| veritas |
09-12-2018 10:10 PM |
Chapter 1: The parable of Barcotic. A warning.
The pressure it was taking Barcotic to refrain from crying was causing sweat to form on his brow, so much so that it was beginning to soak through his bandanna. His eyes kept reading and re-reading the votes. They were all against him and his magnificent verse. His "paragon of textcellence" verse that they were too stupid to get. He felt the pressure increasing, so much so, that his hands were starting to shake to the point that it was making the half-empty Mountain Dew bottle sitting on the edge of his particle board computer desk start to ever so slightly wobble. He was fighting it, the urge, that old cycle. He was fighting it and losing. Suddenly, in a fit of manic desperation he began to jump into his battle and the discussion about the tournament he was losing in and attacking everyone who had the gall to vote against him. He called them haters, going on at length about how they were just jealous of his ability. He brought up how ten years ago he was the illest to ever do it, and how no one would ever be on his level. As the manic energy began to increase to dangerous levels, Barcotic made yet another post (his 10th in minutes) saying the fabled phrase: "I quit."
Barcotic exhaled. He pushed himself back from the keyboard and desk and walked into his parent's living room. Mom and dad were watching Hockey. He hated hockey. He hated them. He hated everything right now. He walked into his room. He slammed the door so hard that the air made the Tupac poster on the back of his door flutter slightly. He flopped on his bed and looked at the ceiling. He began to pout. The old familiar voice started talking to him again. He started fighting himself. "He should not care." "It is not that serious." "They know that you are fraud." "You are not a fraud, you are a genius." This sort of back and forth went on even longer than the last cycle from two months ago. After twenty minutes or so, Barcotic finally succumbed and pulled out his phone to ghost the thread. People were clowning on him. Now there were no holding back the tears. Barcotic threw the phone, luckily it landed in a pile of flat bills and was undamaged. He then got up and went to the bathroom, stripped naked, looked at himself in the mirror, nodded, then turned the shower all the way as hot as it could go and got in. He let the water burn his entire body, even his privates. After his entire body was burned, he carefully dabbed the water off of him with handfuls of toilet paper, then covered himself with Aloe Vera lotion. He then proceeded to go back to his room and lay down in bed, and not get up for 72 literal hours. Upon awaking, he logged back in as if nothing had ever happened, completing the cycle yet again.
To understand this madness one must first understand Barcotic. Ever since the mid-90's Barcotic wanted to be down. He took upon himself a love of Hip-Hop culture to the outermost extremes of cultural appropriation. He also began to write lyrics. He realized early on that he had a special talent for rhyming words. As he logged on to his AOL chatroom, he listened to the 56k modem hum. He was going to really give it to someone tonight. He logged in and entered the rap battle chat rooms. He found an opponent and he crushed them. He told them the following: "Yo Yo I got swords of words and battle axes of syntaxes" as well as other things that for the sake of decency need not be repeated here. He won the battle. Barcotic began to spend all of his time rap battling on the internet with typed words, so much so that he failed out of college and he lost his girlfriend. On the plus side, he did gain two shark forearm tattoos and about sixty pounds. That was some wordplay right there for "on the plus side". Entendre. The cycle began to happen in the early 2000s. People told Barcotic that he was good at text battling, and he believed it. He won on the internet boards all the time, however, away from the computer, in real life he was losing. By the time the 2010s hit, he was a parody of himself, and the pressure of cognitive dissonance began to eat away at his psyche. He began to see himself only as a text battler, and even more so, as the greatest text battler to ever click the keys. Because of this, when it was obvious that he was not, his mind would not allow it to happen and he would suffer temporary mental illness over it.
The story of Barcotic begins the History of Text Battling because it provides and explanation of just how passionate it's partakers are in it, and how just how powerful the magic of Text Battling truly is. It also serves as a preface to the outside reader who wishes to continue reading this book, to be careful, less they let themselves become consumed, and they to become denizens of the scalding showers or dirty bathwater penances.
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