4/5/2012: Everyone knows the Super Bowl -- the annual event in which the industry's very best gather to showcase their lifelong-honed talents before a worldwide audience. What people do not realize, however, is that, both before and after these magnificent athletes march to their best routines playing their hearts out, savage hordes in garish armor clamor about violently in pursuit of a ball of pig's skin. They call this perverse dog-and-pony show "football." Never heard of it? Nor had I...until high school.
We were rehearsing what would be an award-winning routine of my own composition titled "Rocky Mountain Hi-Hat." It was a tribute to the late John Denver, punctuated by a stunning and groundbreaking visual in which my band would march atop one another to create a literal mountain of men before I, adorned with wings made of cymbals, would glide forth from its people-peak like a begilded bald eagle and disappear into the horizon amid a cacophony of applause. As I leapt from the Homo sapiens summit with the same nervousness and excitement Orville Wright must have felt in his maiden flight, I knew both my prodigious career and I would meet abrupt and premature ends...or soar to new heights. Fate, of course, made her choice.
I was surveying the world of the terrestrial alongside my winged brethren when I eyed the oddest of spectacles taking place on the marching field. There, in rudimentary formation, were bodies mindlessly colliding against one another. Naturally, I landed my percussive craft to investigate and learned what all the broad-chinned, bulging-biceped dweebs did after school while the cool kids and I marched. They called it "football" (for reasons beyond me, as I never once saw a foot touch the pecan-shaped non-ball) and its practitioners had even integrated the lines on the marching field into the rhythm of their brutish dance. Part of me had a mind to pick on these misguided losers; another part of me craved the chimichangas I had caught a waft of only moments before (the same aroma would later lure me to Monterrey where I would briefly masquerade as "El Bandolero.") The latter won out -- a decision I would come to regret when, not long after, my debut performance of "Get Outta' My Dreams, Get Into My Choir" was interrupted by the same gaggle of geeks crashing through a banner and onto our field. It was the beginning of a disconcerting pattern.
I continued running into these barbarian dorks, particularly their apparent warlord -- a certain Mark Angelosetti. While well-intentioned, he was practically stalking me. No social graces, this guy. Every chance he got, he would grab my waistband and pull it as high as he could with an almost obsessive desire to help keep my pants from falling down. Rather than see me trampled by the hallways' masses, he would help me along into my locker and out of harm's way, even when I did not ask for such assistance. But it did not get really disturbing until he began emulating me. After I declined the Captain of the Cheerleading Squad's invitation to Prom, he decided to take her - like a desperate puppy picking up the Alpha Dog's scraps.
That is why I was none too surprised when I saw the so-called "Mr. Touchdown" show up on my new home field, CHIKARA. And none too surprised when he began pining after Veronica following our mutual decision to pursue other professional interests. He wants to be a pro-wrestler like me, and he wants to avail himself of Veronica Ticklefeather's managerial services like me. I mean, he is totally not her type of managerial prospect and I am sure he will find that out the hard way...but I digress.
There was a time in my life in which pro-wrestling was my passion but something about testosterone-fueled animals with masculinity complexes punching each other in the face ad nauseum no longer appeals to me. If Angelosetti wants professional wrestling, then he can have it. Seems like a great place for a ruffian like him. Now that I am flying solo, I feel the same freedom as the eagle I portrayed in "Rocky Mountain Hi-Hat." It is time for me to pursue that grand craft I have long admired and studied as a child -- the art that I would wake up early, and stay up late, to see splashed across the canvas by modern masters.
On 14 March, Mark Angelosetti will not look across the ring to find the familiarly macho Marchie Archie. For the first time ever, at "I'll Be A Mummy's Uncle," he will meet...Mixed Martial Archie.
