Tomorrow is a Long Time

Something horrible happens. Your girl leaves you. Your husband dies. The house burns to the ground. Some loon with pockets full of explosives walks into a government building. It changes everything. It changes you. The world isn't the same place in which you were living a day ago. That world from a scant 24 hours prior is gone. And even if it was better, even if everything has changed for the worse, there's no way back.

That's what this is. Things change for the worse tomorrow. Once I show my face, there's no going back. If you warrant attention from me - and trust me, you will know - then you're stuck with me until I decide to move on. And even after I've moved on, or even if I haven't layed a hand on you and you've only witnessed what has happened with your compatriots, the people you've fought with and against, even if it's all second hand brutality to you, once I've moved on, there is no going back to what it was when I had not yet arrived.

Make no mistake about it, I'm not some hooligan that just gets a kick out of hitting some thick meathead with a chair. If you are one of the chosen few who will be my entertainment, I go for the lasting sort of hurt. I don't go for it immediately, I know how to take my time, but when the time comes, you and I, at our most perfect moment together, I will make sure that you will not get past me.

It may not be every day that you remember. If you're particularly prolific, the whole of your future may not be defined by what you do for me. There will be no cartoonish promises about every waking moment et cetera. But I'll never be gone from you. Those times that are your most cherished, those few moments of true solitude, those will be mine to keep. Those will be the times that you won't quite trust the shadows at the corners of your room. It will be visions of me that will be troubling your sleep. This is for what I'm aiming. This is what starts tomorrow. "Tomorrow," for some of you, will be lasting a very long time.

I keep a close watch

It's a high. Every time I watch you people, so blissfully unaware of what's coming, knowing more than you, it's a drug, and I just can't get enough. When I finally do show up (within a week for those playing along at home), I think this is what I'll miss most. Moving invisibly closer, watching you slouching about your days, I'm honestly going to miss it. I wouldn't trade what comes after I arrive for this, though. Not for a moment.



And I am watching. Your silly political plays, grumpy champions, your new arrivals, I'm watching and I'm taking it all in. And I'm laughing. I don't know who I'll be coming for, but if the past month has been any indication, whoever it is doens't have a chance.

You Are The Blood

For many of you, more often than not, nothing will really change. As I said, I'm not interested in any large scale actions. This is not an invasion, this is not an occupation. You people have nothing worth invading for. Most of you will only be aware of me and my actions second-hand. You'll see my matches, the things I do that make it on the air. And not everybody I wrestle will be someone who gets my attention. The promotion puts me in matches, but I determine who I find interesting enough to make one of my projects. There are no criteria I use to pick who it will be. Truth be told, they will find out when I do.

No, for most of you, the ACW after my arrival will be no different than it was before I first made my presence known. For the select few that pique my interest, it will be so much different. For the select few that pique my interest, it will be so much worse. Make peace with yourselves. I'm on my way.

These Things Happen

So here's our man. At that time he was a fairly nondescript kind of guy. Had a wild youth, but settled out of it for the most part. He was in his early 20's when the girl came into the picture. He loved her. That overpowering, occasionally painful sort of love, he wanted to envelop her whenever he was with her. They were together for two years before it all went down. See, she was the virtuous type, virginal as it were. Not particularly religious, just the kind who wanted to wait until marriage for somewhat vague reasons. He didn’t agree with this, not a bit. But he loved her, and he was alright to wait.

And then she turned up pregnant. And he left her. He still loved her, that much hadn’t changed, and it hurt to do it, but it had to be done. She understood, and there was no animosity, it was as amicable a breakup as it could have been under the circumstances. They went their separate ways; she was going to raise the child with the father. But it didn’t work out quite like that. The father wasn’t much interested in being a father, and decided to leave town. Having alienated everybody else after what she’d done, having nobody to whom she could turn, she went to our man.

He was hesitant to do it, but he took her in. They weren’t going to be together, he made this much perfectly clear, but he’d help with the baby. He wouldn’t let her go through it all alone. So he got a job with his father, change his class schedule to night classes, and the two of them moved in together. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do. Until she went into early labor. Far too early. Something went wrong. She was rushed to the hospital, he got there that night; he hadn’t gotten word for hours.

She went into a coma, he was given a choice. Neither prospect looked particularly good, but he had to make a decision. He told the doctor, through clenched, drowning eyes, to deliver. She went into the operating room, and she died there. Our man waited outside. The inside of his skin felt scraped out, his eyes wouldn’t focus, he wanted to fly into a rage but he couldn’t move. He just sat. And he waited while the girl died. And he wondered what he was going to do now.

The baby, however, wasn’t breathing. It went straight into intubation, tubes and plugs going every which way, desperately keeping the baby alive, pumping air into his lungs. Our man barely had a chance to say goodbye to the girl he loved before he was faced with the dying child. The doctor said he wouldn’t take the boy off of life support until our man gave the word, but he made no bones about it; the odds of the kid living were all but nonexistent.

Our man silently nodded. He pulled up a chair and he sat next to the boy. He stared at him through the Plexiglas tank. He saw the plate on the side with the boy’s identification and saw the blank space next to the word “NAME.” He pulled out a sharpie and tried to think of a name. Our man could only think to use the name of his father. He named the boy John. He placed a hand on the side of the tank. It was as close as he could get.

The night turned into the morning, the boy was alive. Our man hadn’t left his side. He didn’t sleep. The food the nurses left him had long since gone cold. He just sat, either staring into the tank at the boy or resting his forehead against it. Always talking, silently, to the boy through the tank, through the wires and tubes.

The day turned into several days. It turned into a week. Our man didn’t leave the boy’s side. He wasted away, refusing to eat, drinking barely any water. Some of the nurses gossiped that the boy might live after all. Our man and his kid became the talk of the ward. Even the doctors were talking about them in hushed tones. The doctor who delivered the boy tried to stay level headed about the whole thing, but even he occasionally gave the gossip some thought.

Our man got a lot of attention from the nurse staff, bringing him food that he wouldn’t eat, blankets, making sure he was comfortable, keeping him going. Silently praying for the both of them. Always watching from a distance as our man seemed to carry on entire imagined conversations with the boy, always having some manner of contact with the side of the tank, either a hand or his forehead.

The doctor was completely caught off guard when our man went to him and told him it was time to shut the machine off. He stammered out an “okay” and the two of them went into the room. At a distance the entire nurse staff and several doctors watched, all of them silently thinking the boy would live. The doctor moved to the machine and looked to our man. He gave a nod, eyes clinched tight, but not water tight, and the doctor flipped switch after switch, turning everything off. Everybody held their breath, waiting for the rhythmic beep of the heart monitor to turn into one solid tone. It didn’t.

The energy of the room turned into anticipation. They knew it. The boy was going to live. Our man reached in after the doctor removed the tubes and wires. He picked the boy up into his arms. It was the first time he’d even touched the kid. He held it close to him; the only thing he had left of the girl he loved. He put his forehead to the boy’s and whispered in his ear. “It’s alright. You can go now.” The beeps of the heart monitor finally devolved into one long droning sound. And that was all. The boy was gone.

Rhapsody in Black

I watch from afar. You make it easy. You not only live your lives in the spotlight, you struggle and claw your way to get to the spot that makes you the most visible. It's no wonder I can sometimes barely keep from laughing. I sit among your devoted, making myself to appear as one of them. Make no mistake; I am not. They cheer for you and clamor for you and call out your names. They love you. There is no love here. Not for you.

You make yourselves out to be so strong. You're not like the others. The 'normal ones.' They're ordinary. Frail. Weak. You deserve their adulation for being so much stronger than them. Perhaps. But stronger than those who are ordinary is no great achievement. You pose and flex, you deify yourselves. They feed into it. And the more they feed you the attention you can't help but seek, the weaker they make you. The more succeptible you are when one of us comes along who can see you for who and what you are.

You aren't stars in front of an adoring crowd. You're lemmings, waiting to jump to your death in front of a bloodthirsty camera crew. You may think I'm here to save you. I'm only here to get my amusement from you before the lot of you destroy yourselves. At the end of the day, these people can have you. I'm content with watching. But not before I've had my fun. Public execution is fine, but they lack...imagination.

This is not some self-aggrandizing, egomaniacal call to arms. I have no intention and no interest in anything large scale. I'm a simple sort of man. I merely eat what's on my plate, I don't take my fork and knife to the whole buffet. I do the job in front of me, and for now that job is the ACW. I know for a fact that at least some of you in the ACW are reading this, so I feel I should tell you that whatever expectations you have of me, they are wrong.

I'm sure you've been lulled by men coming in saying they will take you over. They'll go straight to the top. Maybe I could, but there's really nothing in it for me. I'm here for fun. Not achievements, fame, accolades, or even the spirit of competition. Fun. At the expense of your idyllic little existance. You've been living in a dream. I'm here to bring you nightmares.

Happy Music for Happy People

Here Comes a Regular

The bacon is still hissing on the plate, he smiles at her through the mix of smoke from his ash tray and steam from the coffee. His regular waitress sets down the plate as she smiles back. He coughs rather loudly as she walks away to get her attention. She grins to herself; she'd been waiting for this. She hides her grin and turns back to face him. He asks what time she gets off work.

Later that night she dusts off the last table and turns off all the lights. A shadow moves across the wall in front of her. She jumps and turns around. She lets out a sigh of relief; it's him. She holds up a finger to tell him to hold on and she darts to the back. She shuts off the last of the lights and walks back to the door, keys in hand. She unlocks the door and slinks past him, deliberately brushing against his coat as she locks the door and coyly backs away from him as they walk off into the night.

The owners are puzzled by her absence the next day. She hasn't taken so much as a sick day before. They call, but no answer. They shrug it off for the time being; she's probably under the weather. The next day she isn't there. Another waitress swings by her apartment, but it's empty. They put a "help wanted sign" on the window. It takes a few weeks but eventually they take it back down.

He takes his usual table. A waitress from a different shift has it now. He cocks his head at her, making sure she notices, but says nothing except to order his food and coffee. When it arrives he asks about his regular waitress. She tells him she left, and gives her dimestore novel theory about her running off with some wealthy socialite from the city. It takes everything he has to keep himself from laughing.