Simen Oem's Blog

Help support indie publishing like we are doing with indie wrestling. All 'Mania weekend, the Ring Walk is on sale as we hope to launch it up the best-seller lists to show that pro wrestling fans aren't, well, illiterate and poor. Pro wrestling is art and a part of American culture, a culture that this book examines with an incisive and unique voice. It deserves respect as high culture. This book does that.
Because we are so passionate, fans of "the Greatest Thing on Earth" are able to create new, breakout stars. When we get behind somebody, we don't stop until "a rocketship is strapped to their ass and the sumbitch is lit on fire."
The Ring Walk wants to be that sort of breakout act.
No gimmick. No scripted promos. No fake tans, lipo or implants. Just an undeniable personality with the volume turned up.
Flex Italiano might be the best talker since Bobby Heenan and the book is packed with Easter eggs and in-jokes for fans, as well as lyrical, heartbreaking prose, a great heist caper, and one spectacularly filthy joke.
Check out the video trailers below for excerpts read by the author.
Remember how you felt when you joined "the Yes Movement?" When we occupied Raw? When you realized it was a New Day? When Andre turned on Hogan? When Larry betrayed Bruno (a cornerstone and thematic part of this novel)? When Ric Flair retired? When Foley flew from the cage?
This book will make you feel that way all over again.
Like so many breakout stars of Wrestlemania weekends past, Austin at 14, Bryan at 30, Keith Lee on the indies in 2017, the Ring Walk is a product of years of hard work trying to become an overnight success. Only you can make that happen.
Its still real in The Ring Walk, dammit!

okay, as we say in the South, "its nut cuttin time."

i can't tell you how pulverizingly hard internet publishing is. i tried the Salem Witch Trials book without friends and family and extended allies support before launch. it was a spectacular failure and cost me tons of money and a bit of critical reputation.

so be it; those were bumps i was prepared to take. my ego strength, as you well know, remains strong.

but we can't take those same hits on the Ring Walk. this book can't be torpedoed. if we can go somehow above and beyond and get the fucker in the wresting/sports bestseller lists, this is the weekend to do it. and if that happens....
We are broken from this fucking circle of poverty forever.

so i have dropped all pretense of shame. fuck it anyway; the internet is rigged against us. you wouldn't believe the dirty tricks that authors and publishing houses of all sucess levels resort to in order to protect their little corner.

i won't resort to that. but i will drop all pretense of shame in begging aforementioned friends, family, and allies to support this book and future ones in every way possible.

if this is the new publishing model, if this is the new economy for writers, so fucking be it.

Its kinda hard for me to overstate the importance of this, after the beating we took launching the first book, and i genuinely can't thank anybody who participates in this enough.

eh, more after mexican lunch.
me

Cody vs. Omega

by poet crit shodate
Poet Crit Shodate have deep and abiding love of verse. Recognize inherent value of sonnets, haiku, free-form. No get Lucha.

Bias admission:
I love both of these wrestlers
in my heart of hearts

comparison is
the devil between him and
him how could one choose?

Omega is what
Nakamura thinks he is:
body charisma

grace unforced, leather.
Smirks are invitations for
one-winged angels.

may both be near me
when my hair falls out like snow
after an earthquake

my coffee boils
I watch the weather, getting
mad at Omega

a rabbit hole takes
me to North Carolina
modern grappling arts

Matt Hardy has
headlocked Joey Mercury
the gym smells of feet

Jeff Hardy has
meth dreams of ladyboys with
shaved armpits and legs.

the crowd is drunk on
Mountain Dew in green bottles
glass with old logos

I know it is still
nineteen fifty seven here
un-Reconstructed

pre-Post-Racial and
woozy from day labor
in the bastard sun

gasp! I am back, like
the cicadas every year.
Golden Lover wins.

K. Omega vs. K. Okada

by shodate erotic muse.
Shodate erotic muse have deep and abiding love of all forms of sensuality. Recognize inherit value in missionary, cowgirl, and the intertwined octopi. No get Lucha.

More from the most compelling Japanese writer since Mutsuo Takahashi.

“Mr. Takahashi was exempted from the human principle that every young boy grows up to be a young man.”
Zack Sabre Jr here is a very young man. Every boy saddled with the appendage “junior” remains immature and his entire life.

“He did not have to go down to the bottom of the sea, down to the bottom of the female genitalia, which many a young man mistakes for a philosophy, mistakes for profundity.” Yukio Mishima
I wonder if ZSJ got into wrestling to get girls. Girls never show up in the audience for his matches, though that may not be his fault. Indie wrestling in general is blissfully male-dominated, although that bliss is shallow and comes with a high moral compromise.
Still, though, I like to look.

“There is profound, and there is, like, profound, you know?”
I did not.
While marijuana remains terrifyingly illegal here in Japan, every now and then you meet somebody who is indulging. Perilous, and the conversations get stereotypical. “Profound.”

Nobody here has a tolerance so they fall asleep with post-giggle smiles still whispering from the corners of their smoky mountain mouths. Despite that I have spent all night gently listening to them as they unspooled their theories of the world, their dreams will not be of me.

Teenage lovers and Zack Sabre Jr matches are the same in that way; they can be indulged with all the patience in the world and they will still not give you what you want.

He will always be a young man.

So I'm a bit into uncharted waters.

I'm a longtime ghostwriter and have recently decided to start publishing novels on my own.
I have had fewer opportunities than most to network; being a writer-for-hire, I had to keep whatever accomplishments I had to myself.
Now, we're moving in to the brave new world of self-promotion.

I started easy and conventional; I am quite diligently doing everything that Goodreads and a few other sources have recommended. I have neither fear of failure nor anticipation of success.

What I hope to happen is to figure out what works and what doesn't, learn how to write more compelling ad copy, and to suss out my niches.

It feels a bit like pissing in the wind. It also feels necessary. So be it .

Will keep you updated; both of you.

Standing Alone Leads to Massacres on the High Plains.

"I'm the number one man in Mid-South, I stand alone." Butch Reed.

The Midnight Express has just beaten the Rock and Rolls for the Mid-South Tag Team Titles. Jim Cornette is throwing them a party at ringside, because where else? Ross is out to interview with a microphone and a wet lipped smile.

Cornette is even more magnificent than usual here, telling Jim Ross that "you can't come to our victory party." Even though Beautiful Bobby and Loverboy Dennis are acting like braying jackasses, Ross looks simultaneously sad to be left out and very familiar with being excluded.

At one point in the celebration Corny turns down the Loverboy's offer of champagne, saying that "he didn't drink alcohol, but he'd get his Pepsi later." Somewhere, a lightbulb went on over baby Punk's head. The Rock and Rolls show up looking for frosting based revenge and shock of shocks, Cornette's face ends up in the cake. The squeal of delight Watts gives when this happens is so girlish that one can't help but wonder if his hatred of femininity is ever self-focused.

Watts' beady eyed toady, his $3.99 tie purchased from Woolworths that very morning yet somehow already stained with pork fat, looked on with his patented mixture of awe and shame. Ross knows partying with the villains is wrong but he so desperately wants to join in anyway, to be accepted for once in his life, to be one of the boys, to finally run with the pack.

In the subsequent minutes the Cowboy manages to call Cornette a sissy four times before slapping him for one reason or another, an implied lawsuit or a perceived lack of masculinity. What has really enraged Watts is that Cornette continues to insist on calling his mother's lawyers and using his mother's money to get what he wants. Cornette will not stand alone.

One of the greatest illustrations of the grievous peril of standing alone came during the Cowboy’s feud with Eddie Gilbert’s Hotstuff International.

Watts’ entrance music is Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Reagan had used that song during his 1984 campaign so it is not surprising to hear Watts appropriating it for himself here. Neither man, of course, bothered to listen to it and I can’t imagine Bruce was any happier about that crypto-fascist Watts using it than he was Reagan. (13)

This is an outstanding example of Watts needing to stand alone. He pays for it, too, after a short squash over Sting (the Cowboy takes all of the offense and the pin in four minutes while Ross sports and erection that is somehow audible) he gets five minutes with Hotstuff Eddie Gilbert. Throughout the buildup Sailor Jim never specifies exactly where the five minutes alone will take place. In a darkened closet with an Erasure cassette tape playing and the rest of the junior high party waiting outside, I assume. (14) After dispatching Sting with superhuman ease Watts gets after Gilbert for a moment with the leather strap, whippings being a common theme of justice and retribution both in the frontier and in the UWF. Morgan Freeman’s Logan getting whipped to death by Sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven is an example straight from one of the cowboy cult’s leading mythmakers.

In his outstanding book, Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood's Frontier Narrative, Matthew Carter talks about the role of whipping in the American West and depictions of it in movies. He says that critics have noted that “the bull-whipping of Logan is symptomatic of Anglo-America’s legacy of slavery…the representation of Logan’s oppression relates it to the history of American racism…whipping was traditional punishment for runaway slaves.” (15) Now, it absolutely must be noted that in this angle, Eddie Gilbert is white. But bear in mind that Watts ran whipping angles with some regularity, as well as other angles featuring punishments held over from the times of slavery and the Wild West, lynching and tarring and feathering most notably. (16)

Instead of getting his friends to roll with him when going into a situation when he knew he was outnumbered at least two to one, the Cowboy stands alone and when the ‘Birds, new associates of Hotstuff International (17) hit the ring he succumbs to the numbers game.

Oh, sure, the good guys eventually clear the locker room and make the save, but not after, in the words of Seaman Ross, “Terry Gordy has had the Oriental Spike on Watts longer than he’s ever had it on any other man!” Buddy Roberts fights off the heroes with the strap while Hayes, the ultimate sissy in the eyes of Watts, gloats over the Cowboy’s paralyzed carcass.

Both Watts and and members of the cowboy cult never learn that standing alone in the face of a gang night riders leaves you dead on the plains while the farmhouse burns and the Comanche make off with your daughter.

Women and Other Enemies

It seems natural that kayfabe Indians would've attacked Watts and the other heroes of UWF. In fact, that such an angle never happened seems to negate the thesis of this thought experiment, the idea that the cult of the individual and the nativist, isolationist culture that defined the UWF was inspired by the Texas Indian wars. But even for Watts that may have been too on the nose.

Furthermore, since Reagan had heated up the Cold War with his frontier sheriff rhetoric, the Cowboy was able to use American jingoism to fuel some memorable angles using the Soviets and Arabs as uncivilized, un-American existential threats to UWF.

The Soviets represented everything Watts hated. For a man so obsessed with standing alone, the idea of doing things communally was sacrilegious. Ivan Koloff and his comrades burying the Cowboy in the Russian flag is the most lasting and true image Mid-South television ever produced.

Bill Watts was twenty one years old when John Kennedy became president. It is hard to imagine the staunch Republican Watts being a member of Camelot, but it throughout his time in UWF Watts embodied the most Kennedy-like ideals. Kennedy himself was a member of the cult of the cowboy and constantly used frontier mythology to structure his foreign and domestic policy. Slotkin explains that “the choice of the frontier as a symbol was not simply a device for trademarking the candidate. It was an authentic metaphor, descriptive of the way they hoped to use political power and the kinds of struggle in which they wished to engage. The “Frontier” for them was…a vivid and memorable set of hero-tales, each with a model of successful and morally justifiable action on the stage of conflict.” (18) I cannot think of a better way to describe pro-wrestling as produced by Bill Watts than “a memorable set of hero-tales” featuring “justifiable action on a stage of conflict.” The frontier metaphor, Slotkin continues, “shaped the language that the resultant wars would be understood by who commanded and fought them….American troops would be describing Vietnam as Indian country, search and destroy missions as a “game of Cowboys and Indians;” and Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of “moving the Indians away from the fort so the settlers could plant corn.” (19)

After America was defeated and Saigon fell there was a national period of soul searching. The twin tumults of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement (Anglo superiority being another cornerstone of the frontier mythology) led to a justifiably named time of malaise. A man with a tin badge and a cowboy hat was elected to lead America back to its Wild Western ideals, and standing tall against the Soviets was the way to do it.

Eddie Gilbert, being a new man, an international man, had joined forces with the Russians. Watts was doubly enraged, Eddie wouldn’t walk alone, and he and Ivan Koloff were beating hapless pawns of the bourgeoisie and draping the Hammer and Sickle banner over their bodies. Because even jobbers, the weakest of the weak, must stand alone in the UWF nobody was able to stop them, until the Cowboy had seen enough.

When confronted in the ring by Watts, Gilbert feigns contrition. It is also interesting to note that yet again, the heels don’t do anything particularly heelish. Watts threatens to burn their flag and they run out and beat him up and save it from the flames.

Watts, an uber-Patriot, would’ve done the same if the Russians were doing the same to Old Gory, yes? The ego, hotheadedness and self-righteousness that come with standing alone seems to justify any actions the heroes take. How easily they drift from “the good cowboy” to “the bad cowboy,” proving how useless the distinction is to begin with. The cult of the cowboy is inherently violent and destructive to civil society. Neither country won the Cold War. Shane rode off into the sunset at the end, but he was fatally gut-shot and was slumped dead in the saddle.

Any cowboy who stands alone will inevitably be buried under an enemy flag.

When Duggan and Butch Reed team-up against Akbar's "Rat Pack" (rats themselves having long usage in the encoding of racist, anti-Semitic, and nativist language) some form of the phrase "standing alone" is used six to eight times within three minutes minutes.

The angle starts with a brown-skinned invader, in this case Skandar Akbar, in the ring. The Arabs don't do anything particularly heelish until taunted by the babys, taunted far longer than any self-respecting Southern would endure were the situations reversed.

The heroes often call the Arabs "blood suckers" and "parasites,” again, words with terrible and lengthy history in the language of propaganda. (20)

Both Buddy Landell and Reed are fantastic in their roles and Akbar seems like the most reasonable person in the ring. In the middle of all of these buried yet burning passions of race, masculinity, provincialism and jingoism, Akbar behaves only like a capitalist. He buys what he needs and doesn’t understand the constant ego-driven conflict the Western men are engaged in. Akbar isn’t being slick or deceptive (that’s Budro’s job) he’s just being a businessman. But Butch Reed cannot be bought or sold, Butch Reed is a free man, Butch Reed stands alone.

This of course gets him a beat down. The heels have their way with him until another man who stands alone, Jim Duggan, comes to the ring to save him. Once the ring is cleared, Watts calls them to the microphone to talk out their differences and finally, finally, they realize that some cooperative work, some social engagement with those around you, might be better at saving your ass than standing alone and walking tall.

The Comancheria Becomes the American Frontier, By Force, of Course, Of Course.

“I think cowboys represent masculinity, bravery, courageousness, selflessness, rugged individualism. And it's those characteristics, I think, that draw people to the cowboy ideal, the cowboy image. Its appeal is especially strong during periods of national crisis and trauma, whether it'd be war or depression, because cowboys appeal to strength, stability and core values." Byron Price, interviewed on NPR.
Bill Watts is a living embodiment of the frontier culture of rugged individual manliness and therefore makes an excellent study in how the cult of the cowboy manifests itself in American culture. Frederick Jackson Turner crystallized the idea that the frontier developed the freedom-loving democratic character of the United States. In a famous 1893 essay, Turner claimed “that westward movement was central in American history and in the American experience. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character.” (3)

There is a remarkable dual meaning in the phrase “in continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society.” For Turner he meant it as celebration of the idyllic and the virtue of rural life. The settlers fighting to establish an Anglo-American presence in the Comancheria, however, were in a wholly different continuous touch with a “primitive” society. They were at war.

Among the most searing and influential narratives in American history are the “captivity narratives” of women and children settlers who’d been taken by the Comanche during skirmishes or raids. These writings are part wartime propaganda, part ethnography, part adventure and survival story. The stories of Dolly Webster, Sarah Ann Horn, and Mary Jemison gripped white settlers like nothing else in the war and helped rouse national sentiment to defend the frontier from savage attack. Probably the most famous of these narratives is the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, which was turned into the celluloid cowboy classic The Searchers, a movie steeped in the ethic of “standing alone.” There are few men in America the age of Watts who didn’t want to be John Wayne growing up, and probably none in Oklahoma.

“I have honor, a real man fights his opponents head on,” Watts once said to Jim Cornette, as though morality and nobility have any place in war or wrestling. The wars against the Comanche helped codify the cowboy ethos. The Comanche didn’t fight with what the Anglo settlers considered honor: they raided at night, they never attacked alone, when faced with equal forces they retreat into the night, when they did attack they took the weakest and avoided the strongest, they raped women and mutilated the dead. Theirs was not a fight for honor; it was a fight to continue existing as a people.

That the settlers movement west through the Comercharia was unstoppable ensured this conflict would continue until one side no longer existed. The expansion of the Americans was unquenchable, part of their nascent national character. “The frontiersman… defined what it meant to be an American as he moved west and left European influence behind.” (4) Utah Valley College Professor Alice Dodwell makes a contemporary point here; so often we have heard nativist politicians deriding Obama for his “European socialism” and for “turning the American dream into a European Nightmare.” (5)

Most importantly, “frontier life developed the individualism that promoted democracy, and it created a buoyant American character that thrived on freedom, strength, inquisitiveness, invention, and expansion." (6) These are the ideals of the cowboy cult.

Authors Joe B. Frantz and Julian Choate describe the ideals of the cult of the cowboy in a book of somber essays on the morality of the iconic character. They say, “the good cowboy is brave and up for a challenge. He promotes justice and defends the honor of women; he is the implacable foe of the Indian; and a man to whom honor and integrity come naturally.” (7) John Wayne is the iconic good cowboy. Ronald Reagan played a good cowboy, both onscreen and in the White House. George W. Bush thought he was a good cowboy but he was all hat and no cattle.

Bill Watts in the UWF was the archetypical good cowboy; he and his heroes are obsessed with the justice and think nothing of imposing their vision of it on others, through loud talk first and violence after. As revolting as their attitudes towards their women are (an idea we’ll explore later) they are constantly fighting to defend “their honor.” And in the damning eyes of Watts, those without the requisite amount of physical bravery are the worst of the worst: they are “sissies.”

The other side of the same coin is the bad cowboy. This wild and roguish figure is associated with outlaws like Wild Bill and Billy the Kid. Wrestling has seen its fair share of these baddies, too; Terry Funk and Stan Hansen are notably merciless and hard-charging. Hell, Bill Watts himself played a heel cowboy at times in his career, turning on his longtime friend Bruno Sammartino in 1965. (8) As Frantz and Choate define, the bad cowboy is “a reckless ruffian, the bad cowboy is a pistol-shooting, merciless, hard-living man who roamed the boom towns of the Old West.” (9)

Professor Dodwell lays the foundation for this argument in writing, “scholars have critiqued the cowboy myth and called for abandoning it because the good and the bad cowboy become intermingled; they argue that the violent aspects of the bad cowboy are idealized as embodying the essence of the American character.” (10)

Over and over in UWF TV we see that this is true, that the violent aspects of the cowboy culture are twisted and corrupted and that the frontier mythos imposed a physical fascism and confused “standing tall” and violence for morality and bravery.

The brilliant cultural critic Richard Slotkin further explains why in a series of books focused on the cult of the cowboy and the damage it is capable of causing. Regeneration Through Violence (1973) and Gunfighter Nation (1992), are about “how the myth of the frontiersman and the cowboy have sanctioned local and national violence; he argues the U.S. needs to cast off the cowboy myth because of its advocacy of violence and because it idealizes “the white male adventurer as the hero of national history.” (11)

“A middle-aged white badass as the hero of the story” is a perfect encapsulation of UWF television during the Watts reign. How often did the Cowboy (or his handmade homunculus, Steve Williams) have to run to the ring and restore order? Damn near every show.

The frontier mythos and the cult of the cowboy it created is so prevalent in American culture that we cannot conceive of our politics without it.

Slotkin elucidates, writing, “the symbols [of the frontier mythos] are appropriate lauguage for explaining and justifying the use of political power. The exchange of an old, domestic, agrarian frontier for a new frontier of world power and industrial development had been a central trope in American political and historiographical debates since the 1890s.” (12) Oklahoma during from the start of Watts’ life through his booking run in the UWF was an agrarian frontier struggling with its role in the nation. It was the old country colliding with the new and a clash of cultures was taking place, just as had happened during the conquest of the Comancheria. As wheat and commodities prices dropped during a time of wildly fluctuating trade, the old, agrarian way of life was being challenged and usurped by new money from oil and overseas investment. In the UWF that manifested by the Arab Akbar and others, remember, Hotstuff Inc was an international conglomerate.

Bill Watts was born atop the ashes of the Comanche Empire and the culture created by that half-century long war of attrition and conquest continues to define and divide America. His work in Mid-South typifies the attitudes and mindset of the American inhabitants of the former Comancheria (Texas and Oklahoma, for the purposes of this article) who prize individualism and “standing alone” over all other values.

As America expanded westward into the frontier a mythology was created, and a cult sprang up around the cowboy. Settlers in what still were Comanche lands were praised for their toughness and their grit, their lawmen became legends, and their narratives shaped their country’s politics and culture to an incredible degree.

Neither the American settlers nor the Comanche Indians they confronted along that raw frontier in what would become Texas and Oklahoma had “the remotest idea of the other’s geographical size or military power. The Texas-Indian Wars (as the decades long series of raids and skirmishes, battles and massacres, have come to be called) took place in the middle of the country, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Historian S.C Gywnne explains that both the Anglo settlers and the Comanche themselves “had for the past two centuries been busily engaged in the bloody conquest and near-extermination of Native American tribes. Both had succeeded in hugely expanding the lands under their control. The difference was that the Comanches were content with what they had won. The Anglo-Americans, children of Manifest Destiny, were not.” (1)

Comanche warriors routinely attacked settlements of what they justifiably saw as an invading force with territorial aspirations. Fear of the murderous "other," no matter who that was, was a natural cultural reaction to such living conditions. In Watts' UWF, outsiders (not you, Scott, sit down) were constantly invading and destroying the heroes. And the self-reliance of capably violent men, the cult of the cowboy and the Colt .45, flourished.

The Comanche horsemen with whom the settlers were at war were “representatives of a military and trade empire that covered some 240,000 square miles, essentially the southern Great Plains. Their land encompassed large chunks of five present-day states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma." (2) This huge nation was the Comancheria.

Isolated settlers living under the constant threat of raid by hostile, mounted horsemen from such a powerful nation had to develop some admirable self-reliance. The rugged individual, his home his castle, with his rifle and his bible for justice, remains the defining American archetype. However, the idea that those who survived the war on those hot and brutal plains did it on their own without banding together with their neighbors and friends to both ward off death by arrow or elements and better prosper is untrue, arrogant and self-serving.

K. Omega vs. K. Okada

by shodate erotic muse.
Shodate erotic muse have deep and abiding love of all forms of sensuality. Recognize inherit value in missionary, cowgirl, and the intertwined octopi. No get Lucha.

More from the most compelling Japanese writer since Mutsuo Takahashi.

“Mr. Takahashi was exempted from the
human principle that every young boy grows up to be a young man.”
Yukio Mishima

Zack Sabre Jr here is a very young man.
Every boy saddled with the appendage “junior” remains
immature and his entire life.

“He did not have to go down to the bottom of the sea,
down to the bottom of the female genitalia,
which many a young man mistakes for a philosophy,
mistakes for profundity.” Yukio Mishima
I wonder if ZSJ got into wrestling to get girls.
Girls never show up in the audience for his matches,
though that may not be his fault.
Indie wrestling in general is blissfully male-dominated,
although that bliss is shallow and comes with a high moral compromise.
Still, though, I like to look.

“There is profound, and there is, like, profound, you know?”
I did not.
While marijuana remains terrifyingly illegal
here in Japan, every now and then you meet somebody who is indulging.
Perilous, and the conversations get stereotypical. “Profound.”

Nobody here has a tolerance so they fall asleep
with post-giggle smiles still whispering from the
corners of their smoky mountain mouths.
Despite that I have spent all night gently listening
to them as they unspooled their theories of the world,
their dreams will not be of me.

Teenage lovers and Zack Sabre Jr matches
are the same in that way; they can be indulged
with all the patience in the world and they will still not give you what you want.

He will always be a young man.

Ken the Box was an experiment designed by a mad scientist named Survival Tobita to test the boundaries of humanity's capacity for violence and acceptance. Like Frankenstein, he is a haunted creation, cursed to fight pro wrestling's most villainous baddies to prove that even a lab-created monster is touched by god's grace and deserving of rights, respect, and compassion.
Even if you don't like absurdist art or believe that co-operative fighting can be a emotionally moving and an intellectually valid experience, you should take this journey with us. Ken the Box shows what is kept inside us all.

Kevin Spacey and Ken the Box vs. Brad Pitt and Gwenneth Paltrow
Si and his daughter and I watched this and now she's in his arms, shaking, crying cold and terrified tears.
This was horrible. Lets just say that the heels won when Spacy defeated Paltrow and leave it at that.

Ken the Box vs. Kent Hebox.
This was an engaging mirror-matchup, featuring Ken versus a slightly different version of himself. But as happens in a lot of mirror matches, they caught sight of one another in one another and disappeared into an endlessly reflective void.

Ken the Box vs. A Garden Gnome.
Entrance music can tell us a lot about a wrestler. Here Ken comes out to The Venetian Snares, a piece entitled "Destroy Glass Castles" from A Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding. Usually the Venetian Snares are harsh, inaccessible, and unforgiving but this album is accessible, even to music fans who aren't into experimental murder music. So Ken is signalling something to us here, that he wants to be appreciated by a wider audience, that he's tired of working in a niche genre, that he's ready to push his chips forward and declare himself "all in" as an artist and a valued part of human society.
But is society ready to accept him as he is? Or will he be reduced to something more recognizable, more manageable, and trite? Something cute to laugh at and be put amongst the flowers in a garden, perhaps? Sensing a traitor, a sellout, someone who was willing to sacrifice individualism for acceptance, Ken the Box smashes the Garden Gnome to small bits and pins each and every one of them to satiate his growing outcast's rage.