New Home

Wedensdays with Warner has found a new home. I will no longer be sharing my thoughts with you in this setting any more. I have accepted an offer from The Wise Guise to join their team.

Free-agency was fun for the past couple of years, and it obvioulsy took its toll on my consistency, but I will be back with regular thoughts on a weekly basis at my new home.

Go ahead and bookmark the new site: http://www.thewiseguise.com/.

It's been fun. Or I guess I should say it was fun back in 2009.

Thanks for reading. See you at thewiseguise.com.

Photo taken by Lovely Union.

http://www.lovelyunion.net/

The Wise Guise

For anyone that is interested in reading a guest spot by me on another blog, here is the link.

http://thewiseguise.com/

You will find out why watching an occasional terrible TV show is just fine in my book.

In addition to my post, they have some great thoughts on TV, movies, music, and sports. Give them a look after you read what I had to say.

Thoughts from a Die-Hard Wrestling Fan

I’m 25. I’m married. I have a coat and tie job, live in a pretty nice house, and enjoy moderately expensive bourbon.

But despite my young professional, middle class, white picket fence existence, I still have not outclassed or outgrown my love for professional wrestling. At least for now.

If you’re a guy (In fact, if you’re a girl, you can probably stop here.), you remember being glued to your TV sets on Monday nights in the mid 90s to see if Goldberg could beat Hollywood Hogan for the title on WCW Nitro or to see if Stone Cold was really going to give Mr. McMahon a beer bath on WWF (now WWE) Monday Night Raw. You remember pooling $30 or $40 together with your friends and then finding the “cool parent” who would let you order Wrestlemania or the Royal Rumble on Pay-Per-View at their house.

You wore the t-shirts, played the video games, and went to the live shows in your hometowns. You duplicated the moves on playgrounds and cheered for the good guys and booed the bad guys. Wrestling was to eight to thirteen year old boys then what Justin Bieber is to that same age group of girls now. It was an obsession.

And then middle and high school came along and it all stopped. Wrestling was kid stuff or redneck stuff. It was fake. It was cheesy. It didn’t match up to the newfound interest you had in football or rock music or girls or (insert anything else but wrestling here). Wrestling had lost that something that brought you back every week.

But it didn’t lose me.

I remember vividly fighting tooth and nail as a kindergartner with my mom to let me postpone my bath time so I could stay up and watch the first episode of WWF Monday Night Raw. I remember the 1-2-3 Kid upsetting Razor Ramon on a Monday night when mom gave in to my begging and pleading. I remember Lex Luger body slamming the monster bad guy Yokozuna on the deck of the USS Intrepid and winning one for America.

Later I remember getting to school fifteen to twenty minutes early in fifth and sixth grade to discuss whether or not Sting was going to join the NWO Hollywood or the NWO Wolfpac and to see if people really believed that Stone Cold Steve Austin got crucified by the Undertaker.

And then when people stopped watching wrestling, I pretended that I stopped too. I was embarrassed that I still liked it. I was worried people would make fun of me for enjoying something that they so adamantly hated. But every Monday night, I was still right there in front of my TV, waiting to see what The Rock or Shawn Michaels or Triple H had in store for me.

Towards the end of high school a lot of my friends found it very trendy to enjoy such a kitschy form of entertainment. So I was able to vocalize my interest again. We would play the video games in the senior lounge at school and even went to a live show together at the local arena. The interest was there but it wasn’t quite the same. People liked it because it was dumb, kind of like the way people like Jersey Shore these days, but I still loved it.

I loved pro wrestling through college and forced my roommates to put up with it on Monday nights. I found a few friends that enjoyed it, and we would go to Memphis for live events and discuss it every now and then, but it never dominated their lives like it used to on the playgrounds in elementary school.

After I graduated college and entered the adult world, I continued to watch it on Monday nights, but it started losing some appeal. The product was stale. Vince McMahon, the Chairman of WWE, stopped putting on a show that was exciting and well written and started putting on a show so he could sell t-shirts. He created a movie studio that puts out films featuring his wrestlers that are universally panned by critics and usually straight to DVD releases so that he can make even more money. He started treating wrestling like a business instead of treating it like a spectacle to its fans.

This Sunday is Wrestlemania 28. It features a decent card of matches highlighted by the Rock vs. John Cena, a battle of yesterday’s face of WWE vs. today’s, and a Hell in a Cell bout between the Undertaker and Triple H, two future WWE Hall of Famers in the twilights of their careers. The other matches are relatively ho hum and don’t offer much for a former or casual fan.

If this Wrestlemania fails to get good ratings judged by how many people purchase it on PPV, and if the ratings for the weekly WWE TV shows continue to drop, then I personally think that professional wrestling sees a major fall from the glory it once had and that it desperately tries to cling to today.

I know that kids still love it and their parents try to love it with them, but when a diehard wrestling fan of 20 years starts becoming disillusioned with the product, something is wrong. I will probably find a bootleg website and watch Wrestlemania this weekend without paying for it, but there’s a good chance that this Sunday is the beginning of the end for me.

I will still go to Royal Rumble parties that function like glorified drinking games where guys can dress like white-trash. And I will still get the box tickets from work for the live events at the arena in Memphis because nobody else will want them. But Mondays have lost their excitement. I don’t look forward to Raw like I did no less than two or three years ago. Wrestling just isn’t what it used to be.

Honestly there’s still that 5th grader inside of me that thinks Sunday night will resurrect wrestling to the golden years it lived in from the late 80s to the mid 2000s. It’s silly to think that kid might be right, but I really hope he is.

Blog changes

I'm sorry I was gone for a year, but with a counter on my blog, I know that people periodically checked in to see if anything new was here. And of course there wasn't and people were sad. I was sad. It was hard to maintain a blog that promised weekly entries. And a week off became a month and a month became a year, and here I am now, a boy with a dream that is on life support and the cord rests solely in my hand. So I'm gonna keep the respirator running and see if I can bring this dying dream back to life.

When I didn't have to be an adult it was easy to write and be entertaining. I could get off work at the restaurant after lunch or dinner and come home and open a beer and sit down at my computer and write. But a real job came along and now a wife is coming soon and a mortgage and insurance and stuff are all waiting on m, and it will still be hard but I'm going to give it my all to still share my thoughts on relevant topics and ramble about irrelevant topics and be self pitying and attempt to humor the few people that might want to read what I have to write about.

So without further ado, the new, the hopefully improved Wednesdays with Warner.

Please hold your applause.

Honestly I don't have much to say this week. I took a new job last week that I start tomorrow so I've had a few days off to write but I really can't narrow down my thoughts to any particular subject matter, so I'll share a few thoughts with you from the last few days.

1) Atlanta is a wealthy Southern city. I went for a wedding this weekend and saw cars that I only see in magazines. Or James Bond movies. On the other hand, Alabama is not a wealthy Southern state. I saw a PT Cruiser convertible that was mustard yellow outside of Birmingham. Yikes.

2) Weddings all look very different. I've been to about 600 in the last two years and now have one of my own to plan. I hope that our guests will enjoy ours as much as I've enjoyed the ones I've been to. But at the end of the day I get to marry my best friend and spend the rest of my life with her and don't really care about anything but that. I still suggest we elope on a weekly basis.

2b) Sending requests for addresses on Facebook for our wedding invitations is almost as exciting as a Facebook birthday. You just sit and watch the messages roll in and you feel really loved. But in the back of your head you know people are just excited about a free party and free beer.

3) I'm going from working in a suburban mall parking lot at a huge Memphis bank branch to a high rise in East Memphis for a small Memphis Bank on the executive floor. Huge improvement. Very exciting. Unfortunately I will not be able to walk to the following fine dining spots: Red Lobster, Bahama Breeze, Logan's Roadhouse, On the Border, or TGI Friday's.

4) I've had Friday and Monday off. I've sat at home for the majority of both days and noticed one thing. My dogs are worthless. Legitimately the only moves they make are to change sleeping spots. I'm jealous.

5) My shirt has been inside out all day and I haven't showered since Saturday. I usually shower twice a day. I'm a tad disgusted with myself, but I really don't smell that bad.

6) TBS has changed their daytime lineup significantly since the last time I had a day to watch it. No more Home Improvement or Yes, Dear. Now we have shows exclusively produced by Tyler Perry or starring the Belushi brother that has had less success in thirty years than his brother had in about four.

7) Jimmy Buffett fell of a stage last week. If you've seen the video, he literally just walked off of it. Did he not realize he was near the edge? A rock and roll legend (to some) is quickly approaching Bob Dole status. Sad.

8) There was a gas leak in my front yard yesterday. My mom sent me a very dramatic text message with lots of ellipses to inform me. I thought I would be staying in a hotel for some time until it was fixed. When I called her to get the whole story, I quickly learned that it was not a big deal and would be fixed within an hour. So much for the drama.

8a) Mom just called and informed me that the year 2011 will take five years off my life for the following reasons: I'm getting married, I took a new job, and I'm going to buy a house. She also was disgusted that I haven't showered since Saturday.

9) Dogs just changed sleeping spots. If I weren't so lazy, I'd take them on a walk.

10) The hit teenage drama Pretty Little Liars on ABC Family does two things for me. It makes me excited about Mondays almost as much as professional wrestling does. It also makes me justifiably creepy because I watch it with such enthusiasm.

That's about it for today. Check back sometime next week for a new post. It won't always be Wednesdays from here on out, but I figure if Cougar Town can carry that title and have nothing to do with cougars (women on the prowl or animals), then I can continue to call this Wednesdays with Warner.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter @uncle_warny. It's locked but chances are I will accept any follower request.