SONG OF THE DAY: Chains 4 Crowns

In old studio wrestling, the role of the jobber was them dudes who always lost, week in and week out. You had the glorified jobber, who was usually the guy who seemed like he might be a star one day, minimally so, and he usually had the main event television loss to an actual star, but most of the jobbers were just jobbers. The true jobbers didn’t even have the look – you knew there was little star potential in that body, just a malformed ungraceful blob of an existence that was born to lose, even long after actual competitive meritocracies were all replaced by theatrical oligarchies who dedicated resources to engaging still in the performative acts of pretending shit was real. True jobbers.

I appreciate the fact people love to hold up kings and queens and these high cultural watermarks of greatness for all of us to look back on and identify. This is especially important for oppressed people, who in the larger culture are rarely allowed to see themselves in a successful light. In order to keep people from feeling hopelessly destitute in their humane existence, they need to feel like they can have something to attain in life.

And yet, in every human culture from the beginning of time, there’s many many true jobbers, and few true kings or queens. Too many true jobbers, doomed in America, doomed in Europe, doomed in Africa, doomed in all corners of the Earth whenever pyramid scams have been erected where some are seen as greater than the rest. I’m very thankful for the class transition I’ve made in life – I was born a true jobber, and now I feel like I’ve attained glorified jobber status. I look like I could be a minimal star, there’s the tease of actual success always present, but I come out losing most every week, taking the loss, but doing so against even better and higher positioned talent. It took a lot of work to not be a straight up true jobber, lot of luck too, and I got to use the bias of the culture against itself too, because you clean me up, put a decent shirt on me, I look like their preferred style of star to an extent. They don’t realize I’m a piece of shit as easily as they would someone with a different skin tone. But I don’t pretend that I’m not still a jobber, and ain’t ever gonna hold a meaningful title while wrestling with meaning in this performative American life where we pretend it’s still real. Nothing is real anymore.