Post by Phil Atken on Jan 19, 2013 16:53:39 GMT -4
We find ourselves honoured to be in the company of a man that many are already calling the APW World Heavyweight Champion, partially due to the fact he is the APW World Heavyweight Champion... wholly due to the fact really... yes, indeed we are join by Philip Martin Atken himself, suited up good a proper in the most fashionable of fine fitting wares as he stands in front of a camera, glaring with his big wet eyes, not to mention his lovely spit shined title belt wrapped rather ungracefully around his waist. He stands directly in front of a poster advertising the Survive and Conquer match between himself and Michael Callahan, advertised as something of a battle of the politicians.
Atken: Ah, APW, glad you could join me. Sometimes it's just downright difficult to find the right timing to having one of these little heart to hearts, is it not? You've got to take the kids to school, work the job, pick them back up, take care of dinner, clean the house and repeat it all over the next day. It's the mundane existence you all find yourselves in, unable to escape. That feeling of routine, that feeling of helplessness, we've all been there before, we've all had those moments of abyss gazing and if we all look at ourselves in the mirror we would all admit that those moment, those moments where you seen nothing but a deep, dark pit of despair, those thoughts start to enter your head, don't they? That voice in your head, it starts making you wonder if may, just maybe you should just dive head first into that pit. That routine, it drums into your brain, does it not. The predictability of it all... every day the same...
Phil looks down at the ground at shakes his head but as his rather round noggin returns back to camera height, he returns with a glare.
Atken: Fortunately, I don't have those moments. I'm not weak of will, I'm not some kind of self-pitying fool like those of you who were nodding along with me mere seconds ago. For gods sake, I'm a champion, I'm THE champion, if I was to consider myself as part of you, the general public I might as well ask Hank to go load a shotgun, take my out into my lush garden estate and blow my god damn brains out. I have a large issue with the mundane and predictable, it just doesn't suit a man like myself to be associated with it. I mean, take for example this...
Phil takes a step back and gestures towards the aforementioned piece of Survive and Conquer publicity featuring himself and Michael Callahan. He looks up at his own visage with a rather sour and dour look on his face.
Atken: I mean look at it, let it sink in. Let the idea that it is trying to put forward permeate in that ever numbing mind of yours. A battle of politicians? A battle... sure... I don't doubt Survive and Conquer will be a battle, Michael Callahan has proven time and time again to be entirely mentally unstable and no amount of careful analysis can predict the breaking point of a living, breathing loon. No, the problem I have with this wonderful piece of publicity that somehow has been allowed to roll out to the unwashed masses is the idea that I am somehow a politician. Turns out, in the mind of those who deal with APW publicity, those sitting in that wonderfully flush Toronto HQ making a lot of money for little work just because I have a cause I believe in, just because I am willing to fight a good fight, that I have nor will I ever be management's puppet, that because of all of this, I'm somehow labeled as some kind of Machiavellian political figure straight out of House of Cards. It just goes to show you the level of sophisticated thinking that goes on in the upper echelons of this one esteemed company.
Phil puts on a mocking tone.
Atken: “Oh yeah, the Phil Atken, he says some words, he's a politician like the Michael Callahan, PUT IT ON I POSTER, I DREW THIS IN CRAYON”. I do like my quotations every now and then and if you'll indulge me, I'm sure you'll agree that it's “enough to drive you mad”. For those of you too wrecked at the moment after the cocaine bender you no doubt went on after you drew up this wonderful poster, having an opinion doesn't make you a member of the political class. Far from it in fact. Why would I want the taint of politics about my person, if anything, that would muddy my cause, that would muddy my year long battle for sanity in wrestling. I'm no more a politician than Bob Crow. Michael Callahan though, there's a man who is far epitome of the political class, a man who can whip up a crowd on the turn of a dime and then immediately betray his own message without a second thought. He's the kind of many who can stand in front of a camera and say without the slightest hint of irony that his position of an issue has evolved to fit whatever may be the best tactical position for him. I mean look at our very short lived alliance against the ever crumbling Pillars. He is willing to join with me one week, he is willing to stand there and be my brother in arms against Sally Talfourd but the minute our esteemed Asian colleague is out of the picture, he's ready to try and whip you, the drooling idiotic and suicidal APW viewer into a gosh darn frenzy against your true hero. He wants you to believe that he is now standing up for what is just and right and yet he isn't above an ambush with a baseball bat. To me, men of honour don't go around smash people upside the head with weapons when they would be least be expecting it. War criminals, sure, that's their bread and butter but I really feel sorry for anyone buying in to the esteemed Member for Nowhere's new change of heart.
Phil steps back in to centre frame, carefully positioning himself so that he stands in front of the slogan slapped at the bottom of the posters.
Atken: Y'know, I was speaking to a good friend of mine of the other day, surprisingly it wasn't Dirk Dickwood. This friend though, he raised an interesting point about Michael Callahan though, one I hadn't really thought about. Michael Callahan, he's like a weathercock, isn't he? Spinning around, twisting in the wind, trying to find the direction of public opinion, like a weathercock. He's also a giant cock... again like a weathercock. So really, when you think about it, the analogy works on two whole levels, if not more. Callahan is desperate, I'd go as far to say that he is lusting over trying to gain approval from all of you watching this right now. He wants you to want him, he needs you to need him, he's your top cut of meet, he's your choices, he wants to be elected...
Phil shakes his head a little, as if trying to shake something out of his mind.
Atken: Sorry, got caught up in a song quote spiral there. The point is, the match at Survive and Conquer, it's not a battle of the politicians, it's the battle against THE politician. Michael Callahan wants you to cheer him, he wants you to support him, he is desperate for your approval, how else would you explain his nonsensical behaviour at Asylum. He's doing everything he can in his power to get your support. He's the living embodiment of the politician we all hate. If I can just for one day stand in that ring and finally represent all of those he has hurt before me, Sally Talfourd, Anthony Bailey, Calvin Ingram for some reason... then I would be doing a massive favour to all of my fellow competitors in this industry. After all, I may be devious, I may be a man who has certainly used every trick in the book to his advantage but I don't pretend to be a justice crusader like Mr. Callahan. If you think he's turned a new leaf, if you think he isn't the same Michael Callahan who mallicously slammed a baseball bat . Now a dullard like Anthony Bailey, he might buy into that cut and antiquated notion of “respect”, despite the torment and hell that Michael Callahan put before him but as I said, Bailey was brought into this business on false beliefs that he still clings on to to this day. He's still a man who thinks that the better man always wins, that he can "respect" Callahan after Christmas Chaos. It's adorable in a way.
Phil, looking a little red in the fact and indeed a little parched, grabs a glass of water from the side table and begins to gulp it down.
Atken: Still, I suppose since we're talking about dullards being brought into this business under the most of false of pretenses it would logically bring us to the door... well doormat to be more realistic... of one Mr. The GI. Now, Mr. The GI, a puppet of the Callahan Empire is a man with a curiously recordless past and very much a vocal-less present. I mean, at least Hank has an excuse, Hank is a legitimate mute but Mr. The GI... Callahan just doesn't want you to speak does he? He's afraid if you start to talk, if you start to begin to reason things out, if you become... for lack of a better term... self aware that things could get very sticky, messy and oogly indeed. Michael Callahan just seems to be this picture perfect tyrant, willing to use his men as fodder with little regard to their well-being or mental conditioning. Look at GI, a proclaimed killing machine, a man plucked out of a dark past to become an APW megastar at the behest of our own politician. I suppose this is what Mikey views as his contribution to veteran affairs. To have a token veteran on staff, it's a box checking exercise.
Phil smiles to the camera, pulls out a pen from inside his jacket pocket and makes a ticking motion with it before it returns inside his pocket.
Atken: And yet, no greater analysis goes on beyond that. Is Mr. The GI even stable enough to compete? What is the impact of him competing? Say I was to... I don't know... drop him smack on his gurning face, would that bring forth some kind of gruesome war injury that was patched up by Skipper Jack and his glue gun down in the rice fields of Vietnam? That's the kind of stuff that would keep me up and night but Mikeyboy, he just slaps him with a cheap rate pop psychologists and calls it a day for his conscious. It makes me sick, it really does.
Atken begins to rub the back of his skull is a rather concerned manner.
Atken: Now I'll admit, I'm not in the best condition of my career. Turns out shortly after I had the battle of my career against a future Hall of Famer, some nutjob with a baseball bat thought it would just be the bestest thing in the world to slam it into my innocent team of advisors as some kind of weird power proving point. After he spoke about honour and justice and how he would never sully himself through underhanded measures. Almost as if he was some kind of hypocrite, perish the thought. Now, through the infintite wisdom of our Beloved, Dear Reggie, the Dear Leader of Asylum, he has placed me in the ring, a mere week away from battling this fraud, against a man he picked out of obscurity to be his human meat shield. You'd think that somehow, in return, perhaps, just perhaps, Mikeyboy, he'd have to go up against my own monster. A man who would die for me, not because I paid him to but because of a bond forged between everyone who works for me. A bond that no one in APW can quite penetrate or understand. Michael Callahan up against Hank, the would seem fair to me and yet nope. Here we stand. Me against GI and Mike gets the show off. It seems like my cries of conspiracy are cliché by this point but really... I mean really...
Atken pulls out a sheet of paper from his inside pocket (an amazingly versatile pocket) and begins to peruse it before folding it back up and returning it to the pocket whence it came.
Atken: I've found my standing in this company has recently been questioned. A recent poll of my esteemed colleagues on the roster has found me to be considered the mere 16th best wrestler in this company. Can you imagine it? The APW Heavyweight Champion, the man who has stood tall against Sally Talfourd, Jason Kash, Johnny Knuckles, TJ, Keaton Saint... hell even Yarmouth... only 16th best in the company. No doubt these are the same colleagues already gleefully proclaiming my immient lost of the title I have held so dearly for mere weeks. A title that it took my a year long journey to even come close to caressing. The World Heavyweight Championship that I held high after destroying a false idol and yet... I'm not considered to be the best of the best. I'm not even considered to be better Johnny Rebel, a man who ended his active wrestling career writing fan fiction and powerlessly swinging around a crowbar. Perhaps I shouldn't let things such as that get to me, yet they do. They eat away at me. It's that kind of thought that just can't seem to escape your skull. Just eating away at you, eating, eating, eating... it's really quite a nuisance if I'm to be quite honest.
So, I have two thoughts just running wild inside my mind right now. One, I want to expose how careless Michael Callahan is to use a poor vet like GI as his own personal meat shield and two, I want to show these mindless drone who dare to doubt me, who have shown their champion, their leader a lack of suitable respect. I mean god damn it, beneath Mark Mania. MARK MANIA. Are you kidding me?
Yet I find if I put them together, Michael Callahan will not be able to sit at ringside patiently if he is a living, breathing human with a soul. I don't believe he is though, I believe he cares far more about this title shot of his than he does his own cohort. I bet he wouldn't dare stop what I am planning to do to GI because what I envisage happening to that poor man to prove the Megastars wrong, to expose you Mike... well...
I suppose that's just something you'll have to find out come Sunday.
Atken: Ah, APW, glad you could join me. Sometimes it's just downright difficult to find the right timing to having one of these little heart to hearts, is it not? You've got to take the kids to school, work the job, pick them back up, take care of dinner, clean the house and repeat it all over the next day. It's the mundane existence you all find yourselves in, unable to escape. That feeling of routine, that feeling of helplessness, we've all been there before, we've all had those moments of abyss gazing and if we all look at ourselves in the mirror we would all admit that those moment, those moments where you seen nothing but a deep, dark pit of despair, those thoughts start to enter your head, don't they? That voice in your head, it starts making you wonder if may, just maybe you should just dive head first into that pit. That routine, it drums into your brain, does it not. The predictability of it all... every day the same...
Phil looks down at the ground at shakes his head but as his rather round noggin returns back to camera height, he returns with a glare.
Atken: Fortunately, I don't have those moments. I'm not weak of will, I'm not some kind of self-pitying fool like those of you who were nodding along with me mere seconds ago. For gods sake, I'm a champion, I'm THE champion, if I was to consider myself as part of you, the general public I might as well ask Hank to go load a shotgun, take my out into my lush garden estate and blow my god damn brains out. I have a large issue with the mundane and predictable, it just doesn't suit a man like myself to be associated with it. I mean, take for example this...
Phil takes a step back and gestures towards the aforementioned piece of Survive and Conquer publicity featuring himself and Michael Callahan. He looks up at his own visage with a rather sour and dour look on his face.
Atken: I mean look at it, let it sink in. Let the idea that it is trying to put forward permeate in that ever numbing mind of yours. A battle of politicians? A battle... sure... I don't doubt Survive and Conquer will be a battle, Michael Callahan has proven time and time again to be entirely mentally unstable and no amount of careful analysis can predict the breaking point of a living, breathing loon. No, the problem I have with this wonderful piece of publicity that somehow has been allowed to roll out to the unwashed masses is the idea that I am somehow a politician. Turns out, in the mind of those who deal with APW publicity, those sitting in that wonderfully flush Toronto HQ making a lot of money for little work just because I have a cause I believe in, just because I am willing to fight a good fight, that I have nor will I ever be management's puppet, that because of all of this, I'm somehow labeled as some kind of Machiavellian political figure straight out of House of Cards. It just goes to show you the level of sophisticated thinking that goes on in the upper echelons of this one esteemed company.
Phil puts on a mocking tone.
Atken: “Oh yeah, the Phil Atken, he says some words, he's a politician like the Michael Callahan, PUT IT ON I POSTER, I DREW THIS IN CRAYON”. I do like my quotations every now and then and if you'll indulge me, I'm sure you'll agree that it's “enough to drive you mad”. For those of you too wrecked at the moment after the cocaine bender you no doubt went on after you drew up this wonderful poster, having an opinion doesn't make you a member of the political class. Far from it in fact. Why would I want the taint of politics about my person, if anything, that would muddy my cause, that would muddy my year long battle for sanity in wrestling. I'm no more a politician than Bob Crow. Michael Callahan though, there's a man who is far epitome of the political class, a man who can whip up a crowd on the turn of a dime and then immediately betray his own message without a second thought. He's the kind of many who can stand in front of a camera and say without the slightest hint of irony that his position of an issue has evolved to fit whatever may be the best tactical position for him. I mean look at our very short lived alliance against the ever crumbling Pillars. He is willing to join with me one week, he is willing to stand there and be my brother in arms against Sally Talfourd but the minute our esteemed Asian colleague is out of the picture, he's ready to try and whip you, the drooling idiotic and suicidal APW viewer into a gosh darn frenzy against your true hero. He wants you to believe that he is now standing up for what is just and right and yet he isn't above an ambush with a baseball bat. To me, men of honour don't go around smash people upside the head with weapons when they would be least be expecting it. War criminals, sure, that's their bread and butter but I really feel sorry for anyone buying in to the esteemed Member for Nowhere's new change of heart.
Phil steps back in to centre frame, carefully positioning himself so that he stands in front of the slogan slapped at the bottom of the posters.
Atken: Y'know, I was speaking to a good friend of mine of the other day, surprisingly it wasn't Dirk Dickwood. This friend though, he raised an interesting point about Michael Callahan though, one I hadn't really thought about. Michael Callahan, he's like a weathercock, isn't he? Spinning around, twisting in the wind, trying to find the direction of public opinion, like a weathercock. He's also a giant cock... again like a weathercock. So really, when you think about it, the analogy works on two whole levels, if not more. Callahan is desperate, I'd go as far to say that he is lusting over trying to gain approval from all of you watching this right now. He wants you to want him, he needs you to need him, he's your top cut of meet, he's your choices, he wants to be elected...
Phil shakes his head a little, as if trying to shake something out of his mind.
Atken: Sorry, got caught up in a song quote spiral there. The point is, the match at Survive and Conquer, it's not a battle of the politicians, it's the battle against THE politician. Michael Callahan wants you to cheer him, he wants you to support him, he is desperate for your approval, how else would you explain his nonsensical behaviour at Asylum. He's doing everything he can in his power to get your support. He's the living embodiment of the politician we all hate. If I can just for one day stand in that ring and finally represent all of those he has hurt before me, Sally Talfourd, Anthony Bailey, Calvin Ingram for some reason... then I would be doing a massive favour to all of my fellow competitors in this industry. After all, I may be devious, I may be a man who has certainly used every trick in the book to his advantage but I don't pretend to be a justice crusader like Mr. Callahan. If you think he's turned a new leaf, if you think he isn't the same Michael Callahan who mallicously slammed a baseball bat . Now a dullard like Anthony Bailey, he might buy into that cut and antiquated notion of “respect”, despite the torment and hell that Michael Callahan put before him but as I said, Bailey was brought into this business on false beliefs that he still clings on to to this day. He's still a man who thinks that the better man always wins, that he can "respect" Callahan after Christmas Chaos. It's adorable in a way.
Phil, looking a little red in the fact and indeed a little parched, grabs a glass of water from the side table and begins to gulp it down.
Atken: Still, I suppose since we're talking about dullards being brought into this business under the most of false of pretenses it would logically bring us to the door... well doormat to be more realistic... of one Mr. The GI. Now, Mr. The GI, a puppet of the Callahan Empire is a man with a curiously recordless past and very much a vocal-less present. I mean, at least Hank has an excuse, Hank is a legitimate mute but Mr. The GI... Callahan just doesn't want you to speak does he? He's afraid if you start to talk, if you start to begin to reason things out, if you become... for lack of a better term... self aware that things could get very sticky, messy and oogly indeed. Michael Callahan just seems to be this picture perfect tyrant, willing to use his men as fodder with little regard to their well-being or mental conditioning. Look at GI, a proclaimed killing machine, a man plucked out of a dark past to become an APW megastar at the behest of our own politician. I suppose this is what Mikey views as his contribution to veteran affairs. To have a token veteran on staff, it's a box checking exercise.
Phil smiles to the camera, pulls out a pen from inside his jacket pocket and makes a ticking motion with it before it returns inside his pocket.
Atken: And yet, no greater analysis goes on beyond that. Is Mr. The GI even stable enough to compete? What is the impact of him competing? Say I was to... I don't know... drop him smack on his gurning face, would that bring forth some kind of gruesome war injury that was patched up by Skipper Jack and his glue gun down in the rice fields of Vietnam? That's the kind of stuff that would keep me up and night but Mikeyboy, he just slaps him with a cheap rate pop psychologists and calls it a day for his conscious. It makes me sick, it really does.
Atken begins to rub the back of his skull is a rather concerned manner.
Atken: Now I'll admit, I'm not in the best condition of my career. Turns out shortly after I had the battle of my career against a future Hall of Famer, some nutjob with a baseball bat thought it would just be the bestest thing in the world to slam it into my innocent team of advisors as some kind of weird power proving point. After he spoke about honour and justice and how he would never sully himself through underhanded measures. Almost as if he was some kind of hypocrite, perish the thought. Now, through the infintite wisdom of our Beloved, Dear Reggie, the Dear Leader of Asylum, he has placed me in the ring, a mere week away from battling this fraud, against a man he picked out of obscurity to be his human meat shield. You'd think that somehow, in return, perhaps, just perhaps, Mikeyboy, he'd have to go up against my own monster. A man who would die for me, not because I paid him to but because of a bond forged between everyone who works for me. A bond that no one in APW can quite penetrate or understand. Michael Callahan up against Hank, the would seem fair to me and yet nope. Here we stand. Me against GI and Mike gets the show off. It seems like my cries of conspiracy are cliché by this point but really... I mean really...
Atken pulls out a sheet of paper from his inside pocket (an amazingly versatile pocket) and begins to peruse it before folding it back up and returning it to the pocket whence it came.
Atken: I've found my standing in this company has recently been questioned. A recent poll of my esteemed colleagues on the roster has found me to be considered the mere 16th best wrestler in this company. Can you imagine it? The APW Heavyweight Champion, the man who has stood tall against Sally Talfourd, Jason Kash, Johnny Knuckles, TJ, Keaton Saint... hell even Yarmouth... only 16th best in the company. No doubt these are the same colleagues already gleefully proclaiming my immient lost of the title I have held so dearly for mere weeks. A title that it took my a year long journey to even come close to caressing. The World Heavyweight Championship that I held high after destroying a false idol and yet... I'm not considered to be the best of the best. I'm not even considered to be better Johnny Rebel, a man who ended his active wrestling career writing fan fiction and powerlessly swinging around a crowbar. Perhaps I shouldn't let things such as that get to me, yet they do. They eat away at me. It's that kind of thought that just can't seem to escape your skull. Just eating away at you, eating, eating, eating... it's really quite a nuisance if I'm to be quite honest.
So, I have two thoughts just running wild inside my mind right now. One, I want to expose how careless Michael Callahan is to use a poor vet like GI as his own personal meat shield and two, I want to show these mindless drone who dare to doubt me, who have shown their champion, their leader a lack of suitable respect. I mean god damn it, beneath Mark Mania. MARK MANIA. Are you kidding me?
Yet I find if I put them together, Michael Callahan will not be able to sit at ringside patiently if he is a living, breathing human with a soul. I don't believe he is though, I believe he cares far more about this title shot of his than he does his own cohort. I bet he wouldn't dare stop what I am planning to do to GI because what I envisage happening to that poor man to prove the Megastars wrong, to expose you Mike... well...
I suppose that's just something you'll have to find out come Sunday.
