Hey. It has been a long time. Welcome back.

 

PINM was all about me wanting to write stuff as a sort of outlet, I guess. I'm not sure what happened to me between the last thing I posted and now, but I would think to myself, “man, that would be something cool to write about” and then, you know, something else would come up. Never anything important, of course, but something. Always. Forever. I told myself I would come back for the NHL playoffs and they're a few weeks away, but something came up before that, I guess.

 

I refuse to rehash the story of John Hart. If you don't know it by now, it's all over this site. But back when he died, I found myself really, really lost. I didn't know what to do with myself. I went to school and wandered. I went to work and felt dead. This lasted for a long time. The reason I am mentioning this is in October of 2009, I found some little, tiny source of solace in online forums. Nerd shit, you know. The two I decided to “belong to” were Sherdog.net and HockeyFights.com.

I took a deep dive into MMA and hockey fighting. Who knows why that happened. I spent way too much time posting and reading crap. One day, some moderator on Sherdog, who was known for being quick to ban people, talked some sort of shit. No idea what. I said something and got a message that said something to the effect of, “Go F--- yourself” and I found out I had been “perma-banned”. Forever. My IP in my apartment shut off to the Sherdog world, forever dead, forever banned. So I turned to hockeyfights.com.

I got to know some people there well enough, I suppose. We talked about everything on there, so, naturally, video games were among them. There's a game mode on EA Sports NHL videogames where you create a dude, play a position and be on a team. I found some dudes that had a team going already and jumped in. I started playing with those dudes back in like 2011 (so NHL 12?)? I'm not positive. I believe I played my first game as Taylor Hruby. No one else had their real name, why the hell would I use mine? I needed a good name.

Around this time, I saw the movie Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The (supposed) life story of Chuck Barris. Chuck created the Newlywed Game, The Gong Show and the Dating Game, among others. The movie stars Sam Rockwell as Chuck Barris. I fell in love with Chuck Barris the first time I saw it. I saw some sort of special feature, perhaps on the DVD, perhaps just looking for stuff about the movie on YouTube that showed Sam doing Chuck's mannerisms. He is incredibly awkward in front of the camera and Sam Rockwell nailed it. I started reading about Chuck's (alleged) missions, his (professed) CIA assassinations, his (purported) use of the Dating Game's dates to go on far away trips to kill American enemies.

I bought Chuck's book, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and sawed through it very quickly. I bought the rest of his books too. I fell in love even more. So, I had my name for EA Sports NHL 12 (or whatever one it was). I have been referred to as Chuck, Barris and Chuck Barris in real life, many, many times.

Chuck Barris died yesterday. I woke up to that news. Somehow, I have no idea why, I thought about this often. About him dying. About what he meant to me then, like so many bands from that time in my life and whatever else helped me get through John's death. I haven't read one of his books in years, even though I really enjoyed his work. I haven't watched Confessions in at least 3 years. But, on March 15th, 2015, I saw that “Gene Gene The Dancin' Machine”, made famous by Chuck's Gong Show, had passed away. I thought about Chuck Barris that day.