It was late at night or early in the morning depending on who you are or what you call it
A friend of mine has recently escorted his 8-year old brother to wrestling at the downtown arena. He recounts his night to me, explaining the dynamics of the WWE in small detail. “We show up, right? And it’s totally the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life,” he tells me, “—little kids all over the place, screaming their heads off. This goes on for about two hours,” he continues, “and then there’s an intermission. So while my brother’s off getting some memorabilia, I decide to get a beer.” I listen intently, waiting for the build up. I know from prior experiences with this particular individual that this story is about to get really good. While the addition of alcohol at what is ostensibly a children's event might imply some form of complexity, it also adds the essential compent of debauchery, which seems essential to storytelling, at least as far as I'm concerned. “The next thing you know,” he says, “I’m getting totally into it; you know, cheering for my little brother’s sake. And all of the sudden fucking Sandman appears next to me in the crowd, and the spotlight is on me, and I’m on TV!” I try to imagine my friend in this scenario, which is not a hard illusion to maintain, all jazzed up as some psychotic wrestler makes his way toward the main stage, with enough pause and proximity for my friend to be captured in the most spectacular ephemera I could ever hope for in televised sports. “Did you get to see it on TV?” I want to know. “No,” he tells me, “I hope no one else did, either; that shit’s embarrassing.” Yeah, I say. I guess it kind of sounds that way.

A night out, in Albany, New York. Oh, Albany, I want to shout out, even your name sounds horrible, the syllables obtuse and bloated. But it’s been years now hurtling insults at one another and I’ve promised to stop, now. You catch yourself once in a while, a small quip in the direction of invective. What can you do? It is another night, the same as every other night. And we are drinking. When the night is over all I want to do is walk around in the desolate nightscape, hurtle obscenities that will bounce off the architecture and into the stone walls. If I hang out long enough, someone will give me an ass beating that will send me into the next stratosphere, I imagine, steal the last fifty cents in my pocket. Something. I know one girl in Albany who was robbed by method of tickle torture (sic), the assailants applying the method of vigorous tickling before running off with her purse. That sounds pretty good. It never happens to me but oh, well.