By: Liam Barrett
I had two messages on my phone around midday Monday. The first one was from a female relative. “What rating on the Liam scale did that get?” The other one was from a close mate. “Have you seen mania yet ?”
I don’t want to talk about WrestleMania.
I’m one of THOSE fans, the ones that have a bit of a sneer when people get annoyed at wrestling online and say things like, “Why do you care so much? It’s only wrestling.” Un-coincidentally I mostly do this when people hate something I happen to like. It’s Hipster bollocks but I can’t sit here and say it’ll never happen again.
It was made easier by the fact that even most of the stuff I liked, I liked in the most muted way possible. A bit of an eyebrow flex, a crease at the corners of the mouth; “Yeah, that’s alright innit.” It was very easy to put out that I didn’t care what people thought about, say, Roman Reigns, because I barely did. “Yeah, he’s alright.””They’re giving it a go, which is nice.” That’s anti-iconoclast shit. I didn’t care as much as you can’t care and still care.
Anyway. After the show finished last night, I cared. They did so much wrong. They did so much WRONG.
I decided I wasn’t going to complain about it online. I did on Twitter but for some reason that never feels like it counts. Even though I probably sent out over two hundred Tweets about the show last night, Twitter has never felt that big to me. Blog posts, videos, forum posts, overly long Facebook Status updates, those things feel big. I’m a bloke that in recent years prides himself, every New Years Eve, in summing up the previous year in a sentence. I used to be onl of life’s overly verbose men, and I’ve worked hard trying to knock that on the head. I don’t do massive proclamations. The perfect joke is eight words long. I don’t write five paragraph statuses about how much I hated WrestleMania.
My mate asked me what I thought was wrong with the show. I literally frowned. I knew I couldn’t tell him in anything other than five paragraphs. And I’d give myself permission to do that, because it’d be a private interaction instead of just being out there. But even without that, there was the fact I wasn’t allowed to care. I had, internally if not always outwardly, been so dismissive of anyone who cared about wrestling, I couldn’t now. Not without being the biggest fucking hypocrite. Even though nobody would know I did it other than my mate and me, I’d know. And I’d be like, “You cunt.”
Then I thought I’d use it in an article I’d write. My brains always ticking over that shit, looking for creative ways into stuff. I could start a review about WrestleMania with how I don’t want to talk about WrestleMania, but then someone asked me what I thought and I ended up writing five paragraphs and I was proud of it and putting it up online would be cathartic and show I’ve grown a bit as a person. That’s another thing I also look out for, a way to make things secretly about other things.
I asked the pair of them permission to quote them in the article. They both said yes. I went for a bit of a walk and started thinking about how I’d present the message to my mate in a different font and italic, because I am Format Wanker. Every capitalised word here is carefully selected. Sometimes I’ll write a word in all caps then go back in remove it because I think the sentence reads and looks better without any emphasis. The reason I’ve said how the message would be five paragraphs long so many times is because I’d already decided it’d be five paragraphs long, because it’d look nice. Format Wanker.
I got in and decided I’d write the message first, then the rest of the article around it. I opened Word on my iPad, and started writing this instead. I haven’t started writing that message yet. I will, because I told him I would, but not yet. I don’t want to talk about WrestleMania.
As I was getting in, the family member messaged me about how she wanted to go on Reddit and see if she could drum up any interest in people walking out on Raw tonight. When I read that, the first thought I had was, “Eh, that’s a bit much.” Why would I think that if I hated it as much as I think I do? I mean, five paragraphs. I’d probably still tell her not to do it, but for other reasons, mostly because Reddit, eurgh. Not because that seemed a bit much to me.
Maybe the fact that I don’t want to talk about WrestleMania, as much as it’s about all the neurosis and character flaws I have, maybe that IS the review of WrestleMania. Maybe I DIDN’T hate this show. Maybe I just hated it as much as you CAN hate something and still not care about it. Maybe I’ve not cared about WWE for so long that I don’t remember what loving and hating it feels like. But saying that, I’m not talking about WrestleMania anymore, I’m just talking about WWE.
And I don’t want to talk about WWE.
I don’t want to talk about WrestleMania.
