IT’S A NEW YEAR! Eleven months to go before the crushing inevitability of the 2020 Election.
Trump will take on Democrat TBD if he doesn’t stroke out or get impeached before then. In Kentucky, we have incumbent Senator and Majority Leader Fuckface (R) running for a seventh term.
The most likely winner of the Democratic primary as of right now is retired Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath who looks like she coaches women’s basketball.
McGrath has a $9 million dollar war chest. She will need every bit of it to compete with Fuckface this year. She also has VALUABLE HOLLYWOOD ENDORSEMENTS.
Thanks, Grace. Love your show. McGrath’s platform consists of “woman fighter pilot/not Mitch McConnell” which could won’t work.
There are some other candidates: Mike Broihier and Steven Cox. Wait. . . Steven didn’t make the cutoff for entering into the primary. I asked him what happened.
At least he got a blue Twitter checkmark out of it. So he’s got that going for him.
So it’s Amy McGrath and everyone else. . . except a promising contender has entered the race. State Rep. Charles Booker put his hat in the ring last week.
Booker said he won’t be accepting money from a super PAC because of his “conviction” that big money ostracizes regular people from the political process.
“The majority of us in Kentucky are broke,” he said.
He believes he has a more powerful message for the time than McGrath does — on guns, for instance, Booker said he will keep a mandate to both respect the right to bear arms as protected in the Constitution and a moral obligation to keep Kentucky families safe.
Booker said what excites him most is the response from voters who trust him to advance the struggle of everyday Kentuckians. Without naming names, in one moment of candor over the phone, Booker said he was perplexed by leaders who say they want to beat Trump, but are unable to engage in the complex range of the political left’s thoughts, opinions, and anxieties. . .
Booker is pushing a progressive platform (Green New Deal, Medicare For All) as non-partisan solutions for Kentuckians. It’s risky but is it any riskier than McGrath’s pro-Trump Democrat gambit?
McGrath and Booker are both threatening enough to McConnell that whenever I type their names in Google search, I get these ads at the top.
Here I am. I’m in my car, in the driver’s seat. My sunglasses are on.
found online, creator unknown
This is my profile picture. This is my Facebook and Twitter picture. Friends, family, strangers, especially the people on Hillary Clinton’s Facebook page. This is the face they see when they read my words. This is the image they have of me when my WORDS OF TRUTH are searing into their brain.
I have many pictures of myself in this car with my sunglasses on. This is the best one.
I’m in control of my car when I drive my car. I’m in the driver’s seat, and no one can tell me what to do unless I’m at a checkpoint or whatever. It’s annoying to have to pull out my license but hey if you’re not doing anything wrong, you won’t get caught, right?
I leave work and go home to my hot wife while all these neo-marxists and liberals stay depressed because they have no purpose in life. I’ve learned a lot in the last few year because I’ve been reading. With no ledge because power and with power comes control. I am in control of my situation. It helps to be have knowledge when you discuss things online because when you do that you know people are going to attack. They’re not in control. They’re not happy. They don’t even post inspirational quotes and Bible versus on their Facebook pages! Because they don’t have any spiritual nature. They have no purpose and they’re have no control.
I sometimes wonder if they have a car to drive lol!
I got into an argument with my cousin over the holidays. He’s a lefty liberal so you have to take what he says with a grain of salt but he said that my car selfie is about insecurity. I asked him what he was talking about. He said that it was all about the illusion of control. Because the car is the only situation in my life where I feel like I’m truly in control. I’m not in control at work or home. I’m just another rat in the race. He said to me, “Now that Trump’s in office, do you feel like you won the war on Christmas?” And I told him HELL NO! IT’S A WAR YOU GOTTA KEEP FIGHTING! People will the forget the meaning of it if you let them.
So even though I have the President I want and the economy’s doing really well and I get to have sex with my hot wife (when she wants lol), I’m not really in control on anything. I’m not actually winning. I’m not really happy after all.
He had the nerve to say to say all that to me. In my house. During the holidays. I got him a good pair of sunglasses for Christmas and this is how he replays me! It took all my strength not to just take them back.
That’s what control is. If he understood that, he wouldn’t have said all that about me to me.
I hired someone to edit this for me. He’s correcting the spelling mistakes and putting all the punctuation in all the right places. I will lock at it later and hope for the best. I don’t see any red lines underneath any words so I assume he did it properly. I found him on fiverr. He assures me that fiverr will have that red underline on it no matter what we do. You won’t see it. He used to work at a newspaper.
I got a call Saturday morning, December 21st around 9:36 am. My mother called to tell me that her mother, my grandmother, had passed away. She was eighty-one.
Usually, we’d have a nice little Christmas celebration. My mother would go get Granny from the Roosevelt House so she could enjoy a rare day out of the house and see her two daughters, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren (now a fifth on the way who will miss out).
I last saw her for Thanksgiving. She didn’t look like she had less than a month to go, although it was clear she wasn’t doing well. Arthritis took over her body, even her jaw and eyes. I cannot imagine the pain she must have been in that final year. She had a brand new scooter that probably had less than a mile on it.
My grandmother was a sweet lady who loved her family and her cat. She had a warm smile and was great to have a chat with. Talking was painful and the sound of her voice changed due to the arthritis. Granny would throw so many treats on the floor, the cat got up to twenty-three pounds at one point. I have Granny’s old flip phone as a hand-me-down and it still has a bunch of photos she took of the cat. She took photos of the TV while she watched the Country Music Awards. Sometimes she hit the button when she didn’t mean to and there’s accidental pictures of nothing. I kept them them all.
We had to put the cat down Thursday because it couldn’t keep food down any longer. By then, the poor thing was three pounds. The cat Thursday, Granny’s funeral a week later. We’re going to plant some of Granny’s funeral home tulips where we buried the cat. Granny is being cremated, and in my opinion we should put the ashes with the cat. We’re taking them to her parents’ burial plot next month. That works.
I had a sinking feeling she wouldn’t make it to Christmas 2020, but I didn’t expect her to miss this one. So if you think the time you have with someone is limited, make it meaningful if only for your own peace of mind. You don’t want that regret to work on your mind. Get as much as you can out of this dumb life, because you have no control over how much suffering you have to endure and you have no idea when it will be over.
And there you have it: that is my last blog of the decade. I didn’t want to end on such a down note but sometimes that’s how it shakes out. December 21 is the first day of the winter solstice. As such, it is the shortest day of the year and from there the days get longer. You could look at that as a bad thing, but I don’t. Each day becomes longer than the last, as if the sun is regaining its’ strength.
I started making music when I was nineteen years old. For the first few years, it wasn’t very good. I have most of my recorded output backed up on my Bandcamp where you can listen to some of it and download it.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to give myself a Rolling Stone-type handjob and pick nine songs throughout my career that are on my Bandcamp.
A Boy Named Nostalgia (Mr. Neutron: Scrapheap, 1999)
This was the first full-length record I ever made. It was supposed to be a concept album. I don’t remember what the concept was. This was the one decent song on the whole album. I recorded the entire album on a Casio keyboard. This album costs $7 as a disincentive to buy it. Unless you really want it.
Sulpher (Mr. Neutron: Sulpher Promo EP, 2000)
Sulpher was an unfinished album, also played on a Casio keyboard. I recorded a four-track promo EP that I sent out to talent bookers, venues and DJ’s. This would have been the title track. The chorus and music was inspired by Jimmy Buffett’s “Son Of A Son Of A Sailor”, a song I have never listened to. The EP costs $3. Whatever.
Holland (Kentucky Prophet: Brain Rap, 2005)
This 2005 EP was recorded when I still lived in Los Angeles. The Beach Boys-esque melody and lyrics were written years earlier but fit perfectly with the east coast groove. I had new collaborators and released the EP when I returned to Kentucky. Brain Rap costs $7 but it’s worth paying for and it has a bonus remix.
Valet Parking At The Player’s Ball (Kentucky Prophet: Brain Rap, 2005)
This song and “Holland” are the two Brain Rap songs that I played the most live and this one shows the comedy element the deepest. It’s a funny song about about a parking lot employee passing judgement and taking revenge on the richie-riches whose cars he parks.
I Sell Drugs To Celebrities (Kentucky Prophet, Beyond The Fringe, 2007)
A trip to Brooklyn resulted in Beyond The Fringe. This was the first full track, a creative use of alliteration while making fun of celebrity culture and mixing in a bit of conspiracy theory at the end. Great use of Donovan sample, too. This album costs $7 but it’s worth it.
Full Of It (Kentucky Prophet, Beyond The Fringe, 2007)
Condensed from the full title, the never-performed “Everybody’s Full Of It (So Are We)” is sung rather than rapped and features scratching from co-producer DJ Cappel. It’s somber tone addresses pride going before the fall, and applying that to hip-hop (at least circa mid-2000s).
Mountain Music (Mike Farmer, Greenville 2013, 2019)
Recorded in a Kentucky church and unreleased for years, Greenville 2013 is a deeply emotional work and “Mountain Music” is the most personal, emotional song about playing bluegrass music at a funeral. Greenville 2013 is available for download. You can pay what you wish.
Normal Love (Mike Farmer, Dolphin, 2019)
The Dolphin album was recorded in 2011 but unreleased officially until 2019. Normal Love goes back even further, written in the early ’00s. This piano ballad has a Beach Boys influence but by Dennis Wilson instead of Brian. Dolphin is available via pay-what-you-wish download. The title is irrelevant to the content.
Jesus Without Mary (Mike Farmer, single, 2019)
This standalone single was the first new original music I released since the breakup of my band Technology Vs. Horse. I wanted to release it in time for the holidays of 2018 but I couldn’t finish it in time so it wasn’t released until a few months later. It’s as close to a Christmas song as I’ll ever do but it’s also as personal as I’ll ever get. It’s as personal as “Mountain Music”. This download is pay-what-you-wish.
Matt Bevin is no longer the governor of Kentucky, but his decisions continued to send shock waves through the state’s legal system this week after he issued pardons for hundreds of people, some of whom committed violent offenses.
Bevin issued 428 pardons since his defeat to Democrat Andy Beshear in a close election in November, the Louisville Courier Journal reported. His list includes a man convicted of reckless homicide, a convicted child rapist, a man who murdered his parents at age 16 and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash after giving birth in a flea market outhouse.
He also pardoned Dayton Jones, who was convicted in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy at a party, Kentucky New Era reported.
It is not unusual for governors to issue pardons as they leave office, but Bevin’s actions boggled some of the state’s attorneys, who questioned his judgment.
Jeremy Pryor was a friend I made when I moved to Bowling Green in 1998. In November 2014, Jeremy was killed by drunk driver Michael Andrew Hardy. In 2016, Drew Hardy was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Matt Bevin pardoned Drew Hardy and gave him a conditional release on December 9, 2019.
I did not know Charles Westerfield, but I knew Irvin Edge’s family. They were from my hometown of Fordsville, where I went to school with Irvin’s daughter. In 1993, Irvin Edge was convicted of the murder of Westerfield, his business partner. Edge was also convicted of solicitation to murder for hiring a hit man to kill Westerfield. The Daily Kos reports that in 2004, Edge was ordered by the Kentucky State Parole Board to serve out the entirety of his life sentence. Bevin paroled him last week.
If you believe, as Bevin says in his pardon of Hardy “that society, as a whole, or the memory of Jeremy Pryor more specifically, will be best served by the continued incarceration of Mr. Hardy“, you must also believe regardless of circumstance that every murderer should be released from prison. Prison is existentially pointless if you’re responsible for another person’s death, by Bevin’s tortured logic. As far as Jeremy Pryor’s memory is concerned, let his family and friends handle that.
Michael Andrew Hardy was a drunk driver who killed Jeremy Pryor. Irvin Edge hired a hit man to kill Charles Westerfield. If a parole board determines that a killer like Edge should live out the rest of his life in prison, then maybe the governor shouldn’t override that. There is a short window to hold people accountable for their actions. Matt Bevin gave the Pryor and Westerfield families, and many more across this state, one last kick in the teeth on the way out the door.
I think I’ve gotten to the core of my problems with Kanye West: He’s a bad representative for people with bipolar disorder. He doesn’t take medicine. Because of his celebrity, he automatically gains credibility he hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve.
Who knows why he doesn’t take medicine? Maybe he thinks it prevents him from being creative. Maybe he’s afraid medicine will turn him into a zombie and change his brain chemistry forever. Maybe he thinks what he’s doing is working for him and he wants to keep it that way.
Medicine can change the chemistry in your brain. So does television, alcohol, drugs, gambling, food and the little phones we carry everywhere and look into all the time. Those change our brains way worse than a pill every day. Medicine is designed to do that. Medicine won’t halt someone’s creativity anymore than drugs will enhance it. And that thing that’s working so well will eventually stop. Then what?
Many people give up treatment because they tried medicine one time and didn’t like how it made them feel or had a bad reaction. It’s not an exact science. People respond differently to medications.
Mental illness is a chemical disorder in the brain and needs to be treated as best as possible. It’s not just “I’m sad”. You wouldn’t tell a schizophrenic to go out for some exercise and fresh air to fix it. They have a chemical imbalance in the brain. Depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder are different types of chemical imbalances and they all get worse without some sort of treatment.
There is no “happy pill”. If you have personal issues you’re trying to work through, therapy helps. As added support, you can also talk to friends and family, online help groups and spend time in faith if you have one. But at the very core, you are treating a chemical imbalance in your brain and that requires something beyond friends, family, faith and message boards.
Some people think they can self-medicate. I’ve heard multiple people tell me that’s how they deal with depression et al. I wish they had done a cost based analysis on monthly weed intake vs. insurance premiums. Smoking pot will only make you grouchy in the long run because you become dependent on it.
Unfortunately, a major source of frustration comes from navigating the murky swamp of private insurance which only makes it harder to obtain quality health care. Considering the state of USA, 2019 and the stress it puts on people, it is no surprise that we have a mental health crisis in this country. I support Medicare for all because I think everyone deserves access to important health care, including dental and eye care.
(Unfun fact: did you know you can get arthritis in the eyes? My grandmother has it.)
We seemingly only talk about our country’s mental health problem when there’s a mass shooting and yet we don’t address the millions who are in need of improved care. Private insurance’s high premiums and deductibles should not be a financial moat preventing us from self-preservation and good health. It is long past time to at least attempt a national health model based on the rest of the civilized world.
I took way too much offense at Kanye. However, it is still idiotic to rap over a sample that has the vocal in it even if the vocal is sped up a bit. We have to have some standards.
Here’s my version of that rather tired Dave Chappelle trans humor that everybody got upset about a while back. I don’t mean to offend, so if it does I apologize in advance:
“If I could transition to anything I’d transition to. . . Friday, 12:45 am. Technically it is Saturday morning but when you left the house it was still Friday night. That’s what I’m going for here because I want to be fun more than anything else.
A lot of things are going on at 12:45 am Friday night. Because it’s Friday night, people get paid and have a little money to spend. If you’re young and you feel like going out, you do that because why waste a perfectly good Friday night? TONI-AI-IIIGHT! WE ARE YOUNG! And 12:45 am is a good time of night because the bar won’t close for at least an hour.
People are having a good time at 12:45 am. Some of them are exchanging phone numbers, saying they’ll text each other. Maybe they’ll make a date but it doesn’t go anywhere, or it’s a one-time hookup, or maybe it goes somewhere and leads to another date, then a third. . . then years later you’re married with a house, two kids and a dog. Or probably the girl gives you the number of a chinese buffet place just to get you off her back.
At 12:45 am, the night is turning on a dime. Two girls are having a catfight outside a club. Somebody catches it on their phone. It gets uploaded to Twitter and a half-million people see it because the tweet says “Wait for the end”. At 12:45 am, the band is playing and people are dancing. Who am I kidding? The DJ is playing, pushing buttons or whatever. People are drinking and laughing but some of them are vomiting. They’re fighting and/or getting arrested, developing and/or enhancing their criminal records. Somebody has gotten drunk, convinced himself love isn’t real and is getting a tattoo: on one arm it says “LOVE”, on the other arm it says “EVOL”.
In big cities and small towns, people aren’t ready to go home yet. 12:45 am feels just right. If there’s a master plan to the nightlife, it’s beyond our comprehension
I would transcend the physical realm altogether and become a moment in time. 12:46 am comes and I’d be a memory. A snapshot, insignificant to many, remembered by some and beloved by others. All for their own unique reasons. This is fate. We’re told to “live in the moment”. Let’s be the moment.
Granted, I don’t feel like Friday night 12:45 am trapped in the body of a forty-one year-old man, but I can dream.”
I’ll be forty-two in March, and I like it (I like it). I’d like to live to be eighty-four. If I’m lucky enough to get that far, I hope the second half of my life will be much better than the first half.
I’ve been more successful than I could ever hope for and yet I’m still not satisfied. Once you’ve done things you set out to do, you want to do them again. Then you want to do more. You want to succeed on your own terms. You want to be Sinatra and do it your way. That would be majestic.
“I feel like he took it way more seriously than the audience.”
Someone in the Louisville music scene said that about me back when I still did comedy rap. He said it to my friend, and probably in confidence too. Yet I couldn’t help but take it to mean that no matter how hard I tried, I would still be a joke. Watch out, everybody. Here he comes. Poor guy. He doesn’t know.
GAHHH WHY WOULD MY FRIEND TELL ME THAT? THERE’S PLENTY OF TALKIN’ STUPID SHIT THAT WE DON’T SHARE WITH EACH OTHER! BECAUSE WE HAVE FILTERS! WE AVOID FULL TRANSPARENCY BECAUSE WE DON’T WANT TO HURT EACH OTHER’S FEELINGS! WHO DOES THIS?
But was he right? Did I take it seriously? Too seriously? Why would he say that? Because I made comedy music?
He probably forgot about as soon as he said it. What does that say about me? Get over yourself, Mike.
It wouldn’t have hurt so long if he weren’t more successful than me. He did things I hadn’t done and never will.
I’m a dope from Ohio County. Someone like me should be on American Idol for twenty seconds doing that song from RENT while the judges cringe. “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. . .”
Any success I’ve ever had is the result of God’s kindness. I was a Wesley Willisdisciple who listened to the Beach Boys. Then I did comedy rap. I was in a prog band for thirteen years. I never fit in and I’m not cool. If I wanted to make it, I’ve done all it wrong.
I toured the US and Canada. I took Greyhounds between cities and used a debit card but I did it. I’m amazed that I pulled that off. When I was on that show on Comedy Central, I played my comedy music in a segment. I recorded a lot of songs I wrote with the help ofpeople who believed in me. I take it seriously because it’s my life’s work. So what if a big chunk of it sucked?
If anything, considering what I did. . . maybe it’s everybody else who took themselves seriously. Not saying I didn’t but in a different way.
Now that I think about it, I was mad about that way too long. You got to let old wounds heal. Now I’m just hurt my friend (?) told me that. I don’t need to know when people are talking about me, especially something like that. What the fuck? I’ve been an outsider my whole life. I don’t need to be reminded.
I finally listened to Kanye West’s new album event. I think it’s called Not Only Is The Emperor Not Wearing Any Clothes, The Emperor Is Not Even An Emperor. Let me get my bias out of the way. Kanye West is a fraud. He has been a fraud his entire career. The promotion of Kanye West is one of the great snowjobs of post-2000 music. At least Taylor Swift never sold $120 plain white t-shirts.
Taylor Swift, who also sucks, is nowhere near the culture vulture that Kanye West is. “Bound 2” from Yeezus sounds like a bunch of browser tabs with audio playing at the same time and the lyrics are the wrong kind of dumb (“I wanna fuck you hard on the sink/after that, fix you something to drink/Step back, can’t get spunk on the mink). He made a terrible video for it with his fame-whore wife on a motorcycle that even she seemed to be embarrassed to be in. His main influence while making that album was a fucking lamp.
The choir sound nice on the the new album’s first song, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Oh, it’s an intro? How was I supposed to know? All the songs are so short. The album is twenty-seven minutes long.
“On God” is pretty good. “God Is” proves he’s finally using Autotune as it was originally intended instead of the weird way that he did on 808s and Heartbreaks that T-Pain made an entire career out of. Or maybe Kanye isn’t using Autotune and that’s his real voice. Somebody should ask him, especially if they don’t mind never talking to him again. “Closed On Sunday” is embarrassing. The main problem with “Water” is Kanye being on it. Kenny G is on this album, because The Lord commanded it.
In 1979, Bob Dylan made his first of three Christian albums. Bob Dylan wanted to tell everyone about Jesus because he’d been a Christian for about twenty minutes. Kanye is not a new convert. After all, he made “Jesus Walks” but he also sang “If I fuck this model and if she bleached her asshole and I get bleach on my t-shirt, I’ma feel like an asshole”. So fuck this guy. I can’t help it. I hate him.
Maybe he felt like an asshole because he paid $120 for that shirt.
Nobody’s asking him to pull a Cat Stevens and go away for 25 years I am. but who wants to hear a guy of newfound faith preach about something he just learned? I mentioned Bob Dylan because every new convert does this and IT IS IRRITATING. We already have Christian music, made by people who won’t ditch it as soon as it stops being profitable. . . or as soon as they start taking their meds again. Whichever comes first.
It will be easier for Kim Kardashian to pass through the eye of a needle than it will be for Kanye West to get into Heaven. How dare this rich prick lecture anybody about Christ? This album is Hell. The value system behind it is Hell. Kanye’s enduring fame is Hell. Jesus isn’t dead, he just smells bad.
There’s one and two halves of a good song on this album and those two halves are on different tracks. Anyone who says it’s better than that is a liar.
It’s real early morning No-one is awake I’m back at my cliff Still throwing things off I listen to the sounds they make On their way down I follow with my eyes ’til they crash
When you struggle with depression long enough, you come to realize that it is a daily struggle. No matter how well you function with it, the inevitable thrust of depression is to recover the spark that makes you want to experience the fullness of life. If you’ve been there you know that the spark is fleeting. Such is the beast: the fear that cloaks your mind and the paranoia that finds you while your walk down the sidewalk minding your own.
(Suggested listening: “Hyperballad” by Björk, “The Spark of Life” by Todd Rundgren)
Some days you win, and others you don’t. Nevertheless, you try to get up and do it all over again or else you end up waving a white flag in your room or on your couch or from the safety of any place where you’re free from the world outside that goes on without you. You will do anything to protect what little you have, not realizing that your coping mechanism is getting you nowhere. Not seeing that you need to try something different to maybe get a better result. Even a bad step can be a step forward if you think of it that way.
Misao understands this all too well. The current Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling (TJPW) star is currently on an upswing, in the middle of a long win streak and one-half of her league’s tag team champions. But a few years ago, she was one of those people struggling to function. . . a virtual recluse, a self-described “shut-in”, saved and redeemed by the power of pro wrestling. She found the spark that gave her life meaning.
When one of her friends and fellow wrestlers retired, she led the resistance against it. Friendship.
I started watching TJPW last year. It’s an Japanese women’s subsidiary of Dramatic Dream Team (DDT), one of my favorite leagues. It’s silly fun and the performers are endearing and entertaining. I’ve previously written about former idol and cult TJPW wrestling star Maki Itoh.
Maki Itoh is entertaining in her petulant madness but Misao is more compelling because of her life story. While Maki came to TJPW out of idol culture, Misao came to TJPW out of. . . her shell. In 2018, she wrote a four-part blog post about living with her family as a shut-in, staying in her room all day, subsisting on a bag of mini chocolate cream puffs from 7-11 simply because it had the necessary amount of daily calories and because it required minimal amount of chewing. She lived without the spark of life, which is to say barely living at all.
Her mother took her to a local festival where she saw wrestlers fighting in the street. They were having a falls-count-anywhere match and it amazed her. Chaos reigned and the men fought everywhere. A man in a shark mask bit his opponents. Jun Kasai, the hardcore wrestler and self-proclaimed “Crazy Monkey”, jumped off the top of a ladder and crashed for the victory. All of this excited Misao. She then realized that it excited her. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she was excited about anything. It made her want to be a pro wrestler even though she didn’t understand it. She found the spark of life, a reason to get up in the morning.
In 2015, she began her professional wrestler career in earnest at TJPW as the green-clad masked superhero Hyper Misao. She wore a cape at all times and flew at opponents saying “I Am A Hero”. By 2018, she had a match with “Crazy Monkey” Jun Kasai, the man she had seen wrestling at that street festival years before.
The match came with a special stipulation that nobody could go for a pinfall until they finished a bag of mini chocolate cream puffs, the only food that Misao lived on when she still was a recluse.
Kasai defeated her after a wild match by splashing off the top of a giant ladder (naturally) but that was unimportant. Hyper Misao won a place in fans’ hearts by sharing her story and reaffirming why fans watch wrestling: because when it’s good, it makes us feel something and takes us out of ourselves. Just like any other entertainment at its’ best. Wrestling can be fulfilling, redemptive and celebratory.
Hyper Misao vs. Jun Kasai
The first time I tried to write about Misao, I wrote a lengthy and detailed bio covering her origins and storylines. Maybe that’s interesting but not as much as trying to figure out why people still watch wrestling when there’s so much of it available to get burned out on. Moments like Hyper Misao’s match with Jun Kasai keep me watching. It wasn’t a technical classic or an artistic masterpiece but it didn’t matter when I watched it live or re-watched it much later.
I want to feel something when I watch wrestling, both for the people in the ring and for myself. By telling us her story, she gave us more than temporary amusement. She gave us something of herself. She was willing to be vulnerable in a way few artists are. It was an act of giving, pure without self-aggrandizement or self-gratification. It was touching and inspiring and she did it in the forum of pro wrestling where damn near nothing is like that. Almost nothing in entertainment is like that, full stop.
In February, Misao turned heel by renouncing her superhero persona. Frustrated with constantly losing, she took off her mask in the center of the ring and cut it to pieces with a pair of scissors. To emphasize her point, she spiked the scissors into the ring canvas, before aligning herself with NEO Bi-Ishiki Gun leader Sakisama and walking off into the cold February night. It was a symbolically destructive act, killing off the old to make a new start. Misao stared into her past accomplishments and saw an abyss.
Misao: Sakisama, teach me your ways.
Sakisama: HUH? You ready to show me how determined you are?
Misao (removes and cuts up her mask): I have just let go of everything I cared for.
When she returned to TJPW as a member of NEO Bi-Ishiki Gun, Misao (no longer Hyper) returned as Sakisama’s imperial guard. Her gear was a gothic black variation of her past life of a superhero. She no longer flies through the air proclaiming “I Am A Hero”. More importantly, she wrestles without a mask. Sad that such a face that beamed so brightly with joy under a mask would be so expressionless now.
On November 3rd, Misao and Sakisama will defend their tag titles on one of DDT’s biggest shows of the year, DDT Ultimate Party 2019! in one of the prominent matches on the card. Misao has come a long way from being that girl who hid in her room all day living on chocolate snacks from the convenience store. Fans and fellow TJPW wrestlers still miss the fun-loving, crowd-pleasing wacky Hyper hero, including her Ultimate Party! opponent Rika Tatsumi. She among others have tried time and time again to bring that side of Misao out but failed miserably.
A champion, but at what cost?
Wrestling is built on moments, as is life. Misao had that moment of clarity when wrestling helped her rescue herself from reclusion. She had another one when destroying the old Hyper hero persona (admittedly, her in-ring ability has improved greatly since then). She will have more in her career and life.
“No, no, no, no. . . a little more humanity, please.” – Todd Rundgren
courtesy Twitter @misao_tjp
When she started, she wanted to be the superhero of TJPW. Just by getting in that ring, she did something far more heroic. By turning away from her Hyper past, she turned away from that heroic act, practically denying it. It’s cold and it’s cruel but it feels true: there is still sorrow and light inside of us that we struggle to reconcile and that is the nature of the beast that we know as depression. We all want to be something other than what we are. If we change, we yearn to forget the past, to deny it. To deny how it felt to be so low.
There’s a beautiful view from the top of the mountain. Every morning I walk towards the edge. (photo courtesy @oystersearrings on Twitter)
Don’t lose hope for yourself. We’re all capable of having moments, breakthroughs, epiphanies. So much good is possible in this life. Joy, love and happiness is possible in a world that seems inhospitable to such concepts.
UPDATE: Misao was pinned at DDT Ultimate Party! 2019, ending her winning streak and losing the tag team titles in the process. Such is the nature of wrestling, as the story continues. The titles and winning streak were the underpinning of her confidence. It remains to be seen what will happen now they have been taken from her.
(Reference information and photographs were used courtesy DDT English translation fan account @ddtpro_eng on twitter and DDT WordPress fansite which keeps up with DDT and all its’ subsidiary promotions including TJPW. Many thanks.)
