Catching ALS from the Ice Challenge
The Ill
Five Fingers — One Orifice
Where is your wife’s boyfriend?
I want to speak to the man of the house.
I don’t care for passive aggression. It is unbecoming.
I care even less for the lamentations of passive aggressors and habitual line steppers.
There is no shame in being wrong. There is no shame in losing — respecting a formidable opponent.
There is shame in denying reality. Belief perseverance in the face of disconfirming evidence.
A masculine reality-based conflict sequence is to say a name. Offer to talk it out. Then, if discourse reaches a point of no return, take it outside and figure it out.
Immediate clarification. Everyone knows the stakes.
Incessant chirping, demanding attention, then shrinking into a defensive victim pose once attention is granted, is ridiculous.
The internet allows people to initiate conflict without experiencing the corrective forces that were once the terminal exit.
In the age of the screen, the hands-on aspect of conflict resolution stopped being an option. As a result, the digital aspect has failed to protect the online tough guy from themselves.
Words the user would never utter in person during a face-to-face interaction get thrown around like digital confetti, in hopes of making a spectacle.
Momentum
Keep that same energy.
To the unskilled, skill looks like luck.
When the passive aggressor starts talking greasily. Watch the focus. Whether anything is off-limits.
Digging for dirt every night. I’m talking deeper than Barry White.
Meandering descent into vulgarity.
Observe the chasm between the claimed superficial motivation and the obvious evidence of something deeper and unresolved.
Perverted status maneuvering dressed as intellectual discourse. The belief that dragging someone down, smutting up another's name, will elevate one's own.
The floral aroma of self-importance attempting to mask the stench of insecurity.
Then, ultimately, how the aggressor responds to equal or greater counter-aggression.
Enter the victor/victim internal glitch. They reserve the right to be both, at the same time. Like a bipolar transformer.
Excuses. Bad luck, nepotism, the sun was in their eyes.
Anything except the admission that a grave miscalculation was made.
Snitches Get Stitches
Grade 7 was a great confusion. Kids from various schools were dumped together. About half came from a sister school that had functioned as a prep feeder for this new high school.
Residue of an original order was present, but the fractures were palpable. Many carried legacy names. Some had multiple older brothers. “Fair” was never a consideration. Teachers talked about equality, but even at that age, the concept was laughable. It took a little over a year for the new order to fully crystallize.
AOL had instant messaging in a chokehold. My first troll-based exchange came from a dude over a girl whom I had barely known. Best friend of her older brother. Two years older than me. One energy online, a non-existent energy in person.
As bad as the boys were, the girls were worse. There is nothing meaner than a fifteen-year-old girl with a keyboard. If she wasn't chosen by the boy she liked, the girl he chose was in for a rough ride. I watched the rejected one go to work — methodical. If the target had unalived herself, I doubt it would have satisfied the aggrieved. The boys were saints in comparison.
People could talk spicy online and rumours spread like wildfire — but sometimes you had to answer in person for what you typed. The online/reality overlap kept people accountable on a short timeline.
Hands-on conflict resolution was always on the menu. Social order had to be established, and the self-sorting sometimes required a heavy-handed approach.
The feral males had torn a hole in a nearby fence leading to residential woods — a designated smoking zone behind the pines of one of the neighbours’ houses. It doubled as a conflict resolution center. As for the fights, many showed a lot of heart. Skill left something to be desired. This lasted until a math teacher raided the enclave.
We adapted. One of the older boys had brought in boxing mitts, kept on hand for any problem that couldn’t wait for the weekend or off-campus. There was a large washroom on the second floor of one of the boarding houses. The two static-ridden gentlemen would lace up. Designated boys ran security — holding the doors closed to buy time if a teacher attempted to encroach. A select few were permitted to witness the fervent exchange of ideas. It worked remarkably well.
Fights didn’t last long, but they were conclusive.
If you were beaten but gave a good showing, it was respected.
Shenanigans led to gatings — think detention, on a weekend. Sunday gatings ran a few hours, typically for those behind on schoolwork. Saturdays were for general mischief and could stretch from a few hours to a full day. A major gating was the full Saturday-Sunday combo. Jobs assigned varied in levels of awful: cleaning behind the deep fryer with a blunt, heavy, yet wholly inadequate object; graffiti removal in the science lab; snow shovelling for the sake of snow shovelling.
I was facing tiempo. They offered a reduction if I coughed up the names.
They handed me a quadruple major like I was an overachiever. The plan was to make an example out of me. It backfired. It was the school record, and technically, it wasn’t supposed to be possible. Anything beyond a double major meant suspension or, depending on severity, expulsion.
I never understood how we cruised right past that triple, straight to a grand slam.
Cold Blooded
Fiction can reveal the hero journey and hater pathology from circumspect angles. Victor and victim origin stories. Challenges that have been overcome or wounds that never healed. The earned self-respect or the inability to metabolize defeat.
This ties into a protagonist cut from a fabric woven in a foreign land. J.M. Wayland’s Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood — think Harry Potter, if Potter had balls.
Dorian embodies everything Harry lacks. Rowling’s orphan waits to be rescued. Dorian doesn’t wait to be chosen. He carves a name for himself in the arena.
Harry is raised on the absence of consequence and submerged in perpetual victimhood. Dorian isn’t alone, isn’t rejected, and isn’t building a grievance-based personality. He’s forged by grandparents who instilled a rock-solid sense of self — the kind of paternal ballast that teaches boys not to make emotion-based decisions. Especially not jealousy or fear.
The book reads as an honourable foundation to male character development, whereas Harry Potter reads as soft, feminized wish fulfillment. Earned inner strength rather than self-pity.
Harry runs headfirst into a wall and hopes no one notices.
Dorian, chin up, pops the latches and makes those doors slide.
The HVIII
Skeletor is the perfect villain because he's already dead. Blueprint for the modern online hater.
Skeletor can’t win. He’s not even comfortable in his own skin.
He-Man has Castle Grayskull. Skeletor has Snake Mountain. Envy architecture.
Skeletor — originally Keldor. Depending on who is telling the story, he was denied the throne or was never a legitimate heir to begin with. Turned to dark magic and had his face melted off in a failed attack.
Aristocratic resentment — a man who believed he was owed power and position, was denied, and permitted that to define everything that came after.
Not generic villainy. A specific wound that calcified into an entire identity.
He-Man doesn't hate Skeletor. He defeats him and moves on.
The outer appearance matches the interior mindset. The wound that wouldn’t heal.
You stop seeing what you have and only see the shape of what you don't.
