Tag: rage

The year-end post, circa 2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[Originally written on December 9th, but held off until end of year due to personal neuroticism]

Today, I took a half day off work.  I originally wanted to take a full day off on account of the fact that I’m sitting on nearly six days’ worth of PTO hours that I haven’t used, and my company has a use it or lose it policy, and I’m more than likely going to take an L on some hours.  But the way I see it, or at least the way I try to rationalize it to myself is that it’s a little bit of give and take on the sick hours, since there’s probably been several days in which I should’ve just taken the day, but I “worked from home” on those days but whatever, I took a half day off when I wanted to take a full day off, primarily because there was a big monthly meeting at 8 fucking AM that I felt that I needed to attend because I had several projects being shown and it was probably for the best that I be there.

So, as far as the rest of my day went, instead of punting and logging on from home after the 8 AM meeting, I decided to just head into the office since I tend to be more productive there.  And yes, I was pretty productive in the two hours that I was there, determined to hard stop at 11:45, but the dearth of work I’ve had throughout the year has been pretty mundane and often aggravating in nature, mostly because most all the work is like that at my company because of project management that can’t ever seem to stabilize due to rapid employee churn and turnover.

Plus, there were some concerning layoffs that happened a week prior, and naturally everyone at the office is on high-alert and on their best behavior, lest they become victims of another spontaneous workforce reduction initiative.

Anyway, I left the office and headed down toward the vicinity of the airport because I have to pick mythical wife up, and everyone knows just how much fun a trip to Atlanta Hartsfield Latoya Jackson Intergalactic Spaceport, Nail Salon and Hot Wing Express is, even for a pick-up job, but I saw it as an opportunity to at least treat myself to some Willy’s and loaf in the parking lot to do my daily Duolingo.

But by the time I get back from the airport, any chance at any sort of personal endeavors are pretty much gone, since my kids are just getting off school, and despite being off the clock, there’s another meeting that I felt that I should at least listen in on because again, tryna be indispensable.

So, I try to be productive with my day, since I’m a weird fuck who finds satisfaction in productivity, despite it being completely counter-culture to the notion of taking PTO in order to relax.  But since I’m off the clock, I take the time to set up some outdoor Christmas decorating that fell to the wayside because of all the babysitting I’ve had to do for my dad, being under the weather a week ago, and that I just generally never have any fucking time.

I get the lights set up, and then I come inside and set up the second Christmas tree, which sounds like a complete waste of time setting up a second one, but y’all need to understand that this is my tree, aptly called the jihad tree, because it is cheap and small, but it houses all of the tacky and fun and ridiculous and mostly broken and unwanted Christmas ornaments that I’ve been accumulating over the years.  I love this tree and what it represents, and it’s important to me that it goes up and gets its time to shine and display as much as the show tree does.

And then it’s time to get dinner prepped for the kids, and the point of all this is that despite the fact that I took a half day off, absolutely zero minutes of my entire day were really spent in any sort of blow off, fuck responsibility kind of way that PTO should be spent on, and such is kind of a snapshot of just about every day of my life, in 2025, as well as god knows how much longer since.

I had to actually stop and think about it, how I felt about how the year has gone, because I really don’t always have the time to stop and think about things unless they’re usually critical, but I think it’s safe to say that as a whole, 2025 really has stunk.  Yes, I know how curmudgeon and pessimistic that sounds, which is probably what most people think of my personal brand being, but when I stop and think about the general day-to-day and minutiae of living in 2025, and very little of it is notably good.

I’m stressed out and depressed more often than I’m not, and every single day I feel taken for granted, ignored, taken for granted, deprioritized and of course, taken for granted.  I always feel as I have to hard carry the vast majority of aspects of my life, nobody helps out, everyone takes but nobody gives.  I have to take care of everyone, and nobody ever seems to be available to take care of me.

A tremendous amount of angst stems from my financial position, and I genuinely can’t remember ever being in as much debt in my entire life as I am now.  Absolutely nothing I do can dig out of the holes that I’m falling deeper and deeper into, and just when I manage to feel like I get a win somewhere in my finances, something inevitably always shows up and I end up in a worse position than I was previously.  Again, nobody is helping me, and everyone around me is making things worse, and I know it sounds shitty to say, but families are fucking expensive, and I feel like nobody is willing to make any sacrifices or changes in my world except for me, and it shows, because I’m living paycheck to paycheck right now and not doing a very good job of keeping my head above water and this has a massive bearing to my general state of being.

In fact, it was just a few days ago in which I was having a completely normal day without incident, but then I got that ticket in the mail that was a $1,000 fine.  Something I didn’t do, but still something that I am responsible for rectifying.  And then to add insult to injury, there was a $6,500 expense that I was not expecting to show up, just the following day.

I’m not suicidal, but it was definitely one of those moments where I wanted to say that I wanted to just blow my head off, because this shit is fucking ridiculous.

But this really was the pivotal moment in which I realized, man, 2025 really has fucking blew.  And usually I end up writing my year-end post closer to the New Year, but honestly I don’t think three fucking weeks left in the month is going to change anything because I basically have had to cancel Christmas because of $7,500 out the window that I have no earthly idea how I’m going to pay it.

On top of feeling like one of the world’s biggest punching bags is the babysitting I’ve been doing for my dad, in trying to get him to move down to Georgia.  If it’s not clear, I live a tremendously high-stress life as it is, but adding him and all of his resistant to change bullshit and communication issues because he never learned any fucking English and my parents never pushed me to learn more Korean, has really done a number to my health this year.

I’m 43, but for the first time in my life, I’ve really felt old, with my hereditary blood pressure issues seemingly escalating, presumably from all the increases in stress, leading to signs of feeling old like deteriorating eyesight, increased bathroom usage, and tension headaches.  And again, I know what all my stressors are, but nobody in my world seems to give a fuck about remotely helping me, so I’m just left feeling like I’m on an island, getting worse on a daily basis.

Needless to say, I know how dismal and insufferable this post must come off, if any of my zero readers has managed to make it this far.  I know I’m not alone in the world in feeling depression, despair and a general dissatisfaction with life.  I love my family and my kids, and they still manage to bring occasional moments of peace and happiness, handfuls they can all be at times.  But on an overall aggregate state of being scorecard, I’ve been pretty miserable all throughout 2025, and what really sucks is that I’m not sure how much better things are really going to get in the ensuing year, because a lot of the things that are killing me now, probably aren’t going to be going away any time soon in the future either.

One day at a time, I guess.  Try and enjoy little things, and try to not drag too many people down with my actual sourness and hide it behind a mask and keep more of my true thinking to the brog that nobody fucking reads.

Good lord, man.  I just want everything to get better, but I just don’t know if, when or how that’s ever going to happen sometimes.

Money woes, the 2025 edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago, I got an email that was clear to be pertaining to the settlement of some class action lawsuit that I clearly put my name in the hat in, some time ago.  I do that when I can, sign up to be a plaintiff for class action lawsuits, when they are applicable to me.  Sometimes, the eventual payoff is nothing more than a few bucks, if even currency at all, but there have been some in the past that I’ve actually gotten some substantial money from–a true set it and forget it kind of reward that’s always welcome if and when they inevitably settle.

This particular settlement wasn’t paltry; it was like $129, automatically deposited into my PayPal account.  Ordinarily, this would be something that’s I’d be happier about, since a basically free $129 would be welcome at any time of my life, and it’s not that I’m not welcoming any sort of monies incoming, it’s just that especially over the span of the last month, I’ve been hit with constant atom bombs of expenses, and I was already two feet underwater before December started, but now I’m basically in the line of sight with the Titanic currently, and $129 is going to do absolutely dick or butt as far as my current levels of debt is concerned.

Years ago, I used to have this thought process that when shit was going poorly, expenses would just start coming in from out of nowhere, at around $300 at a time.  Unexpected bill, car issue, pet emergency.  Eventually, it kind of went up to $500-600 an incident; needing tires, appliance malfunction, unexpected kid-related expense.

Over the span of the last month, it’s clear that the rubric has once again changed for the worst, and it’s like the array of unexpected expenses are just starting at $1,000 a pop, with no ceiling on them.  The fucking bus-passing ticket cost me a grand, new tires for my car are exceeding $1,000, another critical expense that I had no lead time to prepare for was like $6,000+.

Naturally, like many people who understand what the concept of economics is have pointed out, the rate in which people are compensated at the rate in which expenses globally have increased are not even in the same galaxy of being commensurate, and it all leads to the conclusion that this has basically been the worst financial year of my entire life.

And I say such without any hyperbole, or trying to deliberately exaggerate for effect, this year, twenty twenty-five, has been the worst year of my life as far as finances go.  I have never racked up as much debt in my life as I’ve racked up this year, and there are very long and uncertain futures as far as paying such debts back without them suffocating me any worse in the future as they are doing in the present.

My outgoing expenses are obliterating my incoming earnings like Georgia Tech vs. Cumberland, and an ungodly amount of expenses typically just fall back onto my credit cards, neither of which have a particularly favorable interest rates, and it’s in my best interests to pay them back as soon as possible as to not get sucked into the vortex of interest.

And the worst part is that almost none of these expenses are really the case of me being an irresponsible shithead and having overleveraged myself or living way beyond my means.  I have a wife.  I have kids.  I have an au pair.  I have a family member that seemingly absolutely refuses to help me help him.  I’m basically everyone’s fucking ATM and everyone’s fucking safety net.  All of which amounts to everyone vacuuming up my money, leaving me with absolutely nothing but scraps, debt, anxiety, depression and a whole lot of pent-up frustration.

So as one might be able see, getting a free $129 at this current juncture of my life doesn’t really have much impact.  It merely scratches at a mountain of debt that has materialized massively especially over the last month.

Needless to say, I’m depressed as fuck, which is kind of sad considering we’re in the throes of holidays currently.  I can’t afford to Christmas shop, and even if I could, I’m so over gift giving again, because I’ve been in such financial peril for so long now that I can’t get in the right headspace to where I can be happy to give gifts because I could afford them without jeopardizing my ability to survive.  I’m sick of feeling obligated to have to get gifts, and I would rather receive nothing so I didn’t feel like I had to reciprocate, and the only gifts that I actually want to see are those going towards my children.

I’ve been so depressed that I can’t bring myself to write about the number of things that under normal circumstances, I’d want to carve out some time to write about.  The John Cena retirement.  Philip Rivers’ return to football coincidentally timing with his existing retirement benefits nearing expiration.  Mick Foley vs. Politics.  Pluribus, the latest Vince Gilligan masterpiece.  The Braves actually not having a shitty offseason for once.  Notre Dame being bitches about missing the CFB playoffs, and the shitshow that the CFB playoffs are doing to bowl season outright. 

These are all things and topics that I notated to myself as things I might want to brog about, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to do so, because when I’m not working, I’m parenting, when I’m not parenting, I’m fretting about finances, and when I’m not fretting about finances, I’m cleaning up my house because nobody else gives a fuck to help out.  And if I’m lucky, I get a little bit of time for me to get my daily exercise and Duolingo in, and then it’s off to bed where I have to be the first one up every single fucking day because nobody else is going to ever relieve me of, duty.

I’m always operating against a clock of some sort, I have no time for myself, I’m drowning in debt, with no relief in sight.  I am a tiny solitary planet of stress, anxiety, depression, frustration and rage, with no relief in sight.  Everyone in my life deserves to get a better version of me than what’s currently in existence right now, but short of the momentary glimpses of light that my children bring me, without more help than the nothing I get from the world, this is the only version of me that is available.

Happy holidays, everyone.

This shit gets ridiculous sometimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few months ago, I chronicled how the week in which I was on a cruise with my family, was a week in which the whole fucking universe decided that they needed to get in touch with me, there were emergencies, there were fraud alerts, and I had no less than 69,000 emails, messages, chats and other alerts that took an inconvenient amount of time to sift through and deal with the most critical of issues.

Since I realized that the world most certainly does revolve around me, it’s been comical at just how predictably reliable it’s been that basically, when I am indisposed, unavailable, busy, or just plain not in a position to communicate, is when the whole fucking planet wants to communicate with me.

Case in point, I’m on a flight, connected to shitty WiFi.  I can receive texts and check email, but most all else is woefully unreliable, and I feel like I’m on the 2400baud modem that my old 486 was equipped with.  While on this flight, my boss DMs me despite my out of office being on, and since I’m not as smart as I think I am, I haven’t disabled notifications from Teams so I’m seeing them come through; additionally, there’s a ping for an impromptu business meeting, to which this sudden nature means something substantial, like someone critical leaving or having gotten shit-canned.  I don’t know and won’t know until I get back to the office but I am curious, but not curious enough to reach out to a colleague on a day off to find out.

A voicemail comes through, and it’s apparently my doctor’s office wanting to reschedule my annual that’s in two months, scheduled a month ago, because the American medical system is completely fucked, and I have to figure out what shitty appointment time probably three more months out I can get in on and hope the doc doesn’t schedule an out of office then too. 

And then I get a text from my sister telling me to call when I can, which is honestly these days tantamount to ask me to cure cancer as much of an aggrandizingly obnoxious ask to make of me.  But I can only imagine it pertains to my dad whom I just left after a fucking week of babysitting, so now I’m curious but can’t call because although I have shitty WiFi, making calls is still not something we do in the air.

It’s been like this fairly regularly since I realized that I control the universe.  No matter what I do, it’s when I try to take some time for myself is when everyone in my world starts trying to get in touch with me.

When I’m at my desk, available, ready, and willing to communicate?  Fucking crickets

Hit the gym during lunch?  Ping
Go out for a run on WFH Fridays?  Ding
Spending time with my kids?  Bing
Driving anywhere, any distance?  Be-doop
Running errands with an objective?  Boop-boop

And so on and so on.  It’s one of those things that sure, nobody knows what I’m doing at any given time but all the same I still feel that fucking everyone needs to give my time some more respect and just leave me the fuck alone.

One of these days if I ever get to have a single god damn day sabbatical, I think I need to hole up in a hotel room all by myself and just sleep, shotgun a show, eat whatever I want to eat, and put my phone the fuck away except for to do shit that I want to do, because the conclusion I’m coming to while I’m blathering all this shit out in that I need to just not be so god damn plugged into so much shit.

Not feeling particularly thankful these days

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few times, I’ve seen memes about how dads in general often suffer depression in silence, primarily on account of the fact that nobody cares about their feelings or emotions.  Family, friends, the royal everyone, either people are too wrapped up in their own lives to concern themselves about the emotional/sanity state of some other men, or there’s some credence to the umbrella statement that nobody cares about the feelings of dads.  And occasionally, there are times where I kind of feel this, and I’m just to broke ass poor to afford therapy, and I try to find it in exercise and writing.

Here’s a transcription of what I vomited to my phone because I was having a shitty morning and I felt like I wanted to write about it but didn’t want to chance it to forget the things I was thinking because I was in the car and I always think well in the car, which of course I do, because it’s a place and time in which I am completely incapable of jotting down my thoughts, because life really loves to fuck around with me when I’m generally unavailable:

It’s one of those mornings where nothing is going right. I am thankful for nothing. Forgot to eat breakfast because my kids got up early because they’re sick because every time we send them out of town they come back sick which sucks.  Work sucks, family sucks. Technology doesn’t work.  It’s frustrating.  It’s raining, I’m not feeling very thankful, family in disarray.  I don’t have time to catch up on anything.  I have to clean my house but I live with slobs and kids.  I can’t Black Friday shop.  I can’t have time to watch wrestling or Pluribus or Peacemaker or Netflix.  I never have any time for myself.  I bend over backward for everybody, nothing is ever reciprocated.  My mind is in a dark place.  Everything is frustrating.  Venting to nobody is cheaper than therapy, gym and writing is my therapy.  Memes about dads who suffer in silence and nobody cares feels very poignant and true.  (My) Dad is being weird about his possible future home, ungrateful and lecturing me about my flaws.  BP is getting worse and not sure if it’s just medication or stress and it’s affecting shit like my vision and health

So yeah, a lot to have unpacked to my phone through diction, but at least I was able to more accurately get a lot of shit off my chest and be able to look at it and analyze the things that are eating at me, and it’s not lost on me the irony of complaining about not having any time to do certain things, and then prioritizing writing about complaining about not having any time when I could be doing something more leisurely and entertaining instead, but that’s just how eternally important writing is to me over just about anything else.

But yes, to the point of the subject of this post, I’m not feeling very thankful at the very moment.  Things are very volatile, draining, and not good for my levels of stress, and I’m sure which are contributing to my escalating blood pressure issues, which is its own chicken and egg situation, where I don’t know if the increased stress is causing my BP to increase, or if the increase in my BP is what’s causing me to feel like I’m falling apart physically at times, with headaches and degrading vision.

I have to clean my house up for Thanksgiving, which seems like an extremely daunting task because everyone I live with is a slob and the house is perpetually bordering on needing to contact Discovery to reboot Hoarders: Buried Alive, or at least it seems to me, and of course there’s only one day to do it, although I could be starting it now but it’s just so daunting and I’m depressed that I can’t bring myself to do it without giving myself at least a little bit of time to brog and vent first.

At the very top of the list of stressors though is my dad being down in Georgia testing out a facility that he could very well potentially move into, which in one hand seems like the best end of life option, but on the other hand it means he’s close and accessible to me, and he’s already been weird and a pain in my ass in just the first few days of spending a ton of time with him.  Honestly, I don’t think things were as daunting in my life until this shit started ramping up, and I feel like it’s a contributing factor; the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as my BP elevating, and probably necessitating an alteration in medication.

Everything else, like work pissing me off, my kids being sick, me being exasperated with technology, etc, that’s all just background noise.  It’s the bullshit that takes an annoyed mood and turns it into bad ones, ragey ones, and the over the top frustration which lead to limit break diction rants into my phone like the one up above.

All the same though, the timing of it all, while we’re on the cusp of Thanksgiving, has me feeling not very thankful for a whole lot right now, even though there very much is, I’m just not feeling it at this very specific moment in my life.

Daylight Savings blows, 2025 edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At around 5:20 am, I heard #1 outside my bedroom door, panicking in the dark about how she couldn’t find her sister.  The fact that my child was out of her room in the pitch black of the morning was enough to get me to pop out of my bed, but upon hearing that my other child was allegedly missing immediately put me into a state of panic myself.

Worse off, for some reason there was a light on in my sunroom, which I knew wasn’t the case when I went to bed because I’m neurotic and always make sure all lights are off prior to going upstairs; I would later discover that there was a power surge during the night, and since that room’s lights are controlled via remote control, it light switch is usually in the on position permanently, and stuff like power surges or outages usually result in lights coming on upon reconnection.  However, I didn’t know this, and it immediately put the fear of god into me that #2 was in some sort of danger.

I walked #1 back into their (we let them sleep in the same room on weekends sometimes, on the unfolded futon) room to have her wait for me while I would investigate downstairs, but upon entering the room, there’s #2 snuggled up like a little taquito on the futon already, still sleeping.  Relieved, I set #1 back onto the futon as well, covered her, gave her a kiss on the head, reminded her that it was the middle of the night and hope she bought it, and implored her to go back to sleep; she didn’t need to know her circadian rhythm was correct at thinking it should be 6:20 am, when she’s normally up for school on weekdays, because obviously I really wanted to get some more fucking sleep.

Nope, by 5:30 am, I can hear activity on the baby monitor, both girls are now awake, and it’s only a matter of seconds before I hear doors opening and shutting, and #1 is marching back into my bedroom, with moments later, #2 freaking out in the darkness of the hallway, wondering where everyone is.  I bring them both into the master, and get them into our bed, in between mama and dada, hoping they might actually go the fuck back to sleep for a little bit longer.

Naturally, that doesn’t happen, and by 5:40, I give up, get out of bed, usher the kids downstairs, and concede that the day is now beginning.

The thing is, I actually had a tentative plan about this morning, because I figured there would be some monkey business with the time change, and the chances of me having breakfast ready for awakening kids wasn’t going to be high, which was that we were definitely, going to go to Waffle House because who doesn’t love Waffle House?

It’s just I was not anticipating them to be getting up within the 5 o’clock hour, but here we were.

It actually wasn’t that terrible, I got them dressed and we were at Waffle House by like 6:30 adjusted time, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that we were not the only customers there.  They were definitely the only kids there, and a part of me was hoping to have seen some other parents under similar circumstances having the same plan that I did, but alas, it was just me who was carting my kids out at this ungodly bullshit adjusted time.

But the point remains, daylight savings remains the antichrist, and it’s abundantly clear that the people in the BC years who came up with the idea were a bunch of selfish fucks who either did not have children, or had the privilege or were bad parents enough to not take into consideration the effects of the time change on parents who did have children.  And I hate them for all eternity and hope their descendants are wholly unimpressive pleebs who have nagging gastrointestinal issues.

I like to imagine that if the originators of daylight savings actually had any children, that they were obligated to actually care for, ranging from ages 0-7 years of age, they would think twice about the whole concept of rolling clocks back and fucking with their circadian rhythms and suddenly having to deal with them at ridiculously early AM hours, while people under most other circumstances would still be getting to sleep, regardless of what hour it actually was.

And as I’ve said before, I didn’t care much for it prior to children, but now that I do have kids, I fucking loathe it, and I like to think I’m pretty serious about sticking to my claim that I’d vote for absolutely anyone who prioritized the abolishment of this bullshit antiquated concept, including, those Somali pirates.

The complaining will likely happen yearly, until either this bullshit program is killed off, or my kids get to the age where they want to sleep in, and therefore my entire house can actually benefit from the rollback instead of bemoaning it.  Not going to bet on the former, though.

I’m sure this is going to go over well not

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SFGate: Southwest Airlines unveils new boarding policy, where passengers board in order of window seats first, middle seats, and aisle seats last

At this point, I really should start implementing a tag on my brog for Southwest, because they keep doing things that I keep finding brog-worthy and then I actually write about them, as if I’m chronicling their gradual downward spiral.  They just can’t keep doing questionable things, and I feel like that at the corporate level, there’s some obnoxious visionary who is trying way too hard to put their stamp on the company by making all these questionable choices for really no other reason than the sake of making them, and probably gets off on words like “disrupting” and “aviation space.”

But circling back to this new boarding process, where windows get on first, and aisles get on last, I just feel like this is something that seems destined to fail, on account of people just not adhering to the rule, and the amount of outcry it’s inevitably going to cause because it’s just not working the way SWA corporate envisioned it working.

It doesn’t matter what airline it is, in the hierarchy of passengers, middle seat is supposed to be the very bottom of the pecking order.  Even in old Southwest internal lexicon such a notion was commonplace, where flight attendants would even make tongue-in-cheek jokes about the old boarding process, where Group A stood for Anywhere, as in you can sit anywhere you want, Group B stood for Back of the plane, because that’s where all the remaining good seats are, and Group C stood for Center seat, because that’s all that’s going to be left for you bottom feeders.

Deliberately creating a policy where the positions are forcefully switched is not going to go over well at all, because not only are passengers who prefer aisles not going to handle being considered bottom-tier very well, imagine the people who hate window seats but like getting on the aircrafts as soon as possible having to deal with this new Sophie’s Choice; status vs. preference vs. potential cost differences.  And middle seats still lose, because although their tier might be considered elevated over aisle-seat losers, when the flight takes off, they’re still parked in the middle seat, most likely squished between two fat fucks because Americans are always going to be a bunch of fat fucks.

My favorite part about this whole announcement was this quote:

If queuing isn’t good, boarding isn’t good,” Lisa Hingson, managing director of innovation, told the Wall Street Journal. “So we spent a lot of time studying queuing.”

Studying queueing, lmao.  There’s nothing to study when it comes to queueing, because a study doesn’t account for the infinite variable that is there are a few billion asshole airline passengers in the world, and there’s no finite way to factor for some flights having none of them on any given flight, or some having many of them.

Sure, there are plenty of people that will be willing to adhere and give the system a chance, but then there are always, always going to be just a few of them that have zero intention of sticking to the plan, and nothing short of the gate agent enforcing the queue and stopping any and all violators from boarding too early, this is going to fail 100% of the time.  Those gate agents probably don’t get paid enough nor do they give enough fucks to even try to stop asshole passengers from jumping in whenever they want and ruining the process for the entire flight, and departure times and delays are inevitably going to get wrecked by this, and in the grand spectrum calculus of airline operations, it’s only a matter of time before this shitty idea is quietly scrapped and they return to more traditional, fall-in-line boarding process.

Somewhere else in this whole thing, I have to be curious on how this is going to impact the whole, large passenger policy that Southwest used to be applauded for in having, where large passengers had the possibility of getting a free adjacent seat if the flight had availability.  If there are going to be price tiers in accordance to boarding priority, surely there will be new ways for people to try and game the system in order to save a few bucks, and I have to wonder if SWA people thought this through enough to merge with existing policies in place, unless said policies were on the chopping block for restructure in order to not lose money on these new potential pricing tiers.

Either way, I can’t imagine that this is going to end well.  I like to imagine that when this shit rolls out, it won’t take more than the first flight, before passengers, by virtue of being selfish dicks or just plain ignorance, queues up out of order, isn’t stopped at the gate, and boards when they shouldn’t have.  They sit down in an aisle, take up overhead space with their carry-on, and later on in the boarding, someone who’s a middle seat passenger is denied overhead space, and/or is jilted over having to wait for the prior aisle-seat dick to get out of the way so they can board, and already the flight experience is stained.

Before we know it, a fight breaks out, and 12 people record it on their phones from differing angles, and Southwest is back in the news again for another passenger fight, and absolutely nothing has changed at all.

gg Southwest, look forward to the next bonehead disruptor idea y’all come up with next.

I kind of have to respect Mercedes’ game

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t mention it because life has a tendency to get all up in the way, but a little before Labor Day, I made a small trip, and my first destination was Philadelphia, where I met up with some friends so we could watch AEW live, on account of a childhood friend we have who is on their payroll and could hook us up with some tickets.  However, it wasn’t just watching AEW live, it was watching AEW live at the, now 2300 Arena, formerly known as the notorious ECW Arena, known for being the home to, Extreme Championship Wrestling.

This was very much as case of being more interested in seeing my friends and the venue itself as opposed to the actual product being shown, but honestly, it wasn’t that bad of a show, since the narrative of the whole night was leaning hard into the fact that they were at the ECW Arena.

It also didn’t hurt that our seats were front row.

Anyway, there really was no point to mentioning all that other than to just mentioned that I went to see the ECW Arena for the first time which I really enjoyed, and the whole point of this post is to, once again, talk about Mercedes Moné, seeing as how she’s hoovered up a 12th blet, and has been proclaiming herself to be better than Ultimo Dragon, and apparently, I’m not sure what prompted it, but also better than Bret Hart.

Little does she probably realize that kayfabe or not, by bringing up Bret Hart’s name in such a manner will embark her on a personal beef with the Excellence of Execution for the better part of the next three decades, but that’s neither here nor there.

Loosely tying back into my experience at the ECW Arena, I did get to see Mercedes live, in an in-ring promo where she was glorifying some new backyard promotion’s title win.  Despite being in the front row, nobody could really hear anything, because whether it’s AEW’s equipment being shitty, or the acoustics of the ratty old ECW Arena, nobody was getting any audio, but it didn’t really matter because in spite of the backhanded praise I have planned for this post, it doesn’t change the fact that she still gives really shitty promos, and on the trading card talent scale, her promos are probably at like a 2 out of 7, primarily on account of the fact that she’s not afraid to speak, it’s just she sucks at it.

But that was back on Labor Day, and as of now, Mercedes now holds 12 different blets, and finally lots of the internet are finally beginning to acknowledge that in spite of the number of blets, only nine of them are actually titles, considering the number of asterisks surrounding several of them, like the Owen Hart Tournament blet being a trophy and not an actual title, the Queen of Southside blet being technically retired and not an active blet, and I’m guessing the recently won Ring of Honor Women’s Television blet has an asterisk on account of it being an interim title, despite the fact that Red Velvet wouldn’t have a chance against Mercedes in a clean bout.

I’ve said it before, on account of some of them being not actual titles, and many of them being titles for a bunch of backyard promotions nobody had ever heard of, this whole blet collector arc for her is mostly meaningless, and if that makes me a hater to say such things, so be it, but it’s my version of the truth as far as I can see it.

I could argue with troglodytes on the internet about this topic, but I really do not want to, which is why it ends up being a brog post on a brog that nobody reads, but I have to say that I think I’m beginning to see what her large scale scope game is in doing all of what she’s doing, and if such really is the case, I think I do feel that I should respect her in this regard, because when the day is over in the wrestling business, it’s better to be hated and analyzed and criticized over being respected, heroic, but otherwise invisible.

And Mercedes is doing a masterclass job of doing what she’s doing, and getting people noticing and getting people talking.  Shit, as much criticism I have for what her character is doing, this is like my fourth or fifth post about specifically her, so whatever she’s doing is working, and in that regard, she has my respect.

And what she’s doing specifically, I would say is ragefarming, because between being the cockiest heel since prime Ric Flair, Mercedes is also taking her arrogance to the internet, dropping quotes and sound bytes, saying shit that is deliberately and tactfully setting wrestling fans off and getting them talking and interacting and engaging with her, with websites and groups and other outlets that are all scrambling to monetize the exposure.

Speaking of Flair, he used to explain that the point of being a good heel is to be so disliked and hated, that people start getting antsy and itching to see you lose, and one of the true arts of the business is being such to where they will be willing to pay money to see it happen, and I think Mercedes is doing an outstanding job of fulfilling that first part, but me personally I don’t like paying to watch wrestling other than live, but I am going to be excited if and when she starts having to drop all these blets back to their respective promotions.

In the grand spectrum of her career, it will be easier for her to parlay being a legendary heel back into a respectable face, as opposed someone who has to build up their fame and resume, and when the day comes, which I predict might be around next Thanksgiving, when Mercedes goes back to the WWE and becomes Sasha Banks again, she’s going to get a real needle-moving reaction, one way or the other, so the Four Horsewomen can have a massive blowup program with Asuka’s Team Japan with Iyo Sky, Kairi Sane and Giulia in a passing of the torch.

However, I still think the most defining period of Mercedes’s journey right now will be when it comes time for her to start returning the favor to all these companies whose blets she has right now.  My general scrutiny is that she may have stretched herself too thin to it almost being a no-win situation; if she bleeds her titles back piece meal, nobody will notice, but if she goes on a big tour of dropping titles in a sequence, a long string of L’s is going to make her look weak, and history has shown that Mercedes is not a fan of taking too many L’s in general.

If she pulls the losing her smile card, and starts relinquishing titles without having to take any defeats, it effectively kills whomever she does it to, and that’s just not good business at the end of the day, but I wouldn’t put it past Mercedes to keep this in mind if the thought of taking some losses starts to make her lose sleep.

Frankly, the only viable solutions are that a lot of companies will have to have some horsey, multi-women matches where Mercedes can drop blets without always having to take any pins or submissions, or she needs to start a feud with someone in AEW that reaches the level of hate that AJ Styles has reached in feuds with Dominic Mysterio or LA Knight, where they will be willing to cross seas and oceans in order to interfere in their matches and cost them in title defenses, thus keeping her somewhat strong in requiring interference in order to lose.

But anyways, because I’ve clearly got Mercedes unfortunately living rent-free in my head, and I’ve made yet another lengthy post overanalyzing what she’s doing, I’m wrap this up.  I think I’ve said everything that I’ve wanted to say this time, and normally I’d say I hope to not touch on this subject again, but there’s too much wrestling fandom and likely mileage in the Moné-train to not.

However, credit to where it’s due, Mercedes the Ragefarmer is holding a masterclass at ensuring people are noticing and people are talking, and in the wrestling industry such does require talent, and knowledge to parlay such reactions into positive, profitable careers.