Month: August 2020

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
photo courtesy: Matt Altmix

As excited as I am to have my brog back up and running, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about how absolutely none of this happens if not for my brother.  For pretty much as long as I’ve known him, he’s been the rock in which my internet presence has always existed upon, and he’s literally hosted almost every iteration of my site(s) going on three decades now.

Back in like 2000, before my original webhost expired, he volunteered to host a mirror of my original site.  Eventually the subscription lapsed, and then the mirror became the primary.  As a joke, he purchased the domain needelsischeating.net to also point to my site, but then because I was poor and stupid, I let my domain lapse, get cybersquatted by eBay, and then needelsischeating.net became my primary domain.  Eventually, I would register totfc.net, which for those of you who don’t know, stands for TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN because when it comes to actual blogging, I firmly believe that is what I am, and it would become the domain I’ve had since, and my brother hosted it the entire time, all the way from when it was a catch-all site for a lot of all my internet bullshit, to when in 2010, I switched it to a WordPress, because I realized that the brogging was really the only thing I actually cared about.

It was a sad few years when the brog went down, because life gets in the way, and he had moved from North Carolina to Louisiana and then finally to Bratislava, and naturally, servers need to physically move as well.  And he had things going on in his life, as I had things going on in mine, as does everyone, so getting the site back up definitely sat on the back burner for all of us.

But with my daughter on the way and eventually having arrived, I always felt that I wanted to have my brog back up, because one, it was a logical and desired project for me to work on while I was out on paternity leave, but two, given the fact that I’ve definitely got plenty to say about being a new dad, and raising a baby in the midst of a pandemic, I really wanted to have an outlet in which I could actually share my thoughts, emotions and experiences to anyone who might want to stumble across and find my blatherings one day, if not my daughter herself, hopefully when she’s like 23, grown-up and capable of understanding and comprehending the words I’ve slapped onto the internet.  I mean, I’ve been brogging for 20 years now, who’s to say I won’t be doing it when she’s that old?

And as he always does, my brother came through, and took the time to dust off all my old shit, put it back up online, and put me into a position to where I could resurrect the brog.  I could’ve just picked back up from where I last left off, but I figured now was as good of time as any to try and at least remain somewhat in the present in terms of platform, and almost all of my free time over the last three months have been spent working away at this task, which brings us back to today.

I love him more than Floridians love Publix chicken tender subs, Philadelphians love Wawa, and more than he loves Bojangles.  And I want him, and all of my zero readers to know that, that I treasure his brotherhood, friendship and companionship, and that I thank him every single day for being the brother I never had, and hosting my decades of internet nonsense that really doesn’t mean anything to anyone except for me.

Some words for Kamala the wrestler

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I feel that I needed to clarify the disambiguation, because given the fact that the name “Kamala” is exploding the internet right now as Senator Kamala Harris has been formally tapped to be Joe Biden’s VP running mate, there has been an ironically cringey overlap between she, and James “Kamala” Harris, the professional wrestler who has just recently passed away.

When mythical wife stated to me that “some wrestler died,” I quickly did a Google search to see that it was Kamala who had passed away.  I’ll be honest, Kamala “The Ugandan Giant” wasn’t necessarily a guy I cared a tremendous amount, as I always thought he was more of a racist caricature of a character.  And given the fact that he was 70 years old at his passing, it was one of those moments of insensitivity that I felt where at least he lived to see 70, and wasn’t a guy who was found dead in a hotel bathroom from an overdose or heart explosion from a lifetime of steroids and painkillers.

But then as a little time passed, and it was revealed that Kamala had passed away, basically because of coronavirus, then I winced and felt guilty for no-selling the news of his passing, because now it wasn’t so much a passing because a guy had lived out his life, as much as it was a guy having what remaining life he had left to live, stripped away from him, on account of an extremely preventable sickness that shouldn’t been neutralized like three months ago, and now that’s something to be sad about.

As I said, Kamala wasn’t tremendously important to me, growing up as a wrestling fan, but even I knew that Kamala was a guy who’s career transcended three decades in the industry, and has rubbed shoulders with countless industry legends in the process.  In the 80’s he feuded with Hulk Hogan, in the 90’s he feuded with the Undertaker, and he even came back in the early 2000’s to still take some bumps and put over the then-current generation of performers.

In fact, it was actually in 2005 when I probably came the closest to marking out for Kamala, when on an episode of RAW, he got into an altercation with Umaga, who was being pushed pretty hard as a bruising heel at the time, and there was a segment where the husky Samoan and the husky Ugandan were up in each other’s faces, and I was like “oh shit, this is really happening!”  They would have a match where Kamala more or less got squashed, but I can admit that for about five minutes, Kamala was pretty much the baddest guy in the industry when he stood toe-to-toe with the WWE’s top heel for a brief match.

Rarely is a loss of life is ever not sad, and the wrestling industry loves to throw around the title of “legend” to all sorts of former professional wrestlers, as long as they didn’t burn bridges with the biggest promoters.  Like, I’d seen Marty Jannetty being called a legend; the guy’s career’s legacy is being the guy Shawn Michaels smashed through a window, and now he’s more known for wanting to bang his own daughter and admitting to murder on social media.  He’s definitely no fucking legend.

Let’s make it clear that in spite of my own personal ambivalence towards the character of Kamala, he is, undoubtedly a legend.  His career transcended decades, he had feuds with legitimately some of the biggest names in the industry, and had a character that basically proved that black don’t crack, as when he showed up in 2005 looking basically the same as he did in 1985.

Despite living to 70, the man frankly should have kept living, but ‘Murica being what it is today, even the Ugandan Giant from Deepest, Darkest Africa was in the prime age of susceptibility, and unfortunately the business and the world lost a life that should very well have been preventable, which is the saddest part of all of this.

Happy trails, James Harris.

New Father Brogging, #016

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to the arrival of my daughter, I read a book about new fatherhood, as well as watched a few videos and read some stuff on the internet in regards to new parenthood.  Naturally, there’s a tremendous amount of overlap when it comes to the rigors of being new parents, and they often times make it sound like the sleep deprivation and dirty diapers are the worst things since the Bubonic Plague.

I guess I’ve conditioned myself fairly well throughout the years, to where I can operate on low amounts of sleep and make do with coffee alternatively, so the sleep deprivation wasn’t nearly as hellacious as all accounts make it sound like it’s going to be, and I’ve cleaned so much poop and urine from a lifetime of having pets that poop and urine from my own offspring doesn’t seem remotely close to being disgusting or nauseating.

Needless to say, it’s tempting karma to say raising a child has been anywhere close to easy, because it most certainly has not been, but when it comes to the things that most outlets and resources cite as being the worst things in the early stages, have been basically nothing to me.

I guess I should’ve started reading more books about once the baby has come home, and the things that start to happen after the third of fourth months, because I feel like now, we’re getting to the stage where I’m beginning to become frazzled and unglued at times, because I frankly am not always handling the pressures of trying to placate a wailing baby in the best manners.

Long story short, I didn’t know about sleep regression, and I didn’t really prepare myself to the rigors of teething.  And when they’re hitting simultaneously, resulting in a screaming baby that is in pain and won’t nap, and then they stay up past their nap time and hit their next feeding window and then they’re overtired and mixing in wailing about that and won’t go to sleep and we can’t put her to sleep because then she’ll never be able to go back to sleep when we get to her actual bed time; that’s where I feel like I need to have an arm that’s twelve feet long, because that’s about as much of wrist I want to slit when the shit hits the fan sometimes.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #016” →

Somehow, being a Marty Jannetty managed to get darker

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s funny, as I’d been going through all of my old posts from the last decade, I came across this one from 2017, which was this cringe-worthy story about how Marty Jannetty supposedly wanted to bang his own daughter.  The span between 2016-present, I’d forgotten a lot of the things I’d written, because they never saw the light of day on my brog in the first place, but there’s no other way to describe the situation – Marty Jannetty apparently wanted to bang his own daughter, and the most fortunate thing that could’ve happened was that the biological test proved that they were not actually related.

But basically, I declared that the definition of being a Marty Jannetty was no longer exclusive to being the weaker half of any professional wrestling tag team, but also implied a man who would want to bang his own daughter.  For example, it could be said that the current president of the United States has almost made some Marty Jannetty-like remarks, like when he stated that if Ivanka were not his daughter, he’d probably be dating her.

The point is, I declared that the definition of a Marty Jannetty had changed back in 2017 based on some ironically fucked up behavior, but very, very shortly after revisiting that post, one of my friends shares with me a text message that basically just said:

Marty Jannetty confessed to murder on Facebook

Naturally, this friend never really gives me any context to remarks like this, so I had to look it up, but well yeah, it basically looks like Marty Jannetty confessed to committing a murder, on theFacebook.

In the grand spectrum of things, as fucked up as potential incest is, I’d still rank it not as bad to, potential murder.  So I guess perhaps it’s gotten even darker to be defined as a Marty Jannetty, because now that would imply that you might be a murderer, and if we want to get specific, someone who can kill a guy and that will ultimately confess to it on social media, 30 years later.

Either way, I’m sure the Nick Jacksons, Chuck Taylors, Angelo Dawkins, Tuckers and Erick Rowans never liked being called Marty Jannettys in its original definition, but I think it’s safe to say that perhaps we should start looking for new terminology for the weaker half of tag teams now, because ‘ol Marty is taking his shit into some really dark and undesirable to be compared to places these days.

New Father Brogging, #015

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, I have started my paternity leave.  Regardless of what coronavirus has done to the world, this was close to the original plan to take my leave, because in a pre-COVID19 world, I work all through most of the summer while mythical wife is on maternity leave/summer break, and when she goes back to school, I tag in with paternity leave, and stretch out the not needing daycare for another six weeks.

Ironically, as I’ve said numerous times at this point, coronavirus has unintentionally given me a whole bunch of bonus paternity time, as I’d been able to be working from home throughout the entire summer, and almost entirely since my daughter was born.  For all the bad it’s done throughout the world, I ironically have to be somewhat grateful for its existence in the sense that because of it, I’ve gotten so much extra time to bond with my child before taking off officially.

And right in time too, because it was made no more clear than the last week or so, that my performance was deemed to be inconveniencing by my superiors at work, and I had a rather uncomfortable talking to about how much they think I suck at my job, despite the fact that we’re in the middle of a pandemic, I can’t get child care no matter how much we might all want it, because my baby was born medically fragile and Americans can’t be trusted to socially distance and remain healthy, so a lot of childcare during business hours still falls onto me.

To the point where I’m actually taking this week with my own PTO, and rolling directly into paternity leave, because I’m over the bullshit and the passive aggressive swipes and friendly reminders, and ready to just spend some quality time with my daughter, without feeling any need to be worried about my inbox filling up or some bullshit virtual meetings to have to attend.

So for the next seven weeks, good riddance to work, and hello to daddy time.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #015” →