07/25/2006: "An Unprecedented Outpouring of Bloodlust"

Hi All,

Well, it would seem as though I have cracked open something of a Pandora's box with my fight challenge. I had no idea of the depth and breadth of my fellow countrymen's (and a few non-Canadians) raging bloodlust, a wide and deep and profound vein of simmering rage and powderkeg violence that clings so close to your vicious little bosoms.

Huzzah!

My email inbox has quite literally exploded with fight challenges. If you have emailed me, I will get back to you over the next few days; I will get back to everyone, so if you sent something and did not hear back, you may want to re-send it (my hotmail account blows).

Suffice it to say, I wish I could fight all of you. I wish it were possible to punch you all in your faces and bellies and to be punched in kind, to have the manly topography of my face re-landscaped in bizarre and breathtaking ways...

...alas, I cannot.

I simply cannot fight all of you---or at least, not on this one night. If everyone's desire to beat me down persists, perhaps I will take it upon myself to travel across Canada, province by province, fighting my readers.

I could start in PEI, brawl some stalwart son of the soil in a potato patch, then, once my lumps are healed, head into Nova Scotia to face a be-kilted Celtic bruiser in a ring of stacked lobster pots. From there onto New Brunswick, where the devastation of the blasted landscape will harrow me to the bones and sap my fighting spirit, on into Quebec, where I will tussle with a fierce anti-Anglo gone soft from too much poutine and, having bested him, sally forth into Ontario, domain of the noodle-armed fancy lads, where I will punch a willowy scat poet, knocking his beret off, and he will drool and grovel and say, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked---skiddle-op be do!" and I will become wholly disgusted with the puling bohemian and turn my back upon him, my front facing Manitoba, but yet again the blasted landscape shall assault me, robbing my fighting spirit but, following the code of the Ronin, I shall summon my energies and forge into the flatlands (Saskatchewan) where I will be challenged by the victim of a catastrophic combine accident, and, seeing his prosthetic arm and leg, I will shake my head sadly and say his life's troubles have already been too great, he doesn't need me doling out a hearty helping of ass-kickery to boot, but he will laugh and I will know he is indeed a mighty warrior and his ballistic rubber limbs will land upon my body like the stings of the Burmese Fire-Breasted Millipede and his kicks shall smite me with the force of a Mongolian mountain goat and I will cry out, "I have erred! I am penitent! Cease your floggings!" and he shall be merciful and load me into his pickup truck and drop me at the Albertan border, where I will recover my wits and meet the challenge a strange smelly man, who, since he sees me approaching from the east, thinks me an Easterner and automatically loathes me and so we fight, indeed, fight like two weasels in a sack, and in our extremeties he tells me he is my father and I am so overcome with shame that I faint and awake in British Columbia [EDIT: this is a goof on Star Wars and has no bearing on my own father, who resides in Alberta but is neither strange nor smelly and who would beat me badly were we to tussle], where I will smoke some primo medicinal weed (for my rapidly-worsening glaucoma) and stride into a hookah bar and slap the Turkish water pipe out of a white poseur rastafarian's mouth and challenge him thusly, but like the scat poet he will blubber and mince about and I shall be filled with a dismal melancholy and will need to rest in a forest of mighty redwoods for fourteen nights and fourteen days.

After that I guess I'd fight people in the Yukon, NWT, and Newfoundland.

But...

I cannot fight you, personally, for this bout we're lining up. Or at least, probably not. My publicist has some people in mind, so there's a bit of a pecking order. But I am sending every email challenge I receive on to him, so who knows? If you really "wow" him, maybe. Plus there might be some undercards, so if you just want to fight someone, not me specifically...again, who knows? Could be we get enough cool challenges from enough cool people that I end up on the undercard myself. Make a whole night of it.

Some updates: we've got a venue picked out---very cool, in Toronto, very authentic---and lining up some judges, plus a liquor sponsor. When I get the green light to let everyone in on it, I will post it here. Should be a great night: fights, drinking, more fights, a Shakespearian monologue or two, then I go down for the 10 count.

More updates to come. Thank you to everyone for their challenges (I really do mean that; it's great to see some interest in a very non-tradiational literary event), and you will hear back from me as soon as I can get my inbox in order.

All best, Craig.