Do you ever think why it is you’re doing something or why do you like something again that really hasn’t been in your mind for years? I sometimes ponder these thoughts. Lately I’ve been pondering how cool wrestling was back when I was about 13-15 years old. 

I think I might have these thoughts because at that time I had a wholehearted escape from reality. I was fully bought in and invested in a male soap opera that aired each Monday night. Instead of an onslaught of news about COVID, racial tensions, people acting crazy, political strife I had a Internet news feed filled with wresting rumors about who was going to show up on Monday night Raw or Nitro from either the WWF, WCW or ECW. It was a world that I was in that was disconnected from reality. I might as well have been reading comic books.  I wasn’t, I was watching grown men beat and bloody each other. 

The story lines were beautiful. I don’t think such characters or story lines had been so well crafted in the history of pro wrestling. Both the WWF and WCW were on fire each and every week. 

Are my newfound thoughts about this period of wrestling due to a desire for normalcy? The late 90’s were pretty normal…and by normal I mean good.  The tech boom was in full swing and no huge wars were going on.  Bill and Monica were all over the news. Terrorism was seen as a much smaller scale threat. No horrible illness was going around. It was a great time to be a teenage boy watching wrestling each Monday night. 

Well, back to reality. Those days are gone. Many of the wrestlers back then have died. The story lines are dead and I’m not 14 years old anymore.

Here in the real world we must deal with a new insanity that seems to rise weekly, if not daily. It’s as if we as a society became a teenager and suddenly developed acne and can’t understand what is going on. A new day, a new zit. When will it end?