Post by CM Poor on Apr 23, 2015 14:00:01 GMT -5
Where are you going?
"Look, I know we haven't talked recently. That's on me. I'll be honest, I thought I knew what I was getting into, signing my name on the dotted line there and all. Heh. Couldn't have been more wrong, I suppose. Nothing can prepare you for this. Nothing. You...well, you think you know. You tell yourself you won't be home 360 days out of the year, that you'll spend your free time in strange towns and unfamiliar rooms, biding away the hours until it's go time, but you'll see new places and do new things and meet new people. That's the rub, though. It's the stuff underneath that gets you - the real nitty gritty, stuff that can't be put into buzzwords to dissuade the weary from taking on a life they can't handle. I dunno, maybe that's the stuff that's brought me here now, but there's been a cascade of things sort of piling up, and as you well know, I'm only human, and I thought it might be best if we tried and talked it out before I just went and cracked."
The hits come in threes, they say. Truer words couldn't have been spoken about my standing in the WFWF as the entire organization soldiered on toward the End Game pay-per-view. If I had left the last pay-per-view event teetering on the cusp of the biggest break that was about to ever strike the WFWF on behalf of a young piece of talent - and there were many that argued that I was - then I'd somehow managed since to slide down the embankment to the precarious position where I'd find myself readying my own plunge into End Game: hot off a three strike losing streak courtesy of Joshua Dean, Drakz, and Stan McMann, and readying my wits trying to somehow get into the proper mindset to step into the ring and stare down the returning Michael Kyzer, a man whose mere presence seemed to trump the accomplishments of all who I'd come to have faced before him. The odds couldn't be stacked more heavily in his favor. I'd never been to Vegas, but if I were to have ventured out at that time, the only bet I'd be willing to hedge would be on the likelihood of NOT seeing my name under any sort of high stakes odds as the event loomed closet. Completely discounting the fact that Kyzer would be red hot off a hiatus, looking to create an indomitable surge of momentum, his opponent was coming off some of the lowest lows of his career, and many spectators and speculators had begun questioning whether I was all I had been cracked up to be.
Normally, during times of considerable hardship, I'd have turned to my faith, that one, never wavering constant that had taken me through so many trials and tribulations in the past to have guided me to that point, but for the first time since I'd begun exploring the mysteries of faith, I found my trust in God on unstable ground.
It's an all too human response to blame God or some personification of the devil for our own shortcomings in life. You'll find those of a faith based life doing it less and less, simply because it would seem almost counter intuitive to turn the tables on the deity to which we professed on a daily basis to be solely responsible for all good gifts in life, but at the end of the day, drawn to Christ or not, we're all human, and no degree of faith can alter the manner in which our minds subconsciously work. To say otherwise would simply betray common sense, and while the very process of belief is something of a leap of faith in terms of placing the will of the world around you in God's hands, one doesn't get very far on the presumption that a profession of belief somehow elevates them beyond the stratosphere of human thought, human emotion, and the very real pangs of human biological flaw. Even those who follow God have minds that wander, become sad and happy and angry all within appropriate stimuli, and are subject to the ills and injuries of the very mortal body through which they've been vesselled unto this Earth. It's that dichotomy of faith and humanity that had led me to where I was at that point - down three, still beating myself within an inch over the whole David Brennan ordeal, and in a right state of panic as I strode onward toward what looked more and more, with each passing day, like an insurmountable match against a man who, as human as you or I, seemed to stride between the rain drops.
You'd bet that Job had nothing on you.
I'd heard it called screaming down an empty sky - men of God, their lives vested on faith, falling upon hard times, and certain that their life's work could simply not be for naught, turn and revile God for the hardships that had befallen them. They pray for mercy, they lash out at a deity that they've dedicated their lives to assuring themselves was there, and finally, in the absence of light, they decide once and for all, that he's simply not, and the revelation soon befalls them that all this time, at the hands of naught but God's mercy as they begged and pleaded for the hardships and horrors to let up, they were doing nothing but screaming down an empty sky.
A younger, less traveled version of me once thought the idea obscene - the notion of lost faith simply baffled me and seemed beyond reason, if for nothing else than an affront to the very journey that is involved in truly coming to accept Christ and to live one's life in his name. How could all that fall to pieces over a little hardship? Were the trials and tribulations of every day life not meant to strengthen our resolve and bring us ever closer to understanding the mystery of God's ways?
It's all well and good at that age - young men choosing to follow a path less traveled on the promise of a brighter tomorrow for having accepted God's teachings as the very handbook by which happiness could truly be found, but the simple fact is that at 10 or 12 or 16, most kids, which is what anyone at that age really is underneath it all, haven't been dealt the blows that really test one's resolve and really beg the question of whether or not the dark days are as much a part of God's plan as the grace and the light.
I'd been told many times in life to treat each day as a crossroads of sorts - a new batch of 24 hours on which every decision counts and will have lasting effects upon yourself, those around you, your local environs, and in essence, the world. It's hard to really appreciate the magnitude of that suggestion when your decisions, however great their lasting implications, are largely trivial: should I ask Cindy to the prom? Do I go to college? Do I join the workforce? Should I sign the contract? Do I join the SOS? Who shall face the brunt of my golden opportunity? Do I dare go toe to toe with the enigmatic Michael Kyzer?
Escalatingly important, no doubt, but trivial to a man of God as those thoughts begin the creep into your head in the dead of night:
Had God forsaken me?
Alas for you - lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites that you be.
If I'm honest, I wasn't impressed.
You see someone at a distance - television, a movie screen, that sort of thing - and they're larger than life. Exponentially more than you or me. They're something entirely beyond human. That might be part of why they say don't meet your heroes - they never turn out the way we pedestalize them in our mind's eye, and though hardly a hero to anyone walking on the proper side of the tracks, Michael Kyzer wasn't any different.
I'd seen lesser men cower before him, and the thought had no doubt crossed my mind, given my encounters with David Brennan and the loss I'd just chalked up to Drakz, of just how I might fare if placed in a scenario in which Michael Kyzer and I stood eye to eye, but there, in that moment, fear was the furthest thing from my mind. Apprehension had washed away no sooner had he stepped out into the stage, and a sort of mathematical logic bored it's way into the forefront of my thoughts. I'd just been dealt a hard hitting loss against an opponent I'd hand selected, a former ally of the man who now stood before me. Drakz had lived up to his reputation as a fighting champion in every sense of the phrase, and he'd just finished putting me through the ringer. What more could his junk head former cohort possibly hold in store that I couldn't handle at that point?
"I remember when I crucified a man of the cloth."
As an "outed" Christian, you come to develop certain social cues and expectations of the world around you. One unwavering certainty is that men of a certain ilk - your Michael Kyzers, your DMKs - whose mouths tend to run at a pace just far enough ahead of the pace of their concurrent thought processes will always stumble into the same routines to try and strip you of your very identity that you've established as a follower of Christ. Never fails. Ever. You'd sooner find Stan McMann in front of a mirror with a razor and a can of Barbasol than you'd be able to profess yourself a man of God and not expect some sort of snide comment in that general regard from Michael Kyzer. For a man I'd only just become personally acquainted with, I knew him well enough to know that.
He was talking, of course, about his exploits against Reverend Shadow some years back at Superbrawl, well before my time in the business had come to fruition. To be honest, what had transpired between Kyzer and Shadow had never left such an impression on me as to serve as a sign of things to come for any man of God who may walk through the doors of the WFWF, so much as it was more an example of Kyzer's latent depravity. He'd no more strike out against a man of God than a man whose worship was devoted to any other deity unless he knew for certain that he'd achieve the very ends which he sought before my very eyes in that ring - the opportunity to burrow beneath another man's skin til he'd begin tearing his own flesh from his bones in a vain attempt to rid his body of the toxins that had deceptively invaded and set up shop.
"Is God speaking to you right now? Is he telling you about his fallen angel here? Does he whisper to you about the “God of F*ck”? I can whisper to you, you can worship this God."
Like cue cards. I'd never begin to discount the fact that Michael Kyzer, when not forced into confrontation in the moment, is in all likelihood some sort of evil mad genius. He's shown time an time again a sort of sinister aptitude for destroying his opponents both mentally and physically until they're little more than shells of their former selves, and in all likelihood, with a bit more preparation and planning, he'd have likely avoided a few more Ps here, but it was almost jarring to stand there in that ring, to stare into his eyes, and have to wonder if he really thought I'd never heard this routine before. The only really insult came at the thought that if we assume that he knew without any doubt in his mind that men such as he had lashed out in mockery or affront toward my faith before, then he thought my resolve was so weak that maybe the umpteenth time hearing the same old routine might be the one to crack me. Erosion is a scientific certainty, but the shores of land don't suddenly come crashing into the ocean on account of one sudden crash of a wave. If anything, Kyzer's words were little more than just another faceted stem of the tides - rolling in, and rolling right back out to sea.
The routine continued, of course. It always does. Obscenity. Sacrelige. At a certain point, you just sort of stop listening, your mind fogging out the unnecessary details until your entire awareness is focused on the hunt for any real threat, which came almost suddenly with an audible pop of the mic and Kyzer's attempt at a cheap drop. The cowardice cherry on top of an otherwise picturesque sundae of a man who fancies himself the very embodiment of society's fringe.
I'd just had the pleasure of my first encounter with Michael Kyzer.
When wilt thou save the people? O God of mercy, when?
"It's kind of funny, right? Faith wavers, and we run to church or a chapel or some garden of reflection. We look for presence. That's...I dunno...I dunno what that is. Maybe that's the mystery - we get so down on ourselves that we begin to think that nothing's out there, and yet we don't go looking for new answers or new sources of comfort - we go right back to the well. I mean, here I am, audibly conscious of the very doubt that's penetrated my mind and...well...here I am. No different than any others except that maybe I'm hoping that you're actually there this time because...I dunno...y'know, a lot of people'd have cut and run by now but I'm still here and I'm not looking for an empty sky, y'know? I'm not looking for the negative confirmation that the past 14 years have been a big old lie. I'm looking for you to actually show yourself and give me some sort of indicator that I haven't fallen off the path here! That maybe running off from home and meeting David Brennan and drawing my line in the sand wasn't just a bunch of stuff that happened!
Maybe it was.
Maybe you're not there."
You've got to stay bright to be the light of the world.
I'm sure the direction of my thoughts in the days and weeks following our little meet and greet would have filled him with unprecedented glee that could only be trumped by the arrival of his diminutive man servant and another fix to get through the next hour of the day. Coincidental occurrences are no man's friend - they always emerge at the most inconvenient times, almost as if troublesome by design in order to make one situation appear veiled as another. If Kyzer had somehow managed to catch me off guard in the weeks leading up to End Game, he'd find a man embroiled in doubt and uncertain of what tomorrow may bring, and whether any of what was left to come was really supposed to happen or rather just a happenstance collection of circumstantial occurrences to which he'd be a participatory party. That sort of thing would be the loose thread that could unravel the entire blanket of my case in having any chance of standing against Kyzer in equal measure.
I was lost, in every sense of the word. I was a thousand miles from home, in a strange part of the country to which I'd never traveled before, where I knew no one aside from the usual suspects who happened to share my travel schedule by way of similar employment situations, and where I had no ground base from which to lay myself down and begin to crawl back to my feet. I was in the midst of the hottest losing streak of my career, having fallen once to a man I'd managed to overcome once before, again to an opponent I'd signed my own death warrant against, and even still once more against a relative newcomer who I'd made the mistake of sorely underestimating, and next in line stood a man who by all Vegas odds appeared my better - a former world champion, a Hall of Famer, a name synonymous with WFWF, and a man so enigmatic and with such a storied career that few have ever stepped forth to willingly engage him.
I had no ground for solidarity - the one friend I'd been able to find amid the torrent of the past year or so had betrayed my trust with a single swig of a bottle, simultaneously downing all he'd achieved alongside me in personal redemption. I'd no room for solitude - try as you may, even if you manage to find a tattered, stained, aged copy of the King James edition in the hotel's bureau, a roadside dive and a bed for the night are hardly a place to kneel when you're looking for that real sort of meaningful conversation to drag you back from the edge.
I like to think that in my life, I've made but a comparatively small amount of rash, ill conceived, or poorly times decisions, and so I harbor little regret over the amount of money I placed upon the counter that night in exchange for a one way, non-stop ticket home to Austin, Texas. Even as we reached cruising altitude, I wasn't exactly sure what I'd do with myself once we arrived in the capital of the Lone Star State. One part of me saw therapeutic redemption in a trip home to the Kirkbride family homestead. Truthfully, I hadn't spoken to either of my parents since shortly after my run with WFWF began, not out of spite, necessarily, but rather a simple matter of inconvenience. The schedule had bored down upon me in a way I never could have expected, and I thought that there might be some manner of exhaustive relief in putting that out of my mind.
Alternately, I considered the benefit in the mere appreciation of my home town - the all too rare opportunity to head downtown, saunter past the governor's mansion toward the capital building, then perhaps catch a cab a few blocks to Pecan Street to imbibe in some of the finest eats Austin has to offer.
However, as predictably as Michael Kyzer had stood before me and railed against all that I held dear in some feeble attempt to break me, I instead hailed the first cab I could find out to the reaches of Menchaca county and the dimly lit, seemingly vacant grounds of the First Church of Christ, where years earlier Father Henry Marshall had herded his flock in hopes of achieving a more welcoming and open place of worship to those of all walks of Chrisianity. Entry was never an issue - it had been established early on that there were times I might need to seek out the sanctuary of worship at a time most would consider off hours, and thusly I'd been entrusted with a key to the main building. I didn't bother with the lights - there was certainly no need to alert any unwarranted attention to the fact that in the early morning hours, a man who'd sparingly been back to Austin, short of a brief visit with father Marshall prior to my encounter with Drakz, had just let himself in to a place of worship in the early hours of the morning, unannounced.
Still, the darkness, contrasted with the dim lights of the street lamps did a solid favor to the contrast between the sheer beauty of the place that Father Marshall had pulled from the brink of despair and abandon and the overwhelming doubt that carried the man who'd just stepped forth into those hallowed halls of worship to find if the deity he'd for so long considered his Lord and savior was there at all. Father Marshall had led our last call to worship, and he'd done so in his own unique brand of showmanship meets sincerity, which did well for the heart, but did little for my own need for a one on one with the man upstairs.
I railed.
I railed until I had no more left to rail against, which, in retrospect, wasn't that long - all things considered, I didn't have much in the way to rail about, but for what seemed like hours, given the way my chest heaved when I was done, I lamented the slump I'd fallen into. I lamented my failures in trying to help my fellow man. I lamented the fact that I was the betting odd to get crushed at End Game. I lamented all these worldly problems that had seemed to have befallen me, and I did so with such fervor, such anger in my voice, that by the time I was done, heaving and sweating upon my knees at the altar, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. Men would die for the problems I had in life to replace those that they endured day in and day out - for what did I have to truly lament?
Who is the land for? The sun and the sand for? Yes - it's all for the best.
"I hope you're not talking to who I think you are."
There was a sense of deep concern in Father Marshall's instantly recognizable voice. No doubt, he'd heard everything, and as he slowly approached the altar to sit beside me, that pit in my stomach that accompanies overwhelming senses of guilt grew exponentially. Here was the very man who'd led me right to the table of God, and he'd just heard me utter the very notion that perhaps it was all for naught. Suddenly, an encounter with Michael Kyzer in front of the masses seemed to pale in comparison to explaining myself to Father Marshall, and yet, he sought no reasoning for my vitriolic lament. Instead, with a consoling pat on the shoulder, he offered up a sense of compassion and understanding that had practically become synonymous with his name.
"Happens to all of us."
"Not you."
"Especially me."
"I just felt so lost."
"You've taken a unique path, Daniel. You know it won't come easy."
"I just...I dunno...I guess I was hoping for a sign. Something to tell me that he hadn't just up and left me here."
"This good enough?"
He meant all of this - the guilt that he knew I felt, the fact that my vitriole hadn't collapsed the ceiling upon us, the fact that he was here, he understood, he knew, and he felt compulsion to forgive. Even in my darkest hour, whether consciously or subconsciously, I'd come to the one place on Earth that I knew, for better or for worse, I'd come face to face with the light of the world that shines beyond bushels, the salt of the Earth beyond loss of flavor, and that in an instant, all doubt would be vanquished in my mind.
"God's not going to send you to victory, Daniel. God can't fix David Brennan for you. He doesn't work that way. You know that. It's easy to lose sight of, but in many ways, you are the strengthened hand of God. His signals influence your movements thoughout the world, but it's your actions that attain the end result. He's brought you to all you've found in life, and it falls to you as to whether or not that ends will be achieved. The rest is up to you."
He was right.
Of course he was right.
I'd been trying so hard for weeks to elevate my game, to take that next step, and in doing so, I'd taken one giant step after another away from me. I'd convinced myself months back to decline an invitation to join the Saviors of Salvation in an attempt to keep myself free of distractions that would detract from me going out there each night and putting forth the very best efforts, utilizing all the good gifts of talent that God had bestowed upon me, and here I was screaming at a most saturated sky, for the answers had been lain right there before me all along, over what little had gone wrong.
Instead of allowing myself to learn from my falters and seeing the lessons that lie therein so that I could wake up tomorrow a better and more determined me, I'd let them get the best of me - I'd become absorbed. Absorbed in all the things that were happening around me that made up the scenery and the secondary but had little to no bearing on the plan.
It's funny. People more often than not don't take the time in life to recalibrate themselves from time to time, and really, that can lead to some pretty dire consequences. There on my knees before the darkened altar of that church, I became living proof. I used to reflect - used to pray daily, and I'd let the hustle and bustle of this new life I'd embarked upon deprive me of that, and I didn't realize the vast importance of it until it was almost too late.
God's plan for David Brennan wasn't necessarily salvation - it was a beacon. He'd placed our paths at a deliberate intersection to test my devotion to helping those who so desperately require it, and to offer David a chance to walk toward that beacon and to find the road to happiness through love and charity. I'll never begin to understand fully what it is that plagues the mind of those who've given their lives away to vices, but it's evident to me now that that road, even when finally cleared and embarked upon, isn't always so straight and narrow. I hadn't failed David, if for no other reason than I stopped that day and offered a hand for him to grasp. The rest was up to him.
God's plan for my career clearly didn't involve a meteoric rise to the top. He'd placed obstacles along the way, obstacles that I was always meant to stumble upon - Joshua Dean. Drakz. Stan McMann. Buried in those losses was more than a chalk upon the opposite side of some arbitrary win/loss record. There were lessons in humility. The value of sportsmanship. The value of self evaluation and the persistent stride to better oneself for the match tomorrow. I'd let arrogance in having defeated him once before cloud my second bout with Dean. I'd let aspiration get ahead of me in my encounter with Drakz, and I'd let the value of preparedness slip away in another moment of arrogance get in the way of ever having a chance to triumph over Stan McMann. These losses were not God's will - they were the result of my own failure to see the bigger picture, to see how each of these pieces of this great big elaborate puzzle had all been intended to fit together, and if I was to ever win again, it would be on me to reflect upon what had been laid before me and act upon it, not in brash arrogance or blind aspiration for something greater, but in a manner that does well now to the present, conforming with not but what God requires.
The rest, as they'd say, would be up to me.
Michael Kyzer fancied himself the demon to my soldier of God. The evil to my good. The Randall Flagg to my Mother Abigail.
He was anything but.
I saw it then, staring into his eyes in the ring and I'd see it again as we cut our respective paths toward our own inevitable End Game - a phenomena I'd come to encounter again and again and again as I traipsed through the ranks of the WFWF, through Drakz and through Tugarin Zmey and through Joseph Bishop and through countless names that had come and countless names that would come still.
A man.
Not kings. Not lords. Nations.
Not thrones. Not crowns.
Men.
Michael Kyzer was little more than the lawyers, Pharisees, and hypocrites who doubted the teachings of Christ and started him down the willing stations to hang upon the cross, and yet, still, his followers remained. Mary still cried at his feet, and we're told that Christ still ascended into Heaven so that the sins of all men, men like myself and men like Michael Kyzer may have been forgiven. We're taught that we must call no man on Earth father, for we have but one father and we are all brothers.
Michael Kyzer would revel in the glory of people bowing at his feet and calling him father or rabbi or God to satisfy the very image that he held of himself, and yet he still breathes, he still eats, and he still bleeds for he shares the same mortal blood that we all share, not in the vain of God but in his image.
The God of F*ck
Your Stoned Messiah
These were little more than nicknames for a man who'd grown bored with the human vessel in which he'd come to travel this world, and so he'd painted a picture of himself, a new more superior image of an enigmatic man, a cult of personality that could not be defied.
I defied that man. Not that God, not that messiah.
That man.
I defied his actions, I defied his name. Even in defeat I stepped forth to accept that challenge, because Michael Kyzer's reputation is only as strong as the fear he could wield before him as others trembled at his feet.
I would not tremble.
I would not bend.
I would not break.
I would face Michael Kyzer.
I would fight Michael Kyzer.
The rest was up to God.
"Look, I know we haven't talked recently. That's on me. I'll be honest, I thought I knew what I was getting into, signing my name on the dotted line there and all. Heh. Couldn't have been more wrong, I suppose. Nothing can prepare you for this. Nothing. You...well, you think you know. You tell yourself you won't be home 360 days out of the year, that you'll spend your free time in strange towns and unfamiliar rooms, biding away the hours until it's go time, but you'll see new places and do new things and meet new people. That's the rub, though. It's the stuff underneath that gets you - the real nitty gritty, stuff that can't be put into buzzwords to dissuade the weary from taking on a life they can't handle. I dunno, maybe that's the stuff that's brought me here now, but there's been a cascade of things sort of piling up, and as you well know, I'm only human, and I thought it might be best if we tried and talked it out before I just went and cracked."
The hits come in threes, they say. Truer words couldn't have been spoken about my standing in the WFWF as the entire organization soldiered on toward the End Game pay-per-view. If I had left the last pay-per-view event teetering on the cusp of the biggest break that was about to ever strike the WFWF on behalf of a young piece of talent - and there were many that argued that I was - then I'd somehow managed since to slide down the embankment to the precarious position where I'd find myself readying my own plunge into End Game: hot off a three strike losing streak courtesy of Joshua Dean, Drakz, and Stan McMann, and readying my wits trying to somehow get into the proper mindset to step into the ring and stare down the returning Michael Kyzer, a man whose mere presence seemed to trump the accomplishments of all who I'd come to have faced before him. The odds couldn't be stacked more heavily in his favor. I'd never been to Vegas, but if I were to have ventured out at that time, the only bet I'd be willing to hedge would be on the likelihood of NOT seeing my name under any sort of high stakes odds as the event loomed closet. Completely discounting the fact that Kyzer would be red hot off a hiatus, looking to create an indomitable surge of momentum, his opponent was coming off some of the lowest lows of his career, and many spectators and speculators had begun questioning whether I was all I had been cracked up to be.
Normally, during times of considerable hardship, I'd have turned to my faith, that one, never wavering constant that had taken me through so many trials and tribulations in the past to have guided me to that point, but for the first time since I'd begun exploring the mysteries of faith, I found my trust in God on unstable ground.
It's an all too human response to blame God or some personification of the devil for our own shortcomings in life. You'll find those of a faith based life doing it less and less, simply because it would seem almost counter intuitive to turn the tables on the deity to which we professed on a daily basis to be solely responsible for all good gifts in life, but at the end of the day, drawn to Christ or not, we're all human, and no degree of faith can alter the manner in which our minds subconsciously work. To say otherwise would simply betray common sense, and while the very process of belief is something of a leap of faith in terms of placing the will of the world around you in God's hands, one doesn't get very far on the presumption that a profession of belief somehow elevates them beyond the stratosphere of human thought, human emotion, and the very real pangs of human biological flaw. Even those who follow God have minds that wander, become sad and happy and angry all within appropriate stimuli, and are subject to the ills and injuries of the very mortal body through which they've been vesselled unto this Earth. It's that dichotomy of faith and humanity that had led me to where I was at that point - down three, still beating myself within an inch over the whole David Brennan ordeal, and in a right state of panic as I strode onward toward what looked more and more, with each passing day, like an insurmountable match against a man who, as human as you or I, seemed to stride between the rain drops.
You'd bet that Job had nothing on you.
I'd heard it called screaming down an empty sky - men of God, their lives vested on faith, falling upon hard times, and certain that their life's work could simply not be for naught, turn and revile God for the hardships that had befallen them. They pray for mercy, they lash out at a deity that they've dedicated their lives to assuring themselves was there, and finally, in the absence of light, they decide once and for all, that he's simply not, and the revelation soon befalls them that all this time, at the hands of naught but God's mercy as they begged and pleaded for the hardships and horrors to let up, they were doing nothing but screaming down an empty sky.
A younger, less traveled version of me once thought the idea obscene - the notion of lost faith simply baffled me and seemed beyond reason, if for nothing else than an affront to the very journey that is involved in truly coming to accept Christ and to live one's life in his name. How could all that fall to pieces over a little hardship? Were the trials and tribulations of every day life not meant to strengthen our resolve and bring us ever closer to understanding the mystery of God's ways?
It's all well and good at that age - young men choosing to follow a path less traveled on the promise of a brighter tomorrow for having accepted God's teachings as the very handbook by which happiness could truly be found, but the simple fact is that at 10 or 12 or 16, most kids, which is what anyone at that age really is underneath it all, haven't been dealt the blows that really test one's resolve and really beg the question of whether or not the dark days are as much a part of God's plan as the grace and the light.
I'd been told many times in life to treat each day as a crossroads of sorts - a new batch of 24 hours on which every decision counts and will have lasting effects upon yourself, those around you, your local environs, and in essence, the world. It's hard to really appreciate the magnitude of that suggestion when your decisions, however great their lasting implications, are largely trivial: should I ask Cindy to the prom? Do I go to college? Do I join the workforce? Should I sign the contract? Do I join the SOS? Who shall face the brunt of my golden opportunity? Do I dare go toe to toe with the enigmatic Michael Kyzer?
Escalatingly important, no doubt, but trivial to a man of God as those thoughts begin the creep into your head in the dead of night:
Had God forsaken me?
Alas for you - lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites that you be.
If I'm honest, I wasn't impressed.
You see someone at a distance - television, a movie screen, that sort of thing - and they're larger than life. Exponentially more than you or me. They're something entirely beyond human. That might be part of why they say don't meet your heroes - they never turn out the way we pedestalize them in our mind's eye, and though hardly a hero to anyone walking on the proper side of the tracks, Michael Kyzer wasn't any different.
I'd seen lesser men cower before him, and the thought had no doubt crossed my mind, given my encounters with David Brennan and the loss I'd just chalked up to Drakz, of just how I might fare if placed in a scenario in which Michael Kyzer and I stood eye to eye, but there, in that moment, fear was the furthest thing from my mind. Apprehension had washed away no sooner had he stepped out into the stage, and a sort of mathematical logic bored it's way into the forefront of my thoughts. I'd just been dealt a hard hitting loss against an opponent I'd hand selected, a former ally of the man who now stood before me. Drakz had lived up to his reputation as a fighting champion in every sense of the phrase, and he'd just finished putting me through the ringer. What more could his junk head former cohort possibly hold in store that I couldn't handle at that point?
"I remember when I crucified a man of the cloth."
As an "outed" Christian, you come to develop certain social cues and expectations of the world around you. One unwavering certainty is that men of a certain ilk - your Michael Kyzers, your DMKs - whose mouths tend to run at a pace just far enough ahead of the pace of their concurrent thought processes will always stumble into the same routines to try and strip you of your very identity that you've established as a follower of Christ. Never fails. Ever. You'd sooner find Stan McMann in front of a mirror with a razor and a can of Barbasol than you'd be able to profess yourself a man of God and not expect some sort of snide comment in that general regard from Michael Kyzer. For a man I'd only just become personally acquainted with, I knew him well enough to know that.
He was talking, of course, about his exploits against Reverend Shadow some years back at Superbrawl, well before my time in the business had come to fruition. To be honest, what had transpired between Kyzer and Shadow had never left such an impression on me as to serve as a sign of things to come for any man of God who may walk through the doors of the WFWF, so much as it was more an example of Kyzer's latent depravity. He'd no more strike out against a man of God than a man whose worship was devoted to any other deity unless he knew for certain that he'd achieve the very ends which he sought before my very eyes in that ring - the opportunity to burrow beneath another man's skin til he'd begin tearing his own flesh from his bones in a vain attempt to rid his body of the toxins that had deceptively invaded and set up shop.
"Is God speaking to you right now? Is he telling you about his fallen angel here? Does he whisper to you about the “God of F*ck”? I can whisper to you, you can worship this God."
Like cue cards. I'd never begin to discount the fact that Michael Kyzer, when not forced into confrontation in the moment, is in all likelihood some sort of evil mad genius. He's shown time an time again a sort of sinister aptitude for destroying his opponents both mentally and physically until they're little more than shells of their former selves, and in all likelihood, with a bit more preparation and planning, he'd have likely avoided a few more Ps here, but it was almost jarring to stand there in that ring, to stare into his eyes, and have to wonder if he really thought I'd never heard this routine before. The only really insult came at the thought that if we assume that he knew without any doubt in his mind that men such as he had lashed out in mockery or affront toward my faith before, then he thought my resolve was so weak that maybe the umpteenth time hearing the same old routine might be the one to crack me. Erosion is a scientific certainty, but the shores of land don't suddenly come crashing into the ocean on account of one sudden crash of a wave. If anything, Kyzer's words were little more than just another faceted stem of the tides - rolling in, and rolling right back out to sea.
The routine continued, of course. It always does. Obscenity. Sacrelige. At a certain point, you just sort of stop listening, your mind fogging out the unnecessary details until your entire awareness is focused on the hunt for any real threat, which came almost suddenly with an audible pop of the mic and Kyzer's attempt at a cheap drop. The cowardice cherry on top of an otherwise picturesque sundae of a man who fancies himself the very embodiment of society's fringe.
I'd just had the pleasure of my first encounter with Michael Kyzer.
When wilt thou save the people? O God of mercy, when?
"It's kind of funny, right? Faith wavers, and we run to church or a chapel or some garden of reflection. We look for presence. That's...I dunno...I dunno what that is. Maybe that's the mystery - we get so down on ourselves that we begin to think that nothing's out there, and yet we don't go looking for new answers or new sources of comfort - we go right back to the well. I mean, here I am, audibly conscious of the very doubt that's penetrated my mind and...well...here I am. No different than any others except that maybe I'm hoping that you're actually there this time because...I dunno...y'know, a lot of people'd have cut and run by now but I'm still here and I'm not looking for an empty sky, y'know? I'm not looking for the negative confirmation that the past 14 years have been a big old lie. I'm looking for you to actually show yourself and give me some sort of indicator that I haven't fallen off the path here! That maybe running off from home and meeting David Brennan and drawing my line in the sand wasn't just a bunch of stuff that happened!
Maybe it was.
Maybe you're not there."
You've got to stay bright to be the light of the world.
I'm sure the direction of my thoughts in the days and weeks following our little meet and greet would have filled him with unprecedented glee that could only be trumped by the arrival of his diminutive man servant and another fix to get through the next hour of the day. Coincidental occurrences are no man's friend - they always emerge at the most inconvenient times, almost as if troublesome by design in order to make one situation appear veiled as another. If Kyzer had somehow managed to catch me off guard in the weeks leading up to End Game, he'd find a man embroiled in doubt and uncertain of what tomorrow may bring, and whether any of what was left to come was really supposed to happen or rather just a happenstance collection of circumstantial occurrences to which he'd be a participatory party. That sort of thing would be the loose thread that could unravel the entire blanket of my case in having any chance of standing against Kyzer in equal measure.
I was lost, in every sense of the word. I was a thousand miles from home, in a strange part of the country to which I'd never traveled before, where I knew no one aside from the usual suspects who happened to share my travel schedule by way of similar employment situations, and where I had no ground base from which to lay myself down and begin to crawl back to my feet. I was in the midst of the hottest losing streak of my career, having fallen once to a man I'd managed to overcome once before, again to an opponent I'd signed my own death warrant against, and even still once more against a relative newcomer who I'd made the mistake of sorely underestimating, and next in line stood a man who by all Vegas odds appeared my better - a former world champion, a Hall of Famer, a name synonymous with WFWF, and a man so enigmatic and with such a storied career that few have ever stepped forth to willingly engage him.
I had no ground for solidarity - the one friend I'd been able to find amid the torrent of the past year or so had betrayed my trust with a single swig of a bottle, simultaneously downing all he'd achieved alongside me in personal redemption. I'd no room for solitude - try as you may, even if you manage to find a tattered, stained, aged copy of the King James edition in the hotel's bureau, a roadside dive and a bed for the night are hardly a place to kneel when you're looking for that real sort of meaningful conversation to drag you back from the edge.
I like to think that in my life, I've made but a comparatively small amount of rash, ill conceived, or poorly times decisions, and so I harbor little regret over the amount of money I placed upon the counter that night in exchange for a one way, non-stop ticket home to Austin, Texas. Even as we reached cruising altitude, I wasn't exactly sure what I'd do with myself once we arrived in the capital of the Lone Star State. One part of me saw therapeutic redemption in a trip home to the Kirkbride family homestead. Truthfully, I hadn't spoken to either of my parents since shortly after my run with WFWF began, not out of spite, necessarily, but rather a simple matter of inconvenience. The schedule had bored down upon me in a way I never could have expected, and I thought that there might be some manner of exhaustive relief in putting that out of my mind.
Alternately, I considered the benefit in the mere appreciation of my home town - the all too rare opportunity to head downtown, saunter past the governor's mansion toward the capital building, then perhaps catch a cab a few blocks to Pecan Street to imbibe in some of the finest eats Austin has to offer.
However, as predictably as Michael Kyzer had stood before me and railed against all that I held dear in some feeble attempt to break me, I instead hailed the first cab I could find out to the reaches of Menchaca county and the dimly lit, seemingly vacant grounds of the First Church of Christ, where years earlier Father Henry Marshall had herded his flock in hopes of achieving a more welcoming and open place of worship to those of all walks of Chrisianity. Entry was never an issue - it had been established early on that there were times I might need to seek out the sanctuary of worship at a time most would consider off hours, and thusly I'd been entrusted with a key to the main building. I didn't bother with the lights - there was certainly no need to alert any unwarranted attention to the fact that in the early morning hours, a man who'd sparingly been back to Austin, short of a brief visit with father Marshall prior to my encounter with Drakz, had just let himself in to a place of worship in the early hours of the morning, unannounced.
Still, the darkness, contrasted with the dim lights of the street lamps did a solid favor to the contrast between the sheer beauty of the place that Father Marshall had pulled from the brink of despair and abandon and the overwhelming doubt that carried the man who'd just stepped forth into those hallowed halls of worship to find if the deity he'd for so long considered his Lord and savior was there at all. Father Marshall had led our last call to worship, and he'd done so in his own unique brand of showmanship meets sincerity, which did well for the heart, but did little for my own need for a one on one with the man upstairs.
I railed.
I railed until I had no more left to rail against, which, in retrospect, wasn't that long - all things considered, I didn't have much in the way to rail about, but for what seemed like hours, given the way my chest heaved when I was done, I lamented the slump I'd fallen into. I lamented my failures in trying to help my fellow man. I lamented the fact that I was the betting odd to get crushed at End Game. I lamented all these worldly problems that had seemed to have befallen me, and I did so with such fervor, such anger in my voice, that by the time I was done, heaving and sweating upon my knees at the altar, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. Men would die for the problems I had in life to replace those that they endured day in and day out - for what did I have to truly lament?
Who is the land for? The sun and the sand for? Yes - it's all for the best.
"I hope you're not talking to who I think you are."
There was a sense of deep concern in Father Marshall's instantly recognizable voice. No doubt, he'd heard everything, and as he slowly approached the altar to sit beside me, that pit in my stomach that accompanies overwhelming senses of guilt grew exponentially. Here was the very man who'd led me right to the table of God, and he'd just heard me utter the very notion that perhaps it was all for naught. Suddenly, an encounter with Michael Kyzer in front of the masses seemed to pale in comparison to explaining myself to Father Marshall, and yet, he sought no reasoning for my vitriolic lament. Instead, with a consoling pat on the shoulder, he offered up a sense of compassion and understanding that had practically become synonymous with his name.
"Happens to all of us."
"Not you."
"Especially me."
"I just felt so lost."
"You've taken a unique path, Daniel. You know it won't come easy."
"I just...I dunno...I guess I was hoping for a sign. Something to tell me that he hadn't just up and left me here."
"This good enough?"
He meant all of this - the guilt that he knew I felt, the fact that my vitriole hadn't collapsed the ceiling upon us, the fact that he was here, he understood, he knew, and he felt compulsion to forgive. Even in my darkest hour, whether consciously or subconsciously, I'd come to the one place on Earth that I knew, for better or for worse, I'd come face to face with the light of the world that shines beyond bushels, the salt of the Earth beyond loss of flavor, and that in an instant, all doubt would be vanquished in my mind.
"God's not going to send you to victory, Daniel. God can't fix David Brennan for you. He doesn't work that way. You know that. It's easy to lose sight of, but in many ways, you are the strengthened hand of God. His signals influence your movements thoughout the world, but it's your actions that attain the end result. He's brought you to all you've found in life, and it falls to you as to whether or not that ends will be achieved. The rest is up to you."
He was right.
Of course he was right.
I'd been trying so hard for weeks to elevate my game, to take that next step, and in doing so, I'd taken one giant step after another away from me. I'd convinced myself months back to decline an invitation to join the Saviors of Salvation in an attempt to keep myself free of distractions that would detract from me going out there each night and putting forth the very best efforts, utilizing all the good gifts of talent that God had bestowed upon me, and here I was screaming at a most saturated sky, for the answers had been lain right there before me all along, over what little had gone wrong.
Instead of allowing myself to learn from my falters and seeing the lessons that lie therein so that I could wake up tomorrow a better and more determined me, I'd let them get the best of me - I'd become absorbed. Absorbed in all the things that were happening around me that made up the scenery and the secondary but had little to no bearing on the plan.
It's funny. People more often than not don't take the time in life to recalibrate themselves from time to time, and really, that can lead to some pretty dire consequences. There on my knees before the darkened altar of that church, I became living proof. I used to reflect - used to pray daily, and I'd let the hustle and bustle of this new life I'd embarked upon deprive me of that, and I didn't realize the vast importance of it until it was almost too late.
God's plan for David Brennan wasn't necessarily salvation - it was a beacon. He'd placed our paths at a deliberate intersection to test my devotion to helping those who so desperately require it, and to offer David a chance to walk toward that beacon and to find the road to happiness through love and charity. I'll never begin to understand fully what it is that plagues the mind of those who've given their lives away to vices, but it's evident to me now that that road, even when finally cleared and embarked upon, isn't always so straight and narrow. I hadn't failed David, if for no other reason than I stopped that day and offered a hand for him to grasp. The rest was up to him.
God's plan for my career clearly didn't involve a meteoric rise to the top. He'd placed obstacles along the way, obstacles that I was always meant to stumble upon - Joshua Dean. Drakz. Stan McMann. Buried in those losses was more than a chalk upon the opposite side of some arbitrary win/loss record. There were lessons in humility. The value of sportsmanship. The value of self evaluation and the persistent stride to better oneself for the match tomorrow. I'd let arrogance in having defeated him once before cloud my second bout with Dean. I'd let aspiration get ahead of me in my encounter with Drakz, and I'd let the value of preparedness slip away in another moment of arrogance get in the way of ever having a chance to triumph over Stan McMann. These losses were not God's will - they were the result of my own failure to see the bigger picture, to see how each of these pieces of this great big elaborate puzzle had all been intended to fit together, and if I was to ever win again, it would be on me to reflect upon what had been laid before me and act upon it, not in brash arrogance or blind aspiration for something greater, but in a manner that does well now to the present, conforming with not but what God requires.
The rest, as they'd say, would be up to me.
Michael Kyzer fancied himself the demon to my soldier of God. The evil to my good. The Randall Flagg to my Mother Abigail.
He was anything but.
I saw it then, staring into his eyes in the ring and I'd see it again as we cut our respective paths toward our own inevitable End Game - a phenomena I'd come to encounter again and again and again as I traipsed through the ranks of the WFWF, through Drakz and through Tugarin Zmey and through Joseph Bishop and through countless names that had come and countless names that would come still.
A man.
Not kings. Not lords. Nations.
Not thrones. Not crowns.
Men.
Michael Kyzer was little more than the lawyers, Pharisees, and hypocrites who doubted the teachings of Christ and started him down the willing stations to hang upon the cross, and yet, still, his followers remained. Mary still cried at his feet, and we're told that Christ still ascended into Heaven so that the sins of all men, men like myself and men like Michael Kyzer may have been forgiven. We're taught that we must call no man on Earth father, for we have but one father and we are all brothers.
Michael Kyzer would revel in the glory of people bowing at his feet and calling him father or rabbi or God to satisfy the very image that he held of himself, and yet he still breathes, he still eats, and he still bleeds for he shares the same mortal blood that we all share, not in the vain of God but in his image.
The God of F*ck
Your Stoned Messiah
These were little more than nicknames for a man who'd grown bored with the human vessel in which he'd come to travel this world, and so he'd painted a picture of himself, a new more superior image of an enigmatic man, a cult of personality that could not be defied.
I defied that man. Not that God, not that messiah.
That man.
I defied his actions, I defied his name. Even in defeat I stepped forth to accept that challenge, because Michael Kyzer's reputation is only as strong as the fear he could wield before him as others trembled at his feet.
I would not tremble.
I would not bend.
I would not break.
I would face Michael Kyzer.
I would fight Michael Kyzer.
The rest was up to God.
I dont know good luck 
