Post by Notorious B.O.B. on Nov 17, 2014 16:07:00 GMT
I had this written and ready to go for this weekend but due to an issue with Dropbox it never saved properly and I was unable to post it. I just wanted to share this with you guys since I actually did roleplay - thanks for reading!
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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall …
“I gave you my all, my everything, and in return asked for nothing.” The blackness of the screen blurs into a grainy focus. The front facing camera of the iPhone struggling to make what it is recording visible in a heavily darkened room. The gentle bouncing of the image stabilizes to show the face of a man with nothing left. “I … I don't even know what to say here anymore. What is there even left to say … to do?”
The question hangs there for a moment, his eyes drifting away from the camera and towards the source of what little light is filtering into the room. He licks his lips, biting down gently at his bottom lip. “This all used to be so easy,” his gaze finds its way back to the lens, “the whole, trash talking thing. It used to be as natural to me as blinking and breathing; something that I didn’t need to think about because I just … did it” he says, chuckling.
“But now … now I feel like I dread these moments with you; no offense.” There’s a small shrug, but his shoulders quickly droop back down into a more ‘defeated’ position. “Well,” he says, his face scrunching up, “I guess ‘dread’ is a pretty loaded word; I just don’t look forward to this whole ‘thing’ anymore, I guess. At the end of the day I didn’t get into this business to talk – the talking was just something that came with the package. It never bothered me before because it always came so naturally.” He smirks, “I guess that was one advantage to being such a cocky son of a gun, eh?”
“There wasn’t a guy, or gal, that I feel like I couldn’t go toe to toe with in the center of the ring holding a microphone. Now, I can’t say the same about actual wrestling ability … but on the mic I was one of the best.”
“I dunno, over time I’ve just lost the will, the drive, the fun in seeing the reaction I’d get with a well placed jab. I won’t lie, I was probably my biggest fan” he snorts, “but even I’ve grown tired of hearing my voice.”
“It isn’t just my voice either; I’m tired of hearing the same tired stories from the same tired people. There are only so many times I can listen to a sob story before wanting to tear my hair out. It’s the same recycled drama that just gets pulled out of the trash, shined up and repackaged as someone else’s nonsense.”
“I’m just sick of it.”
He reaches up, running a hand through his hair and pulling at the strands all the way from root to tip before tucking them behind his ear and looking away from the camera again. “I can’t tell you how hard it is to psych myself up to even come to work anymore. It isn’t like I have a simple nine-to-five desk job where I can just do some repetitive bull for a few hours while shutting my brain off.” Smiling, “No, I have to actually put effort into making sure I’m getting from Boise to Burlington while fighting the urge to just careen into an embankment somewhere in between.”
“And it doesn’t stop there … once I’m here I have to make sure I know what I’m doing or somebody ends up getting seriously injured. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of some of these cats in the back,” his right eyebrow rises as he hides a smirk, “but I’ll be damned if I’m the reason one of ‘em breaks his neck. No, I have to give this job one hundred percent of my concentration one hundred percent of the time. I can’t just ‘phone it in’ and I’m started to wish I could … I’m starting to wish I could.”
He sighs, the weight of his words seemingly sitting on his shoulders. The muscles in his jaw flex as he clenches – his teeth grinding. “I wish I could go back in time and recapture that love I once had for this business. There was a time when I’d have done anything for a chance at a spot on a show; hell, I remember what it took to even get my spot here in IWF.”
“But I also remember how quickly all that seemingly went away.”
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall …
“I was the new golden boy – one of the first guys not made in nCw that looked like he was going to rise through the ranks and do something. I had every opportunity to do just that … but I couldn’t.”
“Laszlo gets a lot of crap for always getting title shots but never being able to get the win when it counts, but you know what … screw anybody who thinks like that. IWF, like nCw before it, doesn’t just hand out title shots to every Tom, Dick or Harry that walks through those doors. If that were the case I’d sure as hell have had a shot at that Imperial title. Fact is, though, that I’ve had exactly three chances at capturing a new championship …” he inhales, holding the breath in while shaking his head from side to side slightly, “and of those three opportunities I pissed the bed twice.”
“That isn’t exactly a glowing recommendation for why I should be trusted with more and more chances, eh” he says, pursing his lips and shrugging. “Why waste the time or energy on a guy who has shown he’s not worth either?”
“I’ve sat back, well I guess I wasn’t really ‘sitting back’ so much as watching enviously, as guys took meteoric rises through the company and capitalized when it counted. Renee, Judas and now Seth … three guys who came out of nowhere one day and before you could blink had decimated anyone standing in their way. Two-thirds of that group put their respective championships back on the map while the other looks to be close to capturing his own.”
“All while I’m here, building nothing but contempt for myself and for the chances that I’ve squandered.” Just for a moment, a spark of life illuminates his eyes, but the fire dies out quickly and his dark browns become pallid and dull once more. “I’ve spent the better part of my life fighting. I’ve clawed and scratched my way to the top of more than one mountain, and watched as my momentum has carried me up and over and sent me sprawling back down to the bottom.”
“I just don’t know if I have what it takes to get up, dust myself off and start that climb again. Each time it seems to get a little harder, like gravity itself is battling be … trying to pull me back down to the ground where I belong.”
“I see what stands before me, who stands before me, and I just can’t help but ask myself … is it even worth it?”
All the King’s horses, and all the King’s men …
He smacks his lips, a small pop filling the empty void left after the question. He lets it hang there, unanswered before simply moving on. “It’s funny when you look at exactly what’s in store for me this week considering that I wasn’t sure why there WAS a this week. To the best of my knowledge, management knew that Doctor Griffiths had removed me from active competition until further review.”
“Yet, here I am”
“So I guess that means one of two things. Either management doesn’t care what happens to me … or doesn’t care what happens to the poor saps going up against a man who no longer cares.” Shrugging his shoulders he sniffs unapologetically, “I have nothing to win here, and really … nothing to lose either. A win this week doesn’t put me in contention, doesn’t move me one step closer, doesn’t elevate my standings in any way, shape or form. I’m up against three guys who probably care as much about this match as I do …” he deadpans.
“Laszlo … Bates … Cross … which of them really stands to gain from a win here? Bates has fallen off about as much as I have, though at least he seems to want to make that climb back up.”
“Cross …” he smiles, “lives in more of a fantasy world than anyone I know – but still manages to drag himself back into reality to spread his seed throughout that win column.”
“And then there’s Mikey …” he says with a grin, a genuine smile, “a man who you either love for the train wreck that is his life – or hate for the very same reason. While Cross’s world is an amalgam of half-truths and total fiction, Laszlo’s life has always put the opera into soap opera. There’s never a dull moment for these three souls, which makes my lumping that much more telling.”
“I’ll be the first to admit how much of a wreck I am and, truth be told, I probably could out loser anyone one of ‘em.”
“So in a battle of the poor and downtrodden, the apathetic man is king. Send whomever you want down to that ring, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m done dancing for your entertainment, done trying to prove myself to you … just done.”
“Maybe Griffiths was right; maybe I do need to step away from the ring for a while … get my head on straight. Maybe this time I’ll listen to his advice, just not before walking through that curtain one more time to be the standard bearer for IWF; to plaster a smile on my face like a good little employee and looking excited … whole …”
“when at the end of the day, I’m the one left standing here … broken.”
Couldn’t put Humpty together again
“I’m Bob Pooler … does anyone even care what I’ll do next?”