NPO #5: Life and Freedom

Happy Thursday, Ticketholders!

What I have for you today might seem cynical and dark, as well as lazy, given the lax posting schedule I have set for myself these two weeks. Next week will feature something meatier, but today's New Piece Offering is a class assignment FROM Period 3, June 7, 2001. If I remember correctly, the idea behind the assignment was to take two concepts and write metaphors about them, one simple and one extended. I received a generic, rubber stamp grade of "CREDIT" for completing the assignment (ahh, the milennial-era grading system...). The subject of the simple metaphor was "Freedom."

Freedom is a cruel joke,

to be told and interpreted many times

until it's no longer meaningful.

It upsets some and benefits others.

Not always funny.

At the time, I was in my Junior year of high school, and an avid fan of the WWF-turned-WWE (because no one wanted Vince McMahon to make pandas hit each other with steel chairs, I guess). That obsession continued for another six years, right up until Chris Benoit. I'm not going to add a verb here because it made national news and doesn't deserve any mention beyond that. Even though Eddie Guerrero died two years previous to this, emotion, youth, and general waning interest (not to mention the frequently denied but publicly known fact that "professional" "wrestlers" use steroids) lumped the two deaths closer together in my mind and stirred them (and several other wrestler deaths that took place between 2005 and 2007) into the possibility of some commercially advocated 'roid epidemic that was killing my then-favorite Monday-and-Thursday-night pastime. So I stopped watching.

If you are not familiar with wrestling nomenclature, I recommend visiting this page for related terminology before continuing.

Appropriately, and without further ado, here's my extended metaphor on Life:

Life is a wrestling match;

sometimes real, sometimes fake,

always sports entertainment.

A Submission Match,

where you can't tap out

to anyone.

A Ladder Match

where you must beat the competition

and rise to the top--slow and steady.

Hell In A Cell,

where the only escape

is victory.

But it all comes down to the main event:

an Ironman Match.

It starts out taking forever,

and ends like one-two-three.

Win or lose,

It's over.

In the end,

it doesn't matter.

If this got you talking or thinking, please put both in the comments below, like, share, and subscribe, and click on the ads above and below this post to get me slowly, relatively rich.

Stay tuned for the Ticketverse Throwback later today, which will feature more wrestling-related stuff like John Cena.