image credit: rohwrestling.com
A little secret to let you in on, dear readers: I have a devastating crush on Dalton Castle.
I haven’t written anything about him thus far, because where do you even begin to describe a wrestler so sublime? As you know, I’m fairly prolific on the topic of professional wrestling, but I find myself without words enough to express the feelings when someone so thoroughly steals my heart. This is not the sort of cerebral crush I have on, say, Kevin Owens. It is so much more. The costume, The Boys, the perfection of his presence, the explosive energy of his wrestling, it’s just too much for words. My tormented soul burns up like a vampire in the blinding brightness of everything that is him.
I’m working on this problem. I hope to write thousands of words about Dalton Castle and The Boys sometime in the future; it’s a rabbit hole in which I could die happy. But for now I will simply offer the anecdote of a simple Twitter interaction my heartthrob bestowed upon me several weeks ago that put me in a state of giggling fangirl wonderment, which still mildly tingles to this day.
A major time crunch prohibits me from watching Ring of Honor right now, but I had drifted into my daily procrastination spell of fawning over Dalton Castle entrance videos on YouTube one day when I felt the need to say something. This has become a thing for me lately, that irresistible urge to mouth off into the internet abyss. I only ever say a tiny fraction of what I’m thinking, and without an occasional pressure valve, the voices in my headspace yell so loud I’m deaf to the world around me and can’t get shit done. But I didn’t quite know what to say to Dalton Castle, so I thought I’d articulate just that:
Oh @theDALTONcastle, I just sit and think about you during the day.
— Spectacle of Excess (@SpectacleofX) October 1, 2015
Sometimes we all do this, right? Tweet something mildly inappropriate to one of our favorites? (Don’t try to tell me you’ve never.) It’s not like I was looking for a response. They almost never respond. I just needed to say something so I could break free from the Dalton Castle tangent and get back to work. It’s really a crazy amount of words I signed a contract to translate in four months. I forgot all about my tweet to Dalton Castle, but the next day he retweeted it, complete with a comment of epic proportion:
I only think of you while soaking in the tub https://t.co/zDz3hwRZaD
— Dalton Castle (@theDALTONcastle) October 6, 2015
At first I didn’t look very closely at the situation. I was just like, Dalton Castle wrote me back, wrote me back, omg, thinking of me, in the tub, in the tub… I spun it round in my head a few times. Was kayfabe Dalton Castle hitting on me? I still had an anonymous Twitter avatar so I could have been anybody, is he really this wonderfully inappropriate with random fawning fans? My mind settled on an image of that beautiful man basking in an opulent bubble bath, one Boy holding a champagne flute for when he needs a little bubbly and the other fanning him with feathers because the bath’s so hot, but it feels oh so good. What a saucy gift this man was willing to bestow upon a silly fangirl, I thought to myself. This is wrestling. Oh yes. This is wrestling.
But then I noticed I hadn’t tweeted from my personal account, I had for some reason sent the message from this blog’s Twitter. All Dalton could see was an avatar of ring lights and this blog’s name. So it wasn’t me my beloved was thinking of in the tub, oh no. It was the Spectacle of Excess itself.
I’m going to assume Dalton Castle wasn’t in the tub thinking about our profound wrestling theory and criticism here at thespectacleofexcess.com. I’m going to assume, even if he’s read Roland Barthes (dude’s pretty sharp so you never know) he didn’t automatically recall a mildly obscure reference to a critical text about wrestling’s particular flavor of spectacle written in the 1950’s. I have to assume Dalton Castle was thinking of himself. Because even if he didn’t get the reference, this man intuits the meaning. He lives it. You can see it in his eyes, and in the tautness of his every gesture. If any wrestler is Barthes’ grandiloquence of ancient theatre, light without shadow that generates emotion without reserve, and the godlike gesture that unlocks Nature, it is this man.
Honestly, I like his Tweet even more like this. If Dalton Castle had been legit flirting with me, even in a kayfabe sort of way, I think I would have fallen to the floor and hit my head. But what part of himself was he thinking about as he sat there in the tub, one Boy handing him his bubbly, the other fanning cool gusts of breeze onto his flushed face?
I’ll just leave this thought here. Do with it what you want, naughty readers. It’s all good.
This was hilarious to read!