle with glee and the recent turn of events. Not Jason getting the fuck beat out of him, that was unfortunate.
"Yeah, you said you'd have my back tonight." Jason says with a scowl and points to his title-impacted face. "You weren't there, and you sound pretty damned chipper about it."
I wince. "Sorry about the whole sounding chipper thing, it's just that I'm pretty damned thrilled with the way events are going otherwise. And that's what I wanted to talk to you about." I give him a nod.
"Anyway, there was a masked fucker that got up in my face with his lighter, flaunting his cancer addiction and never-ceasing desire to puff on the penis of the Marlboro Man. Fucking finally, it took you people long enough."
"Huh?" King looks confused. This is a normal and is actually the most common reaction to me.
"I mean even though you people can't fucking cast a spell to save your own fat asses, you've got the basics of magic and elemental oppositions right there in fuckin' Pokemon and Final Fantasy for everyone to see. At least they had them right in 10, which killed any and every desire I had to play any more of the damned things."
"What are you talking about?" he looks utterly baffled. I love leaving people utterly baffled.
"I'm a sea-blooded dragon. Traditional oppositions of the elements are lightning opposing water, which I'm immune to 'cause I'm bonded with Spark and he's obviously an electrical elemental. Which of course leaves fire to oppose my innate icy nature. C'mon, I breathe sub zero temperatures so cold they hurt, it ought to be fucking obvious I have issues with fire." I'm still trying my best to keep from giggling.
"So what does this masked man and the elements of magic have to do with you not having my back?"
"Oh. That. Yeah. El Hijo de Joe Camel set my fucking locker room door on fire to detain me. Fucker cut off the water to the locker room and the emergency sprinklers as well. I couldn't get out of there in time."
"I had to bitch slap a two liter of Mountain Dew out of Plop's hands and pour the sucker out on the floor to have a liquid base big enough to get me and those two assholes to safety. Because seriously, if der Vaart is going to threaten you with bullshit lawsuits over non-attendance I'm sure he'd run me out of ULW on a rail for leaving a pair of so-called "ULW Legends" to potentially burn to death and or die of smoke inhalation."
"...and this makes you chipper, why?"
"Because someone is trying to kill me!" I say with complete and utter delight.
"What." A flat what! Yay! I love those things. I endeavour to draw them out of people as often as possible. They are the points by which I measure the score of my life. Well, my social life at least.
"Being here for the past year has been so fucking weird! Instead of having assassins popping out from my dumpster every Wednesday, rampaging hordes of demonic invaders, and old ladies trying to shank me because I've supposedly rigged Bingo night to humiliate them and have their arch nemesis go home with the prized tube of toothpaste and bars of lilac scented soap. I see like three minutes of solid life-threatening action every two months. If I'm lucky!"
Jason just stares at me, not quite sure what to make of the revelation.
"I've had people trying to murder me basically my whole adult life. It's a sign I'm doing something important, or at least stepping on the toes of people who THINK they're important. You don't bust out the assassins for just anybody."
"But yeah, I wanted to tell you that SOMEBODY is orchestrating some shit right here. Probably New Eden, probably the Shadow Cartel. El Hijo de Joe Camel is probably Adam in a lucha libre mask he picked up on a clearance sale from Highspots because his inner demons thought he was too white bread, and der Vaart already blew the contact budget for the month."
"But even if he's not somebody's working with Cindy Todd, Willow, and Willow's pwecious fee-fees to get at the two of us.
Jason nods, thinking over things for a moment. "Divide and conquer. We make softer targets individually, rather than as a united front. So even as a momentary marriage of convenience, rather than a singular faction."
"Oh it's a singular faction. Magically every single time I put someone down, there's another one waiting in the wings. I make Lenore Price-Mason bleed her own blood, and there Adam smacking me with a chair. I bust Adam's brain, somehow simultaneously not so bad he can walk out with the rest of the New Eden Goon Squad near the end of FUF 9, but apparently bad enough that this career is over, and El Hijo de Joe Camel comes out of the woodwork with his dimestore mask and his cigarette lighter."
"It reminds me of what der Vaart was doing with you; looking outside the company for somebody who can get the job done. There isn't a person here that can stand up to either of us in the ring and with us working together their shenanigans aren't as effective as they used to be. Even with help they can't get the job done in the ring any more, and that fucking terrifies them. It scares the Shadow Cartel shitless."
Jason rolls his eyes, "You don't REALLY think there's a multi-front conspiracy out to control the whole of the Triad, do you?"
"People fucked around with the rules to make sure I didn't get anywhere in IWC, the moment I started getting shit done in ULW people started pouring out of the woodwork to fuck with me and try to run my name into the ground. Every time I take out somebody opposing me, be it Angel Kash, Lenore Price-Mason, Mr. Joshua, Adam, anybody, there's someone immediately waiting in the wings to try and get the drop on me."
"There's nothing connecting them but their opposition to me, and yet each and every one of them shares the exact same agenda. Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action."
Jason King manages a half smile. "Ian Fleming."
"Yup."
"Anyway, I just wanted to clear things up between us. I keep my word. I said I had your back and I meant it."
Jason nods. "I understand and I appreciate you being on the lookout for skullduggery."
I smirk. "Ooooh, that sounds like one of those shitty darkity dark batshit dungeon fuckwit types we've been getting around here. Pasty faced goobers that stink of cloves and dress like late 90's Raven. "I am Skull Duggery and welcome to my parlor of pain."" I say in a mocking monotone.
King chuckles. "Yeah, that DOES sound like one of them." he says, retrieving his ice bucket from atop my tail where I've been balancing it since our little conversation began. He looks in and finds it about half full, I interrupted him before he managed to get it topped off. "It was nice talking..." he begins after I've taken a step backward and fallen through the floor back to the pool in my condo.
"...you?" I hear him finish through the water.
I love doing the Batman thing.
-Promo-
Virgin Mary's clockwork vibrator! You can't swing the Shroud of Turin around this place without hitting yet another asshole crawling out of the woodwork proclaiming that he's here to save us.
Yet another door to door salvation salesman looking to line his pockets by fleecing his flock. The latest in a long, unceasing line of liars, cheats, and con men giving lip service to the ideals of something greater to make people bow so that he may elevate himself by climbing up their bent backs.
I don't understand it. I don't get how you can worship a higher power that by all accounts is an absentee parent at best and a thrice damned genocidal maniac at worst. The vast majority of this world's religious believe in the exact same god, a supposed god of love, and yet they gorge themselves at the trough of hate.
Despite not a word being laid down from on high in centuries everybody knows the will of God, and that that will just so happens to coincide with exactly what they think and believe at that very moment.
And just as the wind changes, just as a rare new thought or idea blossoms in the head of the devoted, suddenly it's a divine revelation, that their past self was wrong and that this new idea is the true divine truth. And with each novel belief the truth is once more revealed, their conviction in their current dogma utterly unshakable, even though they prove to even themselves that they are wrong as they shed the skin of their old devotions.
And even when God is removed from the picture the framework is still there.
The worship of the Founding Fathers, believing their original intent to be a holy, unchanging, forever unassailable truth. Of trying to drag an entire nation kicking and screaming back two hundred years to the days of bloodletting, shitting into a pot and throwing it into the street, enslavement based on the color of the skin, and the disenfranchisement of half of humanity, the degradation of an entire gender.
Just so they can fondle their guns.
Just so that they can bask in the smug self-satisfaction of having their chosen form of interpersonal bonding recognized and exalted and the privileges that come with it.
Just so that they can deny reality, so that they can pretend the world is six thousand years old, that they can burn all the oil they want because they have rightful dominion over the earth, that a bunch of water and 2000 year old hooey can replace the scientific system of modern medicine that basically raped and murdered one of the fucking four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Pestilence is dead. He's rotting in his grave. From 1900 to 1980 the rate of deaths from infectious disease per 100,000 people dropped from 797 to 36. A more than twentyfold reduction. A rate that has damned near doubled since then.
What happened? I'll tell you what happened. People like Brendon Vow happened. Supposed leaders of men with so-called special insight. Men and women who wanted followers, shepherds whose very identities demanded the conjuration of sheep where none were before.
This modern world is in decay, they tell us. That the bygone era of the past was once this shining pillar of perfection that was ruined and brought down low due to the wickedness of mankind and all her sins.
You pick something and somewhere there is an unwashed, unshaven jackass on a street corner with his cardboard sign and his hat open for donations screaming at the top of his lungs about how everything from they gays to interracial marriage to the color of the President's socks has brought low a once great nation and that THEY are the ones who have discovered the path back to righteousness.
This fall from grace, the narrative of decline, it is central to each and every cult, be they one of religion, of nutrition, of medicine, of business.
That the world that killed Smallpox, the world that invented the television, the world that put a man on the moon… that that world and all it stands for is a corruption, an abomination, a degradation, and an evil.
And that by embracing this evil you've taken the corruption into yourself. Into your own heart, into your own soul. And that this corruption is a vile poison, an unnamed, mysterious toxin that only they can flush out with their special proprietary blend of fruit juices, coffee, and cat litter that so totally needs to go up your butt three times a day.
You can't trust the big corporations, they say. They're just in it for the money, they say. They say these things with a friendly smile on their face and their hand in your pocket, a death grip wrapped around your wallet, telling you how Big Pharma is using the method that ended Polio and abolished the Iron Lung ward at your local hospital to kill of the population for some reason. That the way to true health is to buy their expensive product that they made themselves that cannot pass even the most rudimentary of tests.
So coupled with the Fall is always the promise of hidden knowledge. Of the one trick to whiter teeth that one man knows that makes dentists HATE him. People like Brandon Vow say they offer hope, they offer redemption, that they offer salvation. That they are the truth, the way, and the light.
But they're not.
They're fear. They're terror. And above all else they are lies.
Happy people do not make for loyal, obedient sheep. Happy, content people are a Man O War, a communal jellyfish whose combined might is infinitely greater than its mere parts. Parts that would be unable to survive cut away from the whole.
Brandon Vow does not want you to be happy.
Brandon Vow does not want you to be mighty.
Brandon Vow wants you to be afraid.
He and those just like him want you cowering in terror, clutching your bibles and your guns in fear that Obama the Antichrist will ride in upon a heathen hog, the US Army at his beck and call, acting out against the populous of Texas from their bases of WalMarts, casting down your health insurance and forcing you to gay marry.
He wants you to look back in nostalgia for a fictitious golden age of humanity that never was. That this modern world of ours is circling the drain and that the End of Days is coming any day now.
Just like it's been coming any day now since the very dawn of the universe. The world didn't end with the bubonic plague. The world didn't end with the decadence of ancient Rome. The world didn't end with the corruption of the Three Musketeers era French church, where Cardinals lived openly with their mistresses. The world didn't end with the Mongol hordes rampaging with pillaging and rapine through the whole of Asia and a goodly portion of the Western world. A few bad apples starting a shootout at a meeting of bikers isn't a sign of mass lawlessness leading to the apocalypse.
And yet there are those in this world that, despite their ridiculousness, that the Waco shootings and the closure of Texas WalMarts are acts of unspeakable evils and dark plots, seeking to bring about the fall of man.
Dogs don't need shepherds. Dogs are happy, playful creatures filled with curiosity, joy, and wonder at the world. Dogs have teeth, dogs have claws, dogs can tear out the throats of those who would abuse them if they really wanted to.
But the sheep? They need someone to guide them, to protect them. They huddle up in isolation in the middle of a field, terrified of anything and everything outside their little sphere of reality.
"Look around you," says the shepherd, "Look at all the evil, all the darkness, all the filth and vileness that suffuses your world. Look upon the decay and the blight and despair. For it is the nature of man to fall, to destroy, to break down that which was once created. Join me and I will raise you up, join me and fall with your brothers no more. Give your will to me and you will soar with the angels."
And there's the rub, the core subject of the most terrifying song I've ever heard. A little ditty of a hymnal that people sing in church that goes "Empty me of me."
He doesn't want you. He doesn't need you. He doesn't give a damn about you.
All you are is an empty vessel that he can fill with his own personal mixture of crazy. Because that's what he is; crazy.
You have to be batshit insane to look around at this world of yours, to see how much you've accomplished in the last 100 years and change and weep and wail and gnash your teeth and how the mighty have fallen.
By every reasonable measure life today is better than it was a century ago. Once you people stopped eating paint chips crime has dropped to lows far below what it was even in the idyllic bygone age of the Leave It to Beaver style 50's.
Do you think that your grandparents, great-grandparents, or great-great-grandparents could have something so simple as having fresh fruit to eat every week?
Think about it. Sit down and think about all the things necessary for you to be able to go to the grocery store and get strawberries any time of the year, whenever you like. You don't have to can your own food, make your own preserves, don't have to dehydrate and drown your food in salt and syrup in order to make it edible days and weeks and months in advance.
You can talk to people anywhere in the world on a magic box that fits in your hand that will tell you the time, the weather, do math for you, that will play music, that will take pictures, that you can push a button and verbally tell it to find some busty Latina midget porn. And by golly in five minutes you will find yourself with more itty bitty titties than your grandfather saw in his whole lifetime of collecting Tijuana bibles.
But the biggest, baddest, most damaging lie Brandon Vow tells is the same big lie that's at the center of the most damaging, hurtful religions.
That you are wicked.
That you are evil.
That you are an irredeemable, vile, disgusting piece of shit.
That you are nothing without redemption.
That nothing you do will matter.
That you are defined completely and utterly by your membership in one particular social club.
And with him it's not even a social club.
The idea of a cult isn't to go out and meet new people. It's to sit in the middle of your pasture with all the other sheep, chewing on your grass and looking terrified at any outsider that so happens to pass by.
And all the while the other sheep whisper back and forth about how happy and contented they are, about how terrible and awful the outside world is, all the while shaking and quivering in fear over the idea that there's someone out there who doesn't believe in the same particular sky daddy, and that that person has no reason not to rape, maim, and murder his way through life.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the big fear, the big lie. That everything outside of his own personal little bubble is a horrible bastion of tainted, wicked, destructive filth. That you are a wretched sack of shit who wallows in their own vileness each and every moment of each and every day.
And you know what? Some people will believe that. You start calling somebody a piece of worthless, useless, corrupt, decadent, sinful filth long enough they'll start to wonder if they really are. If enough people say it long and loud enough, it might sink in. And you start thinking that your own innate nature is one of worthless immorality, so why not go out and bone yourself some skanks, drown yourself in booze, and fill your veins with narcotics, eh?
And then once you've allowed yourself to become what he wants you to be, the debased, fallen from grace wretch, there he is with a smile on his face and a helping hand. All you have to do is give up a portion of yourself and let a big ol chunk of Brandon Vow settle into the place you used to have a soul. It's no big loss, you're worthless after all, an innately wicked, evil thing. Cut out a piece of you and let somebody righteous pour it in.
I'm not saying it's not comfortable out there in the middle of the field. It's nice and safe and easy. It's oh so easy to sit back and relax, to let someone else do the thinking for you. To just let yourself go and mold yourself into the image of your master. To let the seeds of his mind take root in the soil of your heart, and let the vines of Brandon Vow consume you.
That's what he does.
That's what he's here for.
He wants to grow his flock, his nest, his following. He wants thralls to command, minions to worship him, underlings to carry out his bidding.
Each and every one of them carrying a piece of his own personal brand of crazy.
This isn't how ideas work. This isn't how knowledge spread. This isn't an act of a benevolent, caring human being. The very idea that giving over your identity completely and utterly and allow it to be consumed utterly assembly line style by another human being is just as ridiculous as an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful being that just because you did a certain thing with your penises or lack of penises sends you to a place filled with fire where you will burn in agony forever. Because he loves you.
Brandon Vow's ideology is the ideology of the cancer cell. To grow, to consume, to devour, and to reproduce without care for its host tissue or for its future. It is growth for its own sake, growth for power, growth for control, growth to spread itself so far and wide that it will never be able to be cut out.
Vow, you are not a savior. You are not a deliverer from evil. You are not a prophet who will lead humanity into a shining, glorious future.
If you are remembered it will be simply as another false prophet. Yet another of the limitless door to door salvation salesmen eager to pass around the collection plate and suck up somebody else's dime.
You will die and everything you've said, everything you've done will be buried in the sands of time. Everything that you value, everything that you have ever loved will he a forgotten relic, buried by the sands of time.
No one will care.
None but the sheep that fill the echo chamber of your pasture will mourn your passing.
The world you denounce is a lie and the world that you want is a cold, dead, stillborn thing that will never arise.
But there will be a future. A future filled with wonders and glories that we in this day and age can never imagine any more than Abraham Lincoln could have envisioned space travel, eradicating Smallpox, cell phones, airplanes, and the internet.
There will be new wonders, there will be new technologies, and there will be new ideas. And in time just as we look upon the early 20th century with revulsion at the primitivity of its technology and its knowledge, so too will the future look upon us, wondering how we ever survived without interstellar travel and symbiotic bonds with six legged alien space cats.
There will be new medicines, new technologies, new ways of entertainment, new ways of communication and new ideas to be spread over them. Some of them will be better than any idea that I've ever had, and I can damn well guarantee that virtually all of them will be better than any misbegotten bastard of a thought crafted between two of your malfunctioning neurons.
And if there is any justice in the universe you will get to look on from the afterlife, you will get to watch a bright, glorious future unfold without you, without you toxic ideology, destructive teachings. And you will hate every moment of it.
Face up to the facts, Vow; you've already lost.
You are whispers of fear in the dark, you are the hateful pincers of the crab dragging down those that seek to escape the bucket of your hateful ministry of decrying sin, you are repression, you are subservience and obedience, you are the hateful terror with your claws sunk into the a past that never was, seeking to prevent the world from dragging you into a bright and radiant future where you are not needed.
You are hate, you are bigotry, you are the backwards, superstitious beliefs of the elder generations who didn't know any better.
You are shitty tattoos covered in stolen preacher's robes, stinking all the while of cigarettes. Clinging, denying reality, seeking to infect the minds of a new generation who will end up weeping in agony, stricken with the cancer that YOU put inside them.
I am hope. I am wonder.
I am a seven foot tall, radiantly blue creature of awe, majesty, magic, and wonder. I do not offer salvation, I do not whisper lies, I do not seek to fill my followers with fear. I do not have them rip out their hearts and replace them with a writhing, oozing, pulsating chunk of me.
Mine is the way of joy, of levity, of light, and of life.!
You strive to be a savior, but at my hands all you're going to be is an unlamented martyr.
My blue fire will bring the light of illumination into the darkness of your words, sealing your fate…
With a Frostbite Kiss.
[A kiss to the palm. Blowing of mist. Fade to White.]
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