Wrestling has always been in my life, for better or worse, but no one has ever spoke to me within its bizarre confines more than Jimmy Valiant. He was the most like people I grew up around looking up to. The whole point of the stupid wrestling is to trick you into thinking it's real, even if for a quick second of suspended logic. Valiant's promos and behavior and even the clothes he wore and the way he shucked his legs made me think he was more real than anything else I've ever seen in wrestling. He lived just like the crazies sitting around the kitchen playing Spades on a Friday night with my folks lived.
And the cycle perpetuates itself. Partly from the way I was raised, and I'm sure partly from the influence of things like Jimmy Valiant, now I'm a 32-year-old freak with long beard and dreadlocks who regularly goes around wearing t-shirts with iron-on letters. I try not to put stupid shit that's too hipster or ironic or anything, and instead vague nonsense like "BIRD DOG". Too much more and it becomes a message, and messages require reading, and reading makes you self-pretentious.
Jimmy Valiant is retired from wrestling mostly and has a goat farm outside of Christiansburg, plus a wrestling school. People who have goats tend to be professional loungers, mostly because you've made the decision to have animals but you're too broke to have anything expensive. And you probably can't have chickens because you're dog would kill them. So you get goats. If you ever can find The Best of Handsome Jimmy Valiant Volume 1 or 2, you should check it out. Don't buy bootlegs, because if you order it from Boogie himself, you're putting food right inside his belly, direct. And it'll be worth it. Or he might rip you off, because he's a wrestler and they tend to do that. Either way, he's still the human embodiment of Boogie Woogie.
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