Latest Roleplays
Yes, it’s another blog.
Expect about three of them, by my estimation. I took a good, hard look at my inner self and considered whether I gave a shit whether people thought I was unimaginative this week, and I really came up empty for reasons I should change course over a few yawns from people who couldn’t hold my fucking jock if I handed it to them while I took a piss.
So yeah, it’s another blog.
Same shit I do every week.
That’s kind of the point, actually– it’s the same shit that I do every week. It seems there’s this weird aligning of the cosmos every single time we put on a pay-per-view, and suddenly every member of the HOW’s roster gets dramatically and life-changingly more interesting for just a couple of days. Weird, isn’t it? Fucking bizarre. Jace Parker Davidson FINALLY decides to get help for his addiction to sex, watching old match tapes, still thinking it’s 2016… the week he has a shot at the World Title. Thankfully, he has a therapist who asks him questions very, very relevant to the match that he’s in next week.
Thankfully.
But not me. Just living the same life I’m always living, and getting ready to defend the HOW World Championship. AGAIN. Unfortunately, my daughter wasn’t murdered at a Medieval Times this week. I don’t have a detective hot on my trail for doing THE MURDERS or something, while somehow still being a famous athlete on national television every week. I didn’t accidentally fall into a video game whose basic world mechanics fall onto weak metaphors. Nope, just living my normal, boring life. Eating three square healthy meals a day. Working out like my legacy depends on it, because as always, it fucking does.
You know, being a professional wrestler.
I could have climbed a mountain to ask God for answers. I could have discovered I had a long lost brother who was my twin and really wanted to talk about my strategies against Clay Byrd. Hell, I could have gotten all self-reflective over the past and brought Dirk Dickwood back into the equation as the final scarf of a lazy PPV one-two lazy punch that had brought me great success at ICONIC in previous years. I could have done a lot of things, but I decided to be a professional wrestler.
You fucking General Hospital semi-hard, blowhard try-hards.
I’m not even a little bit nervous about ICONIC anymore.
I was, mind you. Ducks on the pond and all that, when it was just Cecilworth and I. But these big clusterfuck matches? Shit, honestly I’m so good at these now that I’m feeling easy, breezy beautiful Covergirl about this one. I’m so fucking good that I no longer care if it’s frustrating for you, because it’s becoming frustrating for me. Frustrating to have to invent my own fear and anxiety, just to keep me going. To keep myself constantly challenged. Uncle Mike put the most challenging match I’ve had since 2010 on my plate and I shrugged my shoulders. I’m not nervous about this. I’m not afraid. I’m nonplussed, even. Like I said, it’s the only thing I’m good at. One of you, five of you, twenty seven of you, I can handle it.
I can handle almost anything.
I have to.
HOW is kind of all that I have, honestly.
No matter how on fire everything else in my life is, I’m HOW Hall of Famer Michael Lee Best. The ten-time HOW World Champion. The Son of God. I can count my losses in a half decade on one hand, and when I step into the ring, I get to be somebody. Somebody unstoppable. Somebody feared, if not respected. I drop a promo on the website and get a half dozen texts about how it was murder, and it makes me feel good about myself. I hit that knee in the middle of the ring and I feel like somebody. I hold the HOW World Championship over my shoulder and it feels like the missing puzzle piece that turns me into the whole picture.
At least, it used to.
Maybe it’s diminishing returns.
Shit, I’m about to be thirty five years old.
I’m about to be thirty five years old and if it wasn’t for High Octane Wrestling, I’d have nothing to show for my life. I’m alone. No wife, no kids, my legacy dies with me. In the last ten years, I have moved in with six different girlfriends. Got married and divorced. Saw every attempt at making a career outside of wrestling burned to the ground, time and time again. Watched fairweather friends, literally everyone but Cecilworth and my own father, slowly prove to me that they were never more than passers by in my life. I have nothing without HOW.
I AM nothing without HOW.
Maybe the reason I’m so afraid of being forgotten is that everything else about me is so forgettable. Maybe I’m just a handful of sarcastic comments on radio shows and promos that will someday be lost to time and a dead domain name. Maybe I just keep flaunting the one thing I’m good at, in hopes that it makes up for all the things that I’m not. Fuck, maybe it’s not even you that I’m trying to convince.
Maybe I’m trying to convince myself.
Who knows, man.
I broke down into tears today. It was the strangest thing. Floating down a rabbit hole on an edible, watching a bunch of Bo Burnham videos, and suddenly I was just crying. Ugly crying. Sobbing, tears rolling down my cheeks with those big guttural, stuttering breaths in between. It was supposed to be a funny video, but something about it just hit me different. It’s that fake Kanye rant, where Bo is talking about overfilled burritos and Pringles cans that aren’t wide enough for human hands. Silly kind of shit. So there I am, high as fuck and giggling over Pringles cans, and Bo starts talking about how he can’t handle this right now. How all of his fans are a blessing and a curse. How he loves them and hates them, and he wants their approval but he’s afraid of them.
He didn’t perform again for five years after that special.
Just disappeared off the grid. Anxiety and depression got the best of him, and he just couldn’t do it anymore. He wasn’t lying to his fans, he was telling them exactly the truth and they just kept laughing. He couldn’t handle this right now. Was having panic attacks on stage, while everyone just laughed and clapped at how clever and talented he was. And in that moment, through goofy autotune and purposefully overproduced stage lighting, I realize that the sound that’s falling out of my body isn’t laughter anymore. I’m crying. I’m fucking sobbing, and I just buried my face into the pillow and just let it happen.
I think I might be depressed.
Like, seriously depressed. I think I’ve been shrugging shit off for so long and pretending like it doesn’t affect me that I’ve started to believe it. Started to believe that I was okay, and that nothing matters. Just laugh it off, make a couple of jokes about it and move on with the day. Gotta be strong. Gotta be tough. So busy handing out those positive vibes and talking my shit that I didn’t have time to stop and make sure that I was doing okay.
And I’m not doing okay.
But I will be.
As long as I have this ONE THING. This crowned deification that is my place atop the High Octane Mountain. As long as I’m still throwing knees and hurting feelings… as long as I’m still the lion of HOW, I still have my pride. And as long as I still have my pride, I’m okay. The say that pride cometh before the fall, so my plan is pretty simple— as long as I never lose my spot, I never fall.
But there are six of you in the way.
You too, Cecilworth. Because you’re right, we would have fucking killed eachother out there. They’d have had to separate us with the jaws of life, and when it was all over, we’d have still been friends one way or another. But it would have been a war for the ages. A war that I don’t even know if I could have won. I can rant until I turn blue about the boorish addition of all these stragglers to our dream match, but I can’t just keep pretending that next week, we will fight for the first time since we became family. And after all these years of real, sincere, brotherhood, there’s something I need to tell you, and I mean it.
I’m fucking jealous of you.
I always have been. You’re right, I tried to politick you out of HOW when we first met. Jace and I both did. We got onto the radio and threw passive aggressive shade. We talked to Lee behind your back and tried to diminish just how good you really were. I even got Lee to book you against me, as a “final test” before you got that ICON Title shot against Jace. I knew you were good even then, but I didn’t realize just how good.
Until you fucking beat me.
No excuses. No rewriting history. You beat me cleanly, and are one of the last human beings on planet earth who can make that claim. I didn’t throw the match. I didn’t take it easy on you. I didn’t underestimate you. I got outwrestled, outwitted, and outmatched, and that was almost eight years ago. The truth? You’re a thousand percent better now than you ever were then, and I have avoided fighting you for all that time because I knew you would probably still have my number. I joke about it on radio shows because it makes me uncomfortable. I suck your dick about how good you are, because I feel like I’m in on the joke, not the punchline of it. The truth, Cecilworth M. Farthington, is that you are my best friend in the world and the only person on the planet who I think can beat me for the HOW World Championship.
No bullshit hype job.
No swerves coming.
No false sense of danger.
HOW is the only thing that gives my life any value, and what makes me so valuable is my place in the High Octane Pecking Order. The Son of God schtick. The Perception. The Wrestler of the Year. Cause let’s be serious, the only reason that Roberts and Davidson are even in contention for that award is because the HOFC Rankings amounted to be worth FUCK ALL, and my twelve consecutive HOFC wins were thrown in the garbage. More than any of it, though, is the HOW World Championship. My championship. The belt that I’ve held ten times in an eleven year HOW career.
The belt I won from you.
Without ever having to wrestle you for it.
I’ll admit what Sutler wouldn’t, Cecilworth. As legitimately sad as I was that you were gone from HOW, I was secretly glad for it. Glad to have the monkey off my back. Glad to not have everyone breathing down my neck, asking when I was going to defend the title against you. Glad to now be worried from week to week that Lee would finally pull the trigger and book it, just to finally get an answer to the question everyone always asked under their breath. Could I have held the HOW World Championship just shy of a year if you’d been here to ask me for a rematch? Could I have gone on the most legendary run of my career if I had to get through you to achieve that?
I honestly don’t know.
But at ICONIC, I’d like to find out.
Five men stand between us and the match that we shook hands on, Cecilworth. A dipshit cowboy, a Nintendolt, a burned out Starr, a Hall and Oates song (he’s a Maneater, keep up), and a washed up pyromaniac who will for SURE fuck his therapist by Thursday evening. Every fiber of my being says that I should hang back, let them soften you up, and then take you out myself. That’s thirty five years of gut instinct. Thirty five years of looking out for myself first. Thirty five years of protecting me and my only.
Thirty five years of being alone and having nothing but this.
But I want to know, Cecilworth.
I want to know who the better man is.
When the final bell tolls, and one man is holding the HOW World Championship over his head, I want there to be a secret between us. Something that we never have to tell the world, but that we’ll know for ourselves. One of us will know who the best wrestler in the world is, and I think that will be enough. Win or lose, champion or not, I need to know. So I have a proposition, and since we’re the same person, I’m sure it’s one you’ve already considered yourself.
They don’t want to let us fight it out?
Then let’s fucking team up.
Literal Murder. The Pride. The eMpire. Call it whatever you want, but let’s give them a fucking taste of what the Tag Title tournament is going to look like in January. Let’s show them what happens when the two greatest wrestlers in HOW history don’t have to be afraid of betraying one another. Let’s step into that fucking ring, wrestle our asses off, and eliminate all five of those miserable little cling-ons like we were on the Starship fucking Enterprise. Michael Lee Best and Cecilworth Farthington, the first ever tag team to ACTUALLY WORK TOGETHER in a fucking cluster match.
Until we’re all that’s left.
And that’s when we finally find out.
That’s when we have the match that HOW has been begging for. That’s when we shake hands and then do our best to murder eachother until one man can’t answer the count. That’s when we throw knees, and break arms, and do whatever we need to do to prove that the man who walks out with the HOW World Championship is the man who fucking DESERVES IT. No pulled punches, no cute little Gentleman’s Games or distracting bits.
A fight.
The fight that we fucking deserve.
If you need to tear my arm out of it’s fucking socket and beat me to death with it, then do it, because I can promise you that I will do whatever I have to do to retain the HOW World Championship. It is my lifeblood. It is my salvation. It is the only thing on the face of the earth that makes me feel like I’m worth a single fuck, and if I’m going to hand it off to you and shake your hand, then I’m going to do it knowing that I gave every ounce of myself in that ring. That I bled all I could bleed, that I lost every drop of sweat left in my body. That there was nothing more I could do to retain that championship. If you can stand face to face with me in that ring and give me more than I can handle, and you can be the first man to legitimately beat me in over half a decade, then I will GLADLY hold your hand high and celebrate with you in that ring.
I hope that you can say the same.
So I won’t be going on any zany adventurers this week. No crazy car chases, no sudden deaths of relatives I never mentioned until it was time for a title match. I’ll be training. I’ll be eating my three square meals a day. I’ll be dedicating myself to my craft, because I am a professional wrestler and a damned good one.
I’m not doing okay right now.
But I will be.