Tag: death

Happy trails, Virgil

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lonely no more: Mike Jones, better known as former WWE wrestler, Virgil, passes away at the age of 61

I know it seems like every single wrestler from yesteryear that passes away was a favorite of mine in some way shape or fashion, and after twenty years of brogging, there’s no shortage of wrestler eulogies that I’ve written in my own way, at this point.

But Virgil, this guy, was truly a guy that I can’t say was necessarily a favorite of mine, but he was something of an icon in his own way, that I was fixated with, pretty much from the time I learned of his existence until the day he passed.

When I first got into wrestling, a lot of it had to do with the fact that I actually got into a WWF video game first, the arcade version of WWF Superstars, before I actually parlayed it into indulging in the real life variant of the game on television, into the life-long fandom that still maintain today. 

In the game, the final bosses were the tag team of “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase and Andre the Giant; but before you actually started playing against them, there’s like a 12-second cutscene prior to the match where you see “Mean Gene” Okerlund interviewing both DiBiase and Andre, but also standing with them was a jacked black guy in a shiny tuxedo counting money.

When I started watching wrestling, and the first time I laid eyes on the real-life Million Dollar Man, sure enough, there was the same jacked black guy accompanying him, holding the money, and that was when I first learned of the existence of the real-life Virgil.

Little did I know that he was named Virgil, as a personal attack from Vince McMahon to rival promoter/booker/wrestler Dusty Rhodes, whose real name was actually Virgil, and in only a manner that could come from Vince McMahon, he slapped basically a slave persona onto a black man and called him Virgil.

But throughout the years, it became quickly apparent that despite Virgil’s imposing stature and menacing scowl, he was tantamount to the WWF’s punching bag to the stars, and in just a few short years of getting into wrestling, I’d seen Virgil get his ass beat by Hulk Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior, Macho Man Randy Savage, and Hacksaw Jim Duggan among others.  He was a jobber before I even knew what a jobber was, a term I wouldn’t learn until like 12 years later.

Continue reading “Happy trails, Virgil” →

The worst dream of my life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic about it either, because I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream in my life that upon waking up, it reduces me to breaking down into sobbing, I need nearly 30 minutes to bring myself back to earth, and it proceeds to ruin the entire day because I can’t stop thinking about it, and thinking about it fills up the wells again and it’s moar crying all over again.  Telling my wife about it floods the gates one more time, and I can’t even bring myself to write about it until an entire day has passed because it apparently did that much of a number on me.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty safe to say that this was the worst dream I’ve ever had in my entire life.

In a nutshell, I was dying, which I can’t really say has ever really bothered me in the past, but then I had kids, and the number one drawback to no longer living would be the inability to watch and experience their growth and now the thought of death isn’t something to be so ambivalent about anymore.

But in this dream, not only was I dying, I was basically otherwise alive and fine, but facing an impending, for lack of a better term, euthanization.  I had something that was going to definitively kill me, and for whatever reason, it would be best to be put to sleep lest I suffer a gruesome painful demise.  I had a scheduled death date and time in place, and I was basically spending my time in this dream trying to tie up loose ends, and try and make the transition into the world without me in it, as seamless as possible.

Two specific moments stood out the most that I can recall the most, which was a conversation with mythical wife, explaining that after I’m gone, I am fine if she wanted to ever remarry in the future, and obviously to just keep the girls in mind when looking for someone else.  She was more torn up about the conversation we were having than I was, which is probably not necessarily true to reality, seeing as how I probably shed tears way more than she does on the regular.

However that didn’t last long, because it was the other moment that I remember which ultimately ended up being the breaking point in my dream.  I was on my last day, and while walking around the house with my wife further discussing things to keep in mind and things that were settled, I realized that I only had about an hour left before my death appointment, and I proceeded to have a panic attack about why I wasn’t spending this time with my children. 

I frantically ran down the stairs and it was at this point in which I finally woke up.  It was 5:21 am, and I lay there for a few seconds coming to the realiazation that it was all just a dream.  I wasn’t dying, and I wasn’t going to be taken away from my wife and children.  It didn’t matter though, in the seconds that followed, I began openly weeping and the tears came pouring out, fat, hot and wet down my face. 

I couldn’t get back to sleep after a dream like that, so I went downstairs with the dog to take her out early, since she already perked up knowing that I had awoken.  Afterward, I meandered aimlessly downstairs, and gulped down some water since I had woken up with the driest mouth ever afterward.  Must been the blood pressure medication, which did state such could be a side effect; nothing was mentioned about lucid, horrible dreams though.

I sat in the media room in the dark, just replaying the dream in my head, and crying some more.  I clicked on the baby monitor to feel the most immense relief at seeing my two girls peacefully sleeping away in their rooms, knowing that I’d get to see them in just a few hours when they woke up.

Eventually I went back to bed, since rational thinking finally came back to me and I figured it would be best to at least lay down and try to sleep, even if it wouldn’t come, just so I could be warm and comfortable if anything at all.  I don’t remember falling back asleep, but I do remember being awoken by the alarm, that really wasn’t much long afterward.

My day was effectively ruined after that, and I had to make sure I kept my mind on the tasks at hand, because every time my mind wandered back to the dream, I would begin to feel tears welling up again, and crying in the office wasn’t something that I really wanted to have happen.

Point is, it’s not a difficult reach to say that this really was the worst dream that I’ve ever had in my life.  It’s like I can’t call it a nightmare, because there wasn’t anything unrealistically frightening, aside from the ability to schedule a voluntary euthanization, but the scenario of being a situation where I couldn’t see my kids ever again is something that could very well happen, and that alone puts the fear of god into me like nothing else.

Happy Trails, Bob and Arleen

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Talk about an absolutely brutal week as far as fandoms, nostalgia and symbols of millennial childhood go.  Wrestling fans had to endure the passing of a legend, and a sudden departure of a star that wasn’t anywhere near the heights he was destined for, but then fans of the same television I grew up watching had to bear witness as a legend passed, and an icon that defined basically an entire television series.

I don’t particularly have a ton to say about Bob Barker or Arleen Sorkin, at least nothing new from one of the many countless tributes on the internet there are for either of them, but it hit me enough in the feels when both of them left us to where I still feel like at the very least, documenting it in my own brog to try and emphasize at the very least, my appreciation for them and what they did.

Obviously, at 99 years of age, it’s easy to say that Bob Barker did not leave us to soon, and he most definitely lived a full and successful life and career.  Cue the bittersweet jokes about how if anyone was going to ace the big wheel game of getting as close to 100 without going over, it’s Bob Barker.

But like many, the OG Price Is Right was the show that we all watched when we were home sick from school, or over summer vacations, because at least where I grew up, it was always on at 11 am, obviously not a time in which we could watch it at school.  But Bob Barker’s talent was so effortlessly immense that it didn’t matter if you were nine years old, 29 years old, 59 years old or 79 years old, his delivery, his smooth on-screen charisma and charm made him watchable, made him entertaining and made the show the legendary program it was, all because of him.

I always enjoyed watching the show, playing along with the showcase, screaming at the television when contestants didn’t ever seem to realize that the items on the show were always marked up 5000% and undershot their estimates, and of course loved Plinko.

Drew Carey’s variant of the show is garbage in comparison, and as far as I’m concerned, the show ended when Bob Barker retired.  There was once an incident where a contestant hit the nail on the head in the final showdown at the end of the show, and Drew Carey immediately deadpanned him and killed the episode, because he thought that the guy must have been cheating; most everyone was quick to point out that if that had happened under Bob Barker’s watch, he would have sold it like the greatest achievement of mankind, and made it into a memorable event. 

There are just some things that can never be replaced, and Bob Barker is most definitely one of them.  The show is better off discontinuing, than to let Drew Carey sink the prestige and equity that Bob built with his legendary run.

Continue reading “Happy Trails, Bob and Arleen” →

Happy Trails, Windham Rotunda

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Talk about a brutal week for the wrestling business; losing a genuine icon, legend and forefather of the industry on one day, and then losing one of the most captivating and yet to be fully untapped stars of today, very much in the category of having gone way too soon, in Windham Rotunda, whom most people know primarily as Bray Wyatt.

I’m very deliberate in using his real name over Bray Wyatt, because with no disrespect to the the departed, I can’t say that I was really ever that big of a fan of Bray Wyatt.  The whole supernatural character is something that I’m clearly not in the right demographic to really be a fan of.  And as much as I did like the originality and intrigue he brought to the table earlier in his run as Bray Wyatt, I do think his whole character evolution went from weird to progressively weirder and more bizarre, and not in good ways either.

I loved the whole creepy southern gothic cult leader of the original Bray Wyatt persona, but then that it literally killed by Randy Orton in storyline.  The eventual return of the split personality, super-positive and cheerful Bray Wyatt compared to the emergence of the demonic Fiend started off well enough in my opinion, but when he started up with brainwashing Alexa Bliss and being basically unkillable against Seth Rollins but then getting squashed by fucking Goldberg, I was kind of losing my shine to the character as a whole.  Ironically, this too was killed by Randy Orton in storyline.

Which brings us to his final incarnation and last stint with the company, kind of this strange amalgamation of Bray Wyatt who is kind of good, but kind of dark, with the Field still lurking around, but then the introduction of Uncle Howdy, and I’m just kind of like wtf is all this bullshit now.  At this point, I was no longer a fan of the Bray Wyatt universe, and I likened him to being like, Randy Orton, as in a guy whom with once you get tangled up with in storyline, you’re stuck with it for like 3-5 months of having to play scared patron to a haunted house, and barely a professional wrestler anymore.

It was actually during his feud with LA Knight, that I realized that I was starting to become impressed with LA Knight, seeing as how his whole tenure prior, ol’ Eli Drake wasn’t impressing me at all, but while feuding with Bray Wyatt, I found LA Knight to be a shining beacon of charisma and promo school, and even though he was getting his ass kicked and having creepy shit thrown at his character for three months, he was absolutely killing it on the mic, and even though he lost the feud, he clearly won over a lot of fans, seeing as how over he is with the WWE Universe currently.

I just felt that Bray Wyatt was a character that was clearly not geared for people my old age, and is clearly meant to capture the imaginations of those who are in “the demos” that the professional wrestling industry tries their hardest to cater to, children, and the vaunted 18-35 male range.  Aside from such, I just felt that a supernatural character is among the hardest characters to write and book for, especially when you exist in a universe with MMA converts, European wrestling purists and a Samoan dynasty running roughshod through the rest of the company.

Continue reading “Happy Trails, Windham Rotunda” →

Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My fantastic mother-in-law signed me up for some virtual races that give medals for Christmas, but among them was a run called F*CK 2022.  The medal of the run is a middle finger which of course I’m cool with, but what got my brain churning was the idea that there being a race with this theme, there has to be some overwhelming sentiment that 2022 was anything but a good year.

Which brings us to the question in the subject of this post, was 2022 a bad year?

Honest question, because I’ve been living in a pretty small bubble since 2022, and my exposure to the news and happenings of the world outside of it are more limited than ever, and I’ve become one of those grownups who lets theFacebook feed me curated news and really only hear of things from that, Apple News and the shit that my friends talk about in a group chat. 

I don’t watch any television beyond the specific things I want to watch, which most certainly does not include any form of television news and I don’t venture out on the internet to all the news websites and Atlanta-centric sites I used to, so I’m going blind to even local things.

In the past, I felt it was important to be well informed and knowledgeable of news and current events, because if anything at all, that could make me better at conversation, but I really just like being in the know of things.  But after the rise of COVID and having kids and having kids in the age of COVID, it’s just not as important, and far behind the priority of making sure my kids are safe and fed every day.

Needless to say, my bubble has shrunken to where I have to ask other people if they think a year was bad or not, because I don’t really think my opinion holds any weight.  Because within my bubble exists pretty much just my kids, mythical wife, sports, wrestling and working for the sake of making money in order to live, and just about everything else exists outside of it.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve created living documents for every year, where I’ve literally narrated a tiny blurb to summarize every single day, of notable things and happenings, because I’m of the mindset that something important happens every single day, be it as small as one of my kids successfully eating something new, or as momentous as Russia invading the Ukraine and daring the rest of the world into another World War.

Some years have been really sad to look back through, because there’s a mass shooting every single month, or the deaths of notable people in the world, but as far as my interests and explorations of the world via the internet go, combined with the happenings of my daily life, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that something important does happen, every single day.

Continue reading “Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?” →

Trails, Green Ranger

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That was unexpected: Jason David Frank, most famously known as the Green Ranger from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, found dead at the age of 49, as a result of suicide

The reason why I don’t bid happy trails to JDF is that in a nutshell, I don’t really respect suicide, especially of those that have some degree of celebrity.  Reasons may vary, but it really boils down to the unrelatable, how can your life be so hard if you’re famous opinion that I have.  And considering just how many outlets and the fact that TMZ has picked it up, JDF was clearly famous enough to be put into that category in my mind.

Supposedly, from what I can put together with as limited effort I want to put into it, JDF cheated on his wife at some point, was caught, and his wife initiated a divorce.  Presumably, JDF can’t take the heat of divorce, and offs himself; in spite of the fact that suicide is about one of the worst possible things anyone who claims to be all pious and Christian could do, and let us not forget that JDF had or endorsed some company/motto of Jesus Didn’t Tap, to where he even had it tattooed onto his body.

Some belief in Christianity there, eh Tommy?

The worst part of this to me, is the fact that his wife, who by all intents and purposes didn’t do anything wrong in this whole saga, is going to be eating the brunt of the heat from the fallout of all this, because the narrative is going to see her actions as being the catalyst for JDF’s demise, and she doesn’t deserve that.  But be it through her own self-torment, or the rage of the internet, she’s undoubtedly going to be having fingers pointed at her regardless.

But before I really dig myself into a hole of speaking ill of the dead, I have to say that this whole shitshow triggered a brog post, because it spoke to my nostalgia, it spoke to my fandoms, and regardless of what path he headed down after I grew out of it and he moved on from Power Rangers, I was a fan of JDF at some point.

I remember seeing a teaser on FOX Kids about how A NEW Ranger was going to be introduced and he was green, and I have vivid memory of seeing the exact scene in the above gif, and being immediately sucked in that they were introducing someone who was to be the combat equal to fucking Jason, which seemed pretty inconceivable to my fifth grade brain.

And then, they introduced DragonZord as the zord that he would get, and I was all in to being all about the Green Ranger.  For years afterward, even when it was really not cool to be into Power Rangers at the age I was at, I still fanboyed over it, and as I’ve mentioned numerous times in the past, it was some of my life’s ambitions to try and get my very own Zord toys, which took like nearly 20 years later before I actually did.

But man, was I fan of Tommy, and his journey of turning face as the Green Ranger, before Rita and Lord Zedd made a Terminator-like mission to end him.  And then Zordon christening him as the White Ranger, which was pretty cool because Saba bogarted all the other ThunderZords which let the Red Dragonzord fight in its own battle mode which I always preferred.

Needless to say, in spite of how much I had to hide it as a kid, Power Rangers was a notable blip in my childhood, and JDF as Tommy did have something to do with it.  Seeing him kick the bucket, even if it was in the deplorable suicidal manner, is still like seeing a piece of my childhood getting a spinning jump back kick to the face, and that is always sad.

Happy Trails, Kevin Lillard

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I think I can say that I’ve been fortunate that there haven’t been a lot of deaths in my life of people that really, genuinely impacts me.  The passings of figures and celebrities are sad, like when Bobby Heenan or Sonny Chiba passed, but they’re still celebrities to me and I never knew them personally.

But today, I found out that a guy I knew way back from my old convention days passed away, and it definitely was a wtf kind of moment to hear about, and brings me sadness to have learned about it.  Kevin Lillard, a legendary figure to those of us convention going olds from the late 90s into the 2000s, who was a photographer and historian who ran the very well-known Fan’s View website, where he went to a staggering number of conventions every year and basically photographed every single costumer in existence at the time.

Like, a convention wasn’t a convention if Kevin Lillard wasn’t there to document it.  At the time, there were only really like 9-12 conventions a year, and he would somehow go to each and every one of them.  I remember the first time he pulled double duty, and was at one convention on a Friday, and literally flew out Saturday morning so that he could go cover a second convention for the remainder of the weekend.  I was floored, because it was always one of my goals to get him to join my merry group of miscreants for dinner or an off-site outing, because I was a hipster and was always planning on ways to flex being too cool for the conventions, but he was ever the loyal, consistent guy with the press pass who always, always dutifully did his own thing for the sake of his site.

It’s funny looking back, because I really only was hardcore active in the convention scene for like 2-3 years before petering out for the next few before I really kind of stopped going to anime cons outright.  But I can confidently say that I developed a friendly relationship with Kevin throughout those years, and I genuinely liked and cared about the person.  Like many people, I had pored and combed through his site over the years, and even through his non-anime convention stuff, I saw that he had covered an ECW house show at one point, so I knew he had to have had some interest.  In 2000, when my friends and I were planning to go to an ECW show that overlapped with Katsucon, I made a point to lobby hard to Kevin to try and get him to come with us, to which he was interested, but politely declined so that he could document the opening ceremonies instead.

But that was the Kevin Lillard I grew to know; consistent, always friendly and polite, and without question the most unbiased and inclusive person that stepped foot into every single convention he went to.  It didn’t matter if a costumer was a hardcore tryhard cosplayer, or a novice teenager in a cardboard Samus suit, he took everyone’s picture.  He and his camera had the innate ability to make people feel special and confident, and give them something to look forward to later to just know that they were going to be able to find their picture on his website.

I remember the first time he took my photo, I was dressed up as Tasuki with my friends also in Fushigi Yuugi costumes.  I was quite tickled when I found the photo, and throughout the ensuing years, it never didn’t make smile whenever I came across myself, or friends, and to recollect the stories and memories of a convention weekend through his parade of photos.

Through his site, I enjoyed a little bit of convention credibility when he had made me one of his personality of the weeks, and written some nice words about me, and my dedication to going to conventions and having fun at the time, which really touched me, because he was usually a little dry and sarcastic in conversation in person.  I was an antisocial awkward teenager, and his acknowledgment and exposure really did a number for my confidence, and considering there are a lot of people from those days that are still actively in my life today, there’s something to be owed for that.

After the journey of life drifted me away from conventions, I heard bits and pieces of his health and life in general.  When I finally came aboard Facebook much later, I wish I had reconnected with him at some point, but I suppose the opportunity just never presented itself.  I’d probably have loved to have had a conversation with him about the changes of the convention scene that had happened throughout the last 20 years, and gotten his take on, everything, from the sheer number of cons, to the immense growth of the cosplay community and its skill levels.

But would’ve, should’ve, could’ve; things didn’t happen that way, we never reconnected, and now I’ll never get the opportunity.  Such is the nature of living and the passage of time sometimes.  Regardless, it does not make me any less sadder than any of the numerous people who are discovering this unfortunate news today as we all are, and I just wanted to put some words down on brog to express my appreciation for his existence, some positive memories I have of him, and well wishes to whatever happens next in his journey.

Happy trails, Kevin.  It was an honor to have known you, it’s an honor to have a rare copy of your book, and I appreciate all your contributions to a scene and culture that would undoubtedly never grown to its current heights without you.