FADE IN

V/O: Most of the entrants to the Birthday Brawl have no idea what if feels like to win. I don’t either but most have no idea what it feels like to get close. Even fewer know what it’s like to hold the WWA World Title in their hands.

Let me enlighten you…

You grab that symbol of what you’ve been working for all of your life and what comes next is this improbable sensation of holding the entire world in your mouth like a jawbreaker, then a colorless light and a purple hum for some fraction of eternity.

My wife and I awoke as grains of sand on a beach of love and fear, squished and tossed about by an army running laps away from the ocean. One of the grains was me and two were her; another one was aunt Jan and two others were my last cigarette ever, which were also the same as the rest of us. We found each other and climbed up and down at the same time toward the sea that we had already reached.

In the cheers of the crowd I lived a hundred lifetimes on a world where a square is seven-sided, and a hundred more as one of those sides; I died two hundred deaths alone before colliding again on the beach in South Padre with my wife on the day that we had gotten married. We were gathered between two hands, thrown up into the air, and set back in this place.

As we flew through the air I was an orange in Georgia while she was a blade of grass in Rome. I was a Stegosaurus and the fans my last cigarette ever. For five dizzying minutes Julie and I were both a dry white scratch on a sun burnt ankle in Oregon, and then I was a day trader in Kansas until my skin was wrinkled together; raspy and soft like a sweatshirt shoved into a brown paper bag.

That all ended on the last day of the year you can run errands on a bicycle without dressing in layers, which is my favorite time to die. I pushed down the hill in high gear, stood up in the clips and rested my bony waist on the handlebar. The road rose up to my lips and the gravel tore me apart like a bag of vegetable soup. I apple core bounced along the shoulder of the highway and felt the entire world burn alive all around me until my heart pumped its ashes and my eyes turned black. And then I woke up to the fans after I won the World Title and heard their cries.

Most of you will come to a realization. You were not meant for any one of these worlds. We were meant to move through them together like ribbons of oil over rainy puddles in the clay. The thousands of lifetimes apart-- fractions of seconds spanning eternity-- all of them like the autumn days when you tuck stray dollars into your jacket and leave for coffee without your wallet, realizing every time you pat your hip that something you can't get by without is gone.

This is your lament.

(A light flips on to see former Champion Grunge sitting on a stool in black room. He’s wearing a bright purple suit and smoking one of those cheap Black and Mild cigars you buy a crummy convenience store. He smiles as he takes a puff.)

Grunge: But some of you will just work harder. And those that manage to go where I and Mal Somers, Tracer Bullet, Craven Moore, and others have been will kill each other to get there. I almost gained the prize once. I don’t care whose there…I won’t lose again.

Rock and Roll

FADE OUT