“I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

I am Sean McCorkle’s Bruised Ego.

Anymore, you learn about bruises in comic books — all heavy cross-hatching and lilac purple contrasting American Red and Cornflower Blue.  Children today never get a chance to know hurt.  The woods are clear-cut.  Toys are shatter proof and non-toxic. The playgrounds are low.  Rounded.  Cushioned.

Twenty years ago, you cut your hand open on an axe and ran a mile back home, and maybe you got stitched up.

Twenty years ago, nobody knew anything about game-planning for a fight.  Men who all knew little pieces of fighting tactics — what would they know of strategy?  To plan past the third haymaker was beyond many of them.

Anymore, people fight like it’s some kind of job, like they’re trying to make money out of it.  People who watch these fights, they talk like it’s some sort of highest form of competition with safety rules and scoring rules and “Octagon control”.

Not for nothing, but these guys don’t want to talk about how those early days were so special.  How watching two walking slabs of beef hurl themselves at one another was like watching Wild Kingdom with people.  Survival of the fittest.  Kill or be killed.  No one wants to talk about the boner they get for names like Paul Herrera, Steve Nelmark, Jeremy Bullock.

Toughman isn’t the right word, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.

So what do you do when people want to watch a fight, but everyone agrees to call it a sport instead, just to be polite?  And so they make rules, because sports need rules, and somebody said “hey look boxing”, and never mind the difference between boxing and an honest fight.

I am Sean McCorkle’s Bruised Ego’s Murky Understanding of the Duality of Man.

What do you do when two men fight for a half hour, and then they stop and nobody can agree who wins?  If both fighters can honestly say, “I feel like I beat him,” shouldn’t they have to just have to keep going until one of them shuts up?

Robbery isn’t the right word, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind.

Not so much the fighters.  Think of me, a Bruised Ego, and how sometimes you just want to destroy something beautiful.  Sometimes you just want to see a good fight, and anymore, they’ll rob you of that.  Because really, if there was a loser in that fight, he wasn’t in the cage.

Sometimes you just wonder what it would have been like, if everyone had just followed the rules and kept their mouth shut.  I mean, yeah, human cockfighting sounds terrible on the news.

But twenty years ago, man, it was the best!

Bullshit like this never happened.

[SMc'sBE]