Cantankerous Chicanery

I had written down this topic about a month ago, expecting to just wade into the surface issues. Imagine my suprise, then, when the whole hoopla surrounding Jeff Hardy happened, and gave me a whole dirth of rich material to work with (only in America can someone prosper off the misfortunes of someone else. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!)

The recent feud between CM Punk and Jeff Hardy that just ended was an interesting one that brought up a lot of points. For the unitiated, CM Punk won the title from Jeff Hardy. In the storylne, CM Punk (and he’s also so in real-life) is straiht-edge, which means he completely abstains from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. Jeff Hardy (in his actual past as well) has had problems with substance abuse and had gotten suspended for failing two drug tests.

CM Punk always preached the virtues of abstinence and leaving a clean, poison-free lifestyle. Jeff Hardy, on the other hand, claimed he “lived in the moment” and was a free spirit who did what he wanted and wasn’t afraid to not bow down to the puritanical whims of society.

Naturally, this cause dthem to butt heads. But, like all great wrestling storylines, this stems from oftentimes real-life conflicts. Within the hard rock and hardcore community, there often exists a tension between hardliners and druggies. It’s the age-old debate between two conflciting drives of humanity: the id with its need to be instantly gratified and the superego with its moralistic dictates as supported by the outside community at large.

What occured to me as an interesting link between these men, and what seemed to escape everyone else’s attention, was that both of these men sported rather sizeable tattoos. Both actually sported the sleeve style. So, no matter how divergent paths of life these opposing competitors came from, one thing linked them together. A sense of pain, expression, artistic inclinations, and a connection to the youth subculture.

An even more curious dicthomy emerges when you look at the way they booked it. Despite this being the PG Era where WWE is trying to court the younger audience, specifically small children and their parents, CM Punk was positioned as the villian. He became overly preachy and didactic, and arrogant for assuming he was “better than you” for being straight edge. You would think a guy who has never had a drink or a spliff in his life would be the role model and poster boy for the company.

Instead they showed him cheating and weaseling his way out of matches, even going as far a sto try and injure Jeff and brag about it afterwards. Jeff, meanwhile, wa spotrayed a sa ysmpathetic face, a man who wa sproud to be what he was and as a recovering addict who was atempting to make up for his past mistakes.

A lot of people failed to see the subtext to this little storyline. While CM Punk did have a point about the fans turning against him, perhaps he’s a bit too big for his britches. Vince isn’t stupid; he’s trying to reach out to the kiddies but he also knows a good portion of the fanbase are still the 18-35 male demographic, individuals who are assumed to like a good beer and to not be too receptive to Punk’s message of prohibition.

What they’re trying to get across are that the hcracter flaws of Punk’s gimmick is his one-dimensional, lack-and-white view of the world and how judgemental he is. Basically, it’s a motif in literature as old as time itself: forgiveness. Jeff can be forgiven, but Punk isn’t willing to do so. No matter how biologically pure he is, spirtitually he’s a bit tainted.

In a way, they both represent nonconformity, and I think that’s why this feud struck a strong chord with a lot of people, both on the message boards and with the marks. Straight edge was actually a hardcore punk idelogy that arose from the perceived self-destruction of the scene at that time. Minor Threat, specifically lead singer Ian Mackye, saw a good number of people (as he asserted) drowning in the excesses of liqour, cigarettes, and illicit intoxicants. As a result, he revolted against this and reacted by refusing to engage in this.

Straight edge, in actuality, seems to me to be a personal choice. The point is for the individual to have the willpower to not engage in these unhealthy practices, and to not judge others who do so. Jeff Hardy, meanwhile, is a rebel because he throws caution to the wind and is an adrenaline and thrill junkie, the judgements of others be damned.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? I can’t be the judge of that, and neither can anyone really. What we see here is an interesting dialogue about personal responsibility mingling with carefree indulgence.

With the 60s and 70s long gone and the 2000s almost coming to a close as well, we’ve seen the slow and gradual eulogy for the biker culture unfolding. With the psychedelic guitar riffs waning and being replaced by bass beats for rap songs, so we rarely hear the engine of a Harley Davidson reving up in the night. What’s caused this, where have these tattooed outlaws gone to, and why do guys on bikes these days insist on shaving?

When the culture first emerged, they were seen as renegades, thugs, and violent criminals. No less than the FBI came down on them. They were rumored (and noted) to have dealt in drug dealing, arms trafficking, murder, and had ties to big-time organized crime. Now you can go to a chop shop on the side of your local highway and get advice and suggestions from a friendly sales associate that resembles more of Wal-Mart than a road gang.

I feel torn about this lost way of life. On one hand, it’s easy to romanticize these rebels. They were nonconformists in a day and age when it was hard and even dangerous & life-thretaning to be a pariah, and wher eyou couldn’t just go buy leather accessories at the local Hot Topic to piss mommy and daddy. They were hard-drinking, tough charaters who didn’t take shit off of anybody and did things their own way, the laws and rules of society be damned.

At the same time, while it’s easy to think of them as modern-day pirates, it’s easy to forget they were basically heartless thieves who would just as soon slit your throat as look at you. In a sense, they seem like bullies who were overly masculine. Also, I’m not a big fan of their at-times seemingly blatant racism and their attitude towards women (they commonly viewed them as property).

The hippies, interestingly, hired them as security for many of their concerts, seeing a kindred spirit in their anti-establishment ethos and hoping this was a way to stick it to The Man. What they didn’t realize, however, was that these two groups couldn’t be more different from each other. Flower children believed in peace and love and saw the existing order as impediments to their utopia; Hell’s Angels and the like just wanted to get high and fuck and fight and hated authority because cops tend to frown upon those sorts of things.

So the question is, are they an idealistic free romaing society or a group of violent malcontents built on menace and destruction? Who knows. I’m not a member of a biker group, nor do I know anyone in such a group. I wasn’t around in the old days, so my judgemnet is perhaps a bit skewed.

What I do know is that nowadays, whatever your opinion on the past incarnations, “bikers” nowadays (to use that term loosely) tend to be the typical weekend warriors. They work some office job or at a garage shop during the day and on their off time they like to go barreling down the freeway in chaps and T-shirts that are way too tight for their beer bellies. What has happened to the freedom of the open pavement?

Like everything else in life, and as is the fate of all seemingly misanthropic movements, it has been adopted and sanitized by the mainstream. I have an unle that swears by his bikes and patronizes the Harley Davidson store but he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve met.

Most of your typical bikers now are old 40 year old men looking to the past for nostalgia, trying to reconcile their youth spent tripping massive balls on LSD with the current reality of working some shit minmum-wage job, so they turn to Budweiser and doing air guitar whenever they hear dad rock in public to try and seem cool. O’, it truly was dust in the wind, if ya catch my drift.

It would be an effortless task to generalize all of these days as harmless suburbanites who know nothing of true grit and glory like the bikers of the past. And yet, who’s to judge them? Who’s to define what makes a true biker? By its very definition, the biker culture involves a love and respect for riding choppers. That is all. Should we demonize these modern incarnations simply because they have respectable careers, father children, and pay their taxes? I think not, in a sense.

What’s happened to literature? It seems our society is on a gradual decline when it comes to reading. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve run into that don’t read at all, and as an aspriring author, this really hurts me. At one time in this world, most of the general public poured through newspapers and novels, and they did this voraciously. Nowadays people consider themselves scholars if they can get through an issue of Maxim.

Oftentimes, in this pitiful little paradise of intellectualism I’ve carved out for myself here, I feel like the proverbial crazy homeless man ranting to himself. In the day and age of nightclubs, rock music, fads and trends, and 24-hour television, who has time to curl up with a book? Moreover, who really cares?

Recently, during my Interpreting Literature class, my teacher said something interesting. He claimed, “Most of the world doesn’t respect what we do.” (in regards to English majors) And that’s a bitter pill and a harsh truth to swallow. To know that my sole aim in life is to create beautiful and lyrical passages of prose, to illuninate the inner workings of the soul with carefully crafted stories, and to have it perish in the annals of oblivion, is a maddening exercise in frustration.

Then again, maybe I’m biased. I’m sure many mathmeticians out there feel disgruntled that no one really cares for their formulas and equations. There are numerous stories of ignored film makers who craft artistic documentaries and dramas, only to see tjem fall by the wayside of obsucre indy festivals. So of course everyone’s always going to highly value their craft. (The business majors of the world have absolutely nothing to worry about.)

But, entertain me for a minute. The very grace of writing and comprehending this is what makes us human. It’s one of the divine qualities that seperates us from animals and allowed us to stake our claim to the top of the food chain. Once upon a time scribes, official “writers” for the aristocracy, were highly valued and allowed to congreaget and be part of the upper class. The illiterate were cast off into the lower class, being thought of as lacking the comprehension to truly be superior.

You can talk and move all day, but at the end of the night, I feel one can only truly reveal their emotions and record their thoughts by putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as it were). A diary or a poem allows us to sit there and collect our thoughts and organize our sense of expression, as opposed to being put on the spot and the improv of face-to-face talking.

Literature also lets us figure ourselves out. As we trudge through the weeks, aimlessly wandering to our jobs like zombies, we don’t really get a sense of perspective. When we lose ourselves in a magnum opus like 1984 or Waiting For Godot, we acquire an understanding for the human condition. wE’re so caught up in the selfish and subjective view we have of the world, but books became a rabbit hole, to escape into another world, to get a feel for how someone else might see things.

Words are a ladder to knowledge. As a kid, I often had my nose stuffed in hardback covers. Now, as an adult, I feel I have a better understanding for just what is reality, as compared to other people who drank alcohol or dated one another or went to parties or whatever. It’s also sad to see people turn to crappy fanatsy or science ficton. I essentially feel Harry Potter has turned kids onto reading in a shallow way. It never adressed serious, controversial questions or provides a realitsic view of things like, say, Mary Gaitskill.

Indeed, along with mental atrophy and the public’s general apathy to art, genre fiction may well be destroying the art of creative writing from the inside. It sdumbed-down and formualaic plots, one-dimensional archetypal characters, its meaningless plots, lack of substance, and meekly happy endings are producing a sense of lowered expectations for the few people out there that do read.

Obviously, this is a generalization. Not all legal dramas and horror fiction are mind-numbingly atrocious. Sci-fi actually has its roots in many works of the literary canon: H.G. Well’s classic The Time Machine and the many works of Phillip K. Dick. I do have to say, however, that it’s puzzling to see someone like Dean Koontz get all the attention while Donald Barthleme falls on the ash heap of history.

Literary fiction is falling by the wayside, and is becoming an increasingly marganilized academic pursuit. Even the aspiring English majors out there would most likely only read Thomas Pychon if if was on the class syllabus. The only people studying Flannery O’Connor and searching for meaning in it are the teachers and heads of the English faculties. Oh, what a dark and dreary world we live in these days…..

People now are so focused on pop culture they could really care less about any sort of art. Many theatre productions are falling by the wayside because teenagers (and even soem adults) these days only care about heading to the mall to outfit themselves in the latest fashon or keeping track of Tila Tequila’s every move or updating their Facebooks or listening to the newest hip-hop track.

Look, I’m not saying no one should be allowed on YouTube or that if they go a Theory of a Deadman concert they should be shot and arrested. I myself enjoy many facets of contemporary culture and am sometimes of being a lazy fuck who just lays video games all day. Just keep in mind knowledge is what makes a human being. Many countries don’t have the luxury of literacy. Books can enlighten us, teach us a moral lesson, cause us to ponder many essential questions, and simply entertain us and bring us joy and take us away from this rancid and bland endeavor called life. If you look throughout history, you will see that many empires fell once they got away from the cultivation of philosophy and writing and instead turned to excessive hedonism and shallow excursins and pleasures. Roman empire, anyone?

Dontcha think we’re close to that point, as a paralell?

They’ve become such an intertwined part of our daily lives a lot of people can’t conceieve of a world without them. Many of my peers are working two jobs to just try and buy one. Our very landscape is changing to accomodate them. They’ve become a means of transportation, an important part of our culture, and even a rite of passage and a gathering place. For the few unfortunate among us, they also become a home.

What am I talking about? Vehciles, of course. Mostly cars, but you could say trains and trucks go conceivably go under this category as well. No matter what one thinks, you can’t deny their rise in popularity to become a necessary object for our possession.

The odd thing is, it wasn’t always this way. A car used to be simply a rich man’s toy. If one was so ridiculously welathy you had nothing better to do than swim naked in a pile of money, you could buy an automobile. Can you imagine, back in the days of small hamlets and buggy horses, how crazy a machine that sputtere gas and careened down the road looked?

As time went on, Henry Ford developed the assembly line of production, and the rise of consumer products soared. Soon cars not only were produced faster than ever, but as a result they became more affordable. Soon the public was buying them en masse.

A funny thing happened as a result. We soon began altering our roads to accomodate these methods of transportations. We expanded our roads and purposely made them wider and longer so we could drive more. We began builiding gas stations to fuel them. We drilled in foreign countries to get the oil necessary to power them. We put in CDs, DVD players, surround sound speakers, etc. They became an extension of us.

Now, even the poorest among us can shell out for a car. But at what price? What I’m asking is, are cars even really necessary? Do they ultimately bring more harm than good into our lives?

Let me stop here and note I myself drive a car. So there’s the issue of hypocrisy in question. It had made my life easier in some respects. In others, not so much. I’m attempting to look at the problem rather than the symptoms.

Basically, the detractors will claim that obviously they can get you to a destination more quickly and more efficiently. After all, it would be insane to walk for an hour to go to your job that’s about 20 miles away, right?

One time a friend brought up an interesting point to me (ironically, while we were driving around, no less). He said cities and states have expanded their urban grids because of cars. It’s an odd Catch-22, when you look at it: the reason the location of things has expanded in regards to each other is because we bought cars, with the cycle starting at the fact that when we first bought cars all shops and homes were located very close to one another.

An odd cycle, isn’t it? It seems along with other rising trends of technology, the car has explicitly contributed to modern-day alienation. Oftentimes, the efficiency that started with destinations being placed in proximity to the roadside ends up being false. How many of you out there have driven around hours and hours looking for an adress only to find out it’s in an out-of-the-way boondocks location?

Then there’s the now-exposed fact that gas emissions from cars are contributing to global warming. All the fumes that come out our exhaust pipe when we hit the pavement are tearing holes in our ozone layer. All this so we can do 80 on the highway to try and impress random strangers.

Many of the population owning vehicles also leads to congestion and missed time. It is a commonly accepted fact that most jobs or interviews or what-have-you are scheduled around the same time. It’s just a natural human trait to think along the same lines (the “collective unconcious”, if you will). Therrfore, this leads to everyone getting on the road at the same time. Inevitably, this will lead to a build-up in traffic and everybody being late to wherever they’re going.

Ayone who’s been in traffic can tell you about the frustration, anxiety, annoyance, and danger involved in rush hour.

Last but not least, let’s consider the danger involved in them. Despite people’s extreme phobias with flying, it is a statistical fact that you are more likely to die in a car crash than a plane accident. In fact, head-on collisions are one of the leading causes of death in this country. Really, think about that: you are operating a massive ton of steel on an open and sometimes uneven surface! What did you think was going to happen?

Of course, like a lot of other American vices (smoking, alcohol, unprotected sex), people ignore the truth of statistics and refuse to give it up in the name of immediate gratification. Think about how many bloody victims you’ve seen on the shoulder of the road. It happens quite often. On top of this, we trust most of the human race to be in charge of gigantic machines composed of heavy and abrasive material. Remember all the ignoarmuses you encounter on a daily basis and curse under your breath for what vapid waste of spaces they are? Well, then, keep in kind these people most likely are automobile owners.

Before I sound too much like a jaded cynic, allow me to offer a look up at car culture. There is a undenibale freedom associated with them. Every teenager’s first experience with getting a car is inevitably to hit the open highways and travel wherever they please, whenever they please. Transporation such as this was a key feature in the Beat culture and nomadic hitchiker revolution. They do make things a bit easier to travel to, at times. So I guess ya gotta take the good with the bad.

Pollution, a higher rate of mortality, estrangement from each other. And this isn’t taking into fact how insurance comapnies, gas corporations, and dealershps have all stepped in to take just a little bit more money out of our pockets. Why do we even keep these unwieldly monsters in our garages, then? Who knows. The sad fact is they’ve become a fatalistic necessity, cons and all. I’d be lying if I said I was willing to give up mine tommorrow and start jogging to college.

It’d be nice if we had all had a primitivist revolution tommorrow and started hanging around each other at campfires again and the dentist’s office was right next door to where we could walk to it, and things went back to the “buggy/small town where everyone knows each other” dynamic. But it’d also be nice if I could give gold. The deal is, like other modern trends, we’ll just have to make due with it and accept it, advnatages and disadvantages.

This isn’t going to be an easy post to write. Not only is this a controversial issue, but it’s one that personally hits home for me. Nonetheless, I will go on with it. Today I’d like to discuss smoking: the aspects of it, the effects of it, and why I still support people’s right to do it.

It’s a very dicey subject in today’s culture. No wonder, seeing as it does lead to health problems and can severly fuck up your lungs and all. I’m going to share something personal with you; my dad died from lung cancer about a few years ago. He was a chain smoker who went through about a few packs a day. So I know firsthand the dagers of tobacco and nicotine.

With all the anti-smoking sentiment out there, you’d think it’d be enough to deter the youth of America, right? Why is then hat all I see are college campuses are kids lighting up? We’re talking about mature adults who (presumably) intelligent enough to make sound and rational decisions. And they still turn to the cancer sticks?

By now, the malevolent effects of smoking should be clear to anyone. They damage your body and are incredibly addicive. What’s worse is that, by itself, tobacco builds up pretty big tolerance effects, but the coprorations hawking this product add extra stuff to ensure you, the customer, are hoked for life. You pay with your own death, in some cases.

Sure, a pack of joes is pretty bad. But it should also be pretty obvious this isn’t the world’s brightest idea. I mean, come on, you’re filtering smoke through your body! Did you think coughing for two minutes straight couldn’t come without consequences? So, as much as the companies are to blame, so is the individual. It is my philosophy that each and every human being makes choices in life, and we are to be held accountable every second for the consequences of our actions.

At the same time, I truly am disgusted with the business execs that sit there in their high-rise offices in their nice suits, profitting off of people sitting in hospital beds, hooked to iron lungs. It’s hilarious to hang around artsy wana-be bohemians ranting about “The Man” and corporate America while lighting up a Marlboro…..failing to realize not only is that a represetation of an evil company, but that they’re doing themselves and their hygeine a diservice. Nothing quite says rebelling like putting money in the pocket of Joe Camel.

At the same time, there is a rising tide of anti-smoking prejudice in this country. I know we didn’t come here on Plymouth Rock with syringes and beans, but when did we all turn into a country of Minor Threat fans? I have a controversial statement to point out: not every person who smokes dies of lung cancer or other tobacco related disease. Some claim to have refuted that. But if you look around you, you’ll find that to be a bit true. Keep in ind this is coming from someone who (as I mentioned earlier) lost a close family member from smoking. We’ve gotten to the point in this country when we make someone feel if they even look at a pack of fags in a gas staton they’ll have a stroke right there.

I’m going to assert a dicy attitude: we have to let people try things and decide for themselves. A libertarian attitude, if you will. By now, people are morons if they’re not aware of the adverse health effects of cigarettes. But we also can’t try to control people’s behavior or police their personal lives. That would make us no better than Stalin’s Soviet Union. There’s also going to be an outlaw allure to the vices we banish and demonize in our minds.

I’ve heard of a few businesses that will fire you if you’re a smoker, and that is the most repressive thing to me. Someone’s private preferences away from the workplace are none of the bosses’ business. How is that not discrimination? We can’t become moral police and control everyone based on what we think is right or wrong. If you don’t smoke or don’t particularly care for it, that’s fine.

I’ll make a concession—I tried cigarettes a few times. I found I didn’t acre for them and they did me aboslutely nothing. So you know what I did? I quit. Simple as that. I chomp on cigars every so often, and even then I’m trying to lessen my intake of that. I almost feel guilty the rare time I press a Black & Mld to my lips, as I think of my dad.

Even our shining knight in armor, Barack Obama, has struggled with going cold turkey. So not everyone with an ashtray in the house is an evil degenerate scumbag taht deserves to rot in hell. The same people who abstain from smoking and are fanatical about it and get in your face over it are the same ones who will exercise until their bones break or drink themselves into a stupor.

If someone around me was smoking, you know what I do? I get up and walk away if it’s bothering me. Simple as that. I don’t try to give them a D.A.R.E. pamphlet or call up the Surgeon General to lecture them. I just remove myself if it wafts into my nose. we live in a free country, and one of the prices of liberty is respecting one’s another’s differences and agreeing to disagree.

The lesson people seem to have forgotten in today’s society is moderation. The choice of lifestyles is quickly ranging from “Just Say No” to an all-out bender with blow being snorted off a hooker’s ass. Basically, just have fun and indulge in your dark side, but don’t let it get out of control. As my English teacher noted in class this week, “Somnetimes the devil’s a little fun to hang out with”. But I wouldn’t have him as a roomate. You catch my drift?

Everyone’s always up in arms over the perceived glass ceiling in the WWE. Day after day, the message boards are buzzing over their latest darling getting jobbed out to one of the bigger guys. “Give John Morrison a bigger push,” they say. “MVP is being underutilized,” they cry. “A.J. Styles needs to be world champ by now,” they claim.

I will concede to them a few claims. Oftentimes, despite the necessity for wrestling to be a market driven by youth and fresh new faces, it oftentimes seems to be an old man’s game. As with any industry, business, or job, tenure reigns. The veterans are respected for paying their dues and putting their time in. Their loyalty is awarded with pushes, more screen time, and more titles, however unfair it may seem to this.

Do I doubt that Triple H, Shawn Michaels, and those in a similar category have political sway and use it to their advantage? No. But at the same time, WWE and TNA are making concentrated efforts to push their new guys. Case in point: look at the amount of exposure Dolph Ziggler and Hernandez are getting in their respective companies, lately.

There’s this myth of the mid-card, that some bright and promising young wrestlers are forever doomed to languish in insipid comedy angles and go-nowhere feuds while the Angles and Foleys of the world main event every PPV.

That’s not always the case. Chris Jericho has notably broken through, as have the late Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio. Two of the guys being pointed at as the locker room mafia, Randy Orton and John Cena, were once young bucks itching for their chance at the spotlight.

Vince McMahon in particular, for all his faults and vices, believes in the essential need to groom and push upcoming wrestlers. Why else would he put world titles on both Brock Lesnar and Jack Swagger within a year of both of them being in the company?

A lot of times, I think smarks bitch about the current state of things because they want to see the trigger get pulled faster. In a weird way, it’s an almost honorouable feeling hey have: they root for these underdogs so much and get so attached to a wrestler’s potential they get frustrated that they’re not headling Wrestlemania or Slammiversary right this instant.

Remember, o’ dirt-sheet reading ones, these things come with time, and that good omens are awarded to the patient ones who wait. It took a while for CM Punk to get the straight-edge steam engine rolling, but when he did, by God do the fans detest him. Beer Money’s had to perfect their craft for years just to get where they’re at right now. The causal fanisn’t as quick to warm up to storylines and gimmicks as we are because, well….they’re marks. They enjoy the program for what it is, on a surface level, and have short attention spans, as any American watching TV would.

So kick back, relax, and let the two comapnies do their thing. Bryan Danielson and Homicide will make it in no time. You just have to have a little faith, that’s all.

The cougar to the right is Dixie Carter. For those unaware, she’s currently President of TNA. Through some convoluted corporate business dealings that I myself confess to not entirely understanding, she and her company, Panda Energy or whatever the hell they’re called, she has become pretty much the head say-so over in Total Nonstop Action wrestling. Basically, just imagine an Eric Bischoff with boobs, and you’ve got it.

This comparison has popped up before, and that’s not always such a good sign. Recently, I’ve noticed some actions of her are gaining more momentum and power. Recently, during the whole now-infamous Jarrett-Karen-Angle love triangle, she sent Jeff home and packing.

This is despite the fact that, quite honestly, he really did nothing wrong. Sure, he violated the bro of not touching another man’s old lady. But it’s not like Kurt hasn’t admitted to not cheating on Karen while on the road. Plus, they’ve been divorced for a while and even Kurt admits he and Karen have stayed good friends. Sure, it was a stupid decision, and Jarrett should have known better. But shit happens in the workplace, and he is human. On top of that, he truly didn’t do anything illegal or unethical.

Now, this brings me to where Mrs. Carter (tell me where have you been?). She stuck her nose in what was otherwise really none of her business and asserted her authroity. True, she is president of the company and she had to step in at some point to ensure a safe and orderly workplace. But one gets the sneaking suspicion, based on the reports leaking out from backstage, that she took sides and aligned herself with Kurt. This seemed to backfire in her face based on his incident a few weeks ago (which you can find in one of my earlier posts).

Trust me, Dixie Carter seems like she actually does care about the product, she really does. Unlike the Time Warner executives overseeing WCW, she has taken an active hands-on role at times and really seems to respect what professional wrestling is all about. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen too many times, we get a corporate suit who understands next to nothing about the business and basically ends up throwing their weight around.

What a wrestling promotion, especially an at-times fledgling one like TNA, needs is people inside the business who understand how it works, how to book it, and who exactly to push. They don’t need higher-ups meddling around in their business. It’s the same thing with movie studios and the music industry: slick bigshots think they know what’s best for a certain area of entertanment, instead of letting the performers and audience decide that for themselves.

Like I said, some of her actions have been questionable. She seems fine to let Russo and his certifiable brand of insanity run loose with nonsensical storylines and a chaotic on-screen product. She has curiously disciplined neither Kurt Angle nor Christopher Daniels for their run-ins with the law. She claimed Brutus Magnus as a pet product, forcing us to suffer through a forced push as the “Modern Day Gladiator”, only to inexplicably drop that and put him in a niondescript role as a member of the British Invasion.

Dixie Carter has on multiple occassions refused to become an element in kayfabe storylines, and that’s a welcome relief, considering the barrage of real life egomaniacs we’ve had to deal with in the past (See: Bischoff, Eric and McMahon, Vince). I respect that decision on her part to stay behind the scenes and not get involved in the ring. However, one has to question this with her recent decision to show up on TV for an interview to hype Bobby Lashley (ugh):

Hopefully this won’t lead her to popping up as future DOA (Lord knows we already have enough authority figures in TNA), although I actually think this isn’t the case and there’s no need for worry. Still, isn’t it always frustrating when bureacrats stick their nose where it doesn’t belong?

For the past few weeks or so, I’ve had a number of people calling the house looking for someone who isn’t there. It always happen to be a wrong number. For some reason, our home phone number must be one digit away from a popular destination.

The person on the other end of the receiver at first sounds warm and inviting as they search for and seek to speak to an old friend or flame, perhaps. When I tell them the resident in question doesn’t live here, and I’ve never heard of them, they sound flustered. The meager malaise of disappointment settle sin. Sometime sthey resemble the stages of grief; they react in disbelief, either not hearing or comprehending me or just flat-out refusing to accept it and demanding the person in question come to the phone right this instant.

Alas, our little chat ends and they hang up, apologizing. Some just slam the phone down. Often times I feel a weird sort of kinship strike up. “No,” I want to say, “Kevin Windschemidt doesn’t live here, but I do. Would you like to chat?” Inevitably, such attempts at connection are met with dismay. How could they? After all, it is me that they called.

Come on in, stranger, I’d like to comfort them. I won’t bite. I was not in the middle of filing my tax returns or brewing up some chemical concotion that will cure cancer. I have no immediate and important matters to attend to. In fact, I was just in the middle of television viewing and a lights snack when he ringtone signaled you were on a mission to get to this destination.

I always say bye as our dialogue draws to an end. They never do. I figure it’s just a part of common courtesy and etiquette. I wonder if we’ll ever end up getting into a long and drawn-out conversation? Perhaps we’ll end up becoming acquaintenes and then when they dial me, it won’t be a wrong number, but the right one.