Fill your chalice with the blood of our saviour,
Eat the unleavened pita bread that is haunted by the ghost of a two thousand year old carpenter.
This meal is not meant to fill up your body.
It is food for the soul.
Sourdough bread would satiate both these voids, but that requires yeast.
And yeast comes from the devil.
Hello and welcome to my blog.
If this is your first one, I suggest you go back and read some earlier stuff. Don’t start with this one. You don’t necessarily have to go back to the start, but you need to get the flavour of it.
It won’t make sense to you otherwise. Is that OK?
Please fuck off.
For those who are hanging around.
This new round of the Cheeky Chest Wrestler feels a bit more ominous doesn’t it.
The first lockdown was accepted as a bit of a challenge. Like many others, I lost my job and career, but we were still not pissed off about the actions taken by the government.
This one has me a bit pissed off and just a teeny bit defiant. I do however adhere to the rules, but more like a pissed off child or someone doing a task under protest.
Yesterday I took my kid driving and we popped into the supermarket. I don’t do supermarkets at the best of times. I carry with me a bit of anxiety when I go to malls or supermarkets anyway. I’m not sure why. I’ve always had that.
It is particularly bad when we are visiting these places without any particular plan involved. My wife never takes me along to these places.
But yesterday I felt for the first time that my anxiety was completely justified. I was worried about touching food or getting too close to people. I bet everyone was feeling this also and it made me feel pretty normal.
Except for the fact that I was black man wearing a face mask around cash registers. I often feel that I am being watched when I wear face coverings around people. Even while wearing a helmet. I get really self conscious in these moments, and it is something I’ve always struggled with since I had that incident when I was arrested as a youth for no fucking reason. I was just a black guy in a white neighbourhood.
Anyway.
So these existential thoughts got me thinking about how people will view the twenty tens in the future seeing that it’s gone now.
What is the Zeitgeist of our time?
Apologies for the word ‘Zeitgeist’, I can hear your eyes rolling. But zeitgeist a good word.
I believe it comes from Germany and it means ‘Ghost of the time’ or ‘Spirit of the time’. It is a word that describes a whole sentence and I use it quite often to save time.
So instead of saying “Back in the 80’s, you know how things were…” you could just “The zeitgeist of the 80’s”. It’s a lovely word.
The beautiful thing about working out a zeitgeist, is that it is impossible to do while you are still living in that era.
I don’t know the 70’s because I was born in 79, but I can sort of get the Zeitgeist from the music and the political situations from that time.
I remember the late eighties vaguely because I will have been a young kid.
I basically grew up in the 90’s and it’s where I get most of my best memories from. The zeitgeist of that time would have been the emergence of gangster rap and alternative rock. We saw the end of the Cold War and campaigns to end homosexuality because of Freddie Mercury.
Fucking hell, I remember bumper stickers and badges that had the slogan “Don’t bend for a friend,” and an outline of two fellas having a ride. That shit was hilarious.
The 2000’s were most definitely 9/11.
That changed the whole world forever. Especially around racism and xenophobia. Now everyone was guilty until proven innocent. I flew to New Zealand in the 2000’s, and it was one of the uncomfortable things I had to do.
Coronavirus is this generation 9/11 and I know that this will be a massive part of our current Zeitgeist in the future.
Ok yes I have an idea on what to blog about now, but bureaucracy first.
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Ok, before I lose this theory.
When I was growing up, I used to love watching professional wrestling. It was called the WWF back then.
My favourite wrestler was a member of the Hart Foundation called Bret “The Hitman” Hart. He and his brother Owen were my favourite. They made such an impact on my life that my pen name for online work is Bret Owens.
I always knew that wrestling was not real. The way they would strategically position themselves for the moves and the absolute absurdity with which they interviewed.
No doubt that professional wrestlers are amazing athletes, but they are also amazing actors. They hold their characters all the way through and will even interview outside of the shows as their character.
Some of the more insane characters I remember are people like Hulk Hogan. He was this overly American good guy that got power off feeding from the crowd. The cheers from the crowd gave him immunity to any attack.
Sergeant Slaughter was this parody of an Army Drill Sergeant. Absolutely ridiculous.
Ultimate Warrior was this ethnic warrior who wore colorful face paint and underpants. I just googled him now and he is just some cunt called Jim from Seattle.
The Undertaker, Mister Perfect, Jake the Snake. Fucking loads of these ridiculous characters.
This is how the WWF works.
Professional Wrestling, although it is acting, is not theatre.
In theatre we have this thing called the fourth wall. You have the back wall, the side walls and then an invisible wall that separated the audience from the actors on stage. A movie uses the same concept. The actors don’t communicate with the audience, unless it’s one of those weird plays that rely on participatory art. I speak about participatory art on a previous blog.
Some movies back in the 80’s did this. Ferris Bueller springs to mind. In that movie, the protagonist addresses the audience in a few scenes.
In wrestling there is no fourth wall. Audience engagement is a massive to the stories and you have grown fucking men screaming at other men who are boxing the heads off each other in underpants. And they know it’s fake, but nobody wants to be the one to call it out.
This practice is called kayfabe.
Kayfabe is this thing where nobody wants to call out any of the bullshit as they do not want to be the ones to blow the secret and then be excluded from the group. Willful ignorance in other words.
The 2010’s and Trump Zeitgeist is kayfabe.
From the start of his inauguration he was openly lying about everything, and almost all his supporters pretended to believe him. There are loads of examples of his people justifying his lies, and it was rather hilarious at the start, but what got me worried was something that happened about a year into his presidency.
Trump was talking some shit and lying as he does and one of his trusted advisers said something that I did not understand and I don’t think I ever will. It really made the ground beneath my feet crumble to bits.
When pushed with facts, she confidently suggested that Trump and his administration have alternative facts.
This comment does not seem that important, but by saying something like this on the platform that she has, meant that what we see, touch, hear, taste and smell, does not have any relevance anymore. Facts have become equal to fiction, and for Trump, there is no difference.
I’ll tell you why.
A few years ago, the boss of the WWF Vince MacMahon, was involved in a fake limo explosion after Wrestlemania. This was televised live.
Minutes after the explosion, Trump called up his office and asked if his friend was OK. The girl that answered the phone did not know what to say to him and transferred his call to Vince himself. Vince tried to tell Trump that he is OK and that wrestling is fake, but Trump insisted that it is real. So all Vince could do was tell Trump that he hadn’t got into the car yet and that only the driver died. Trump then offered to pay for the investigation.
If Trump can hold up this level of kayfabe for another organization then imagine what he is doing for his. This man is not an idiot. His years and years of privilege have turned into a parody of a human being, and his supporters are too scared to break the kayfabe. Not only because they don’t want to be the ones excluded, but also because it is a fun ride to be on. Much like I enjoyed the wrestling.
That’s all for this week.
Go fuck yourselves.
