Epitaph

Age is not a number - it is the piercing pain at the junction of your C4 and C5 when you wake up every morning.

The Perfect Weekend

The circle completes itself. After three Ashes defeats, 47 all out and 11/25/2014, there is finally reason to rejoice. 

Confessions of Sins, Sharpening of Knives

There's little doubt in my mind now that making relationships work is a function of patience, maturity and a little bit of judgement. Then, of course, there's the little issue of timing - timing that surreptitiously but unerringly tugs away at the things you need the most, timing that serves as a persistent, mocking reminder for all those times when you allowed yourself to be filled with optimism thinking of an indeterminate future, timing that claws away furiously at everything you've constructed and shreds it down to a set of characterless, once-bloody stumps.

So please know that if anyone, however genuinely, supremely and indisputably wonderful they might be, starts talking as if their personal experience with relationships validates any notion of sincerity, fidelity, responsibility and love conquering all, I will want to take the conversation off the record and share with them an open secret, spoken freely on the streets but never even whispered in the repulsively smug corridors of self-congratulatory people in their late 20s who suddenly find themselves tenderly in love - that it's a big world out there and sometimes, despite all your best efforts, despite however much you honestly fulfill virtually everything another person asks of you, events get out of your control and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, except pick yourself up, go to the back of the line and hope - because it's nothing more than that - hope that, somehow, it'll be your time at some point in the same indeterminate future that you've spent the last several years preparing for.     

You can't eat this soup standing up, your knees buckle

El Generico beats Pac with an Olé Kick to round out the best wrestling show of the year...on a WWE developmental pay-per-view.

Those last three words are incredible enough in and of themselves but the talent on show, top to bottom, was so frighteningly good that it was unreal. This is mid-90s ECW, this is mid-noughties SmackDown Six, this is late-noughties ROH, this is every rogue shock wrestling sub-culture there has ever been, and it's happening all over again.

I can't believe we've been slamming WWE Creative and bemoaning the lack of long-term storyline development and the lost ability to create true superstars. The future has been under our noses this whole time. It's taken me a week since NXT R-Evolution to write this and trust me when I tell you, I've been gasping for air this whole time.    

Middle of Centre

"It's not so much what you say to her, Eashan", she said, "what really makes me happy is what you say about her instead."

I've finally figured out that the stinging, tired eyes and the arm that ceaselessly spits out vile spurts of pain are no more than excuses. The truth is, I've been running on empty for a really long time without appreciating it. I still don't have answers, though, and that's just a terrible feeling after a day that made my heart feel so complete and brought so much of the finality I had quietly been looking for. There's another bag of rocks that's been strapped to my back and I'd gladly take it on if I could just get that one chance to lay all the bags down for a little while and start over. I know what's likely to happen - two short weeks will pass, things will inevitably move on and I'll regret that I didn't quite feel that one moment of complete tranquility that could've made these rocks so much easier to carry. 

It's been gnawing at me in an incoherent, incomplete sense for several hours now but if there's one question I'd like to ask myself from two weeks in the future, it would simply be, If I know I have so much more to give of myself, why do I feel so utterly hollow inside?