04/11/00 -- More Wrestling Confessions

"Hit me, baby, one more time."

I went and saw Ready to Rumble this weekend.  I enjoyed it a heck of a lot more than Fantasia 2000 (which I also saw on Saturday).

I tried to talk sweetie into going to see it at some point.   It'd probably make him a little more at-ease with me and wrestling if he went and watched it.  Then again, I think he's at the point where he'll just tell me to put the headphones on and watch it that way, or work late so he doesn't have to be around while it's on.  I suppose I don't care what he thinks about it anymore.

But Ready to Rumble was lots of fun.  No, it probably won't make a billion dollars.  And it won't get any Oscar nominations.   But I'd see it again.  Heck, I'd pay full price to see it again.

And WCW Nitro was just scads of amazing last night.  Makes me kick myself that I didn't go (it was at the Pepsi Center in Denver).  When tickets went on sale, I wasn't sure that things were going to be interesting enough to make buying a reserved floor seat (if I could get one) worth it (and I wouldn't go if I couldn't get a reserved floor seat).  WCW was kinda eh.  Things were boring.   Heck, I was working while wrestling was on a couple of nights and getting more work done than when I was in the office.  I wasn't writing during the commercials anymore.   It had started to sink back into the "background noise" sort of category again.

Last night may have brought it back out of background noise.   For those of you who don't follow wrestling, half of this is going to be meaningless, but hey... this is my journal.  I'm being self-indulgent.  Nyah.

WCW has Eric Bischoff and Vince Russo as writers.  Now I wasn't watching wrestling while Bischoff was around, I've only heard bits and pieces here and there, seen some highlights, but what I have seen and heard were pretty amazing.  I watched Russo's stuff with the Powers That Be.  It wasn't fantastic, but it wasn't terrible, either.  It kept me entertained.  And sometimes pissed off.  I guess he was doing his job.

Together, last night, the two of them were pretty amazing.   I watched.  I waited.  What was going to happen next?  And I was pissed off with the way they ended the Nitro broadcast.  I can't wait for Thunder tomorrow night because maybe, just maybe, they'll resolve that little ending.  If they can keep up what they started last night, if they can hold enough back that they still have something to give, to throw at the audience, to tease the audience with, to make them wish they had bought tickets for the live show, to make them impatient for the next show, then they may be able to pull WCW out of the hole it is in.

And, as a writer, I'm fascinated.  I'd love to be able to take a set of my characters, totally wipe the slate clean, and start them over from scratch.  I want them to be soft and pliable for me.  I want to change everything that's made them who they are and start them fresh, bend them to what I want them to be rather than what they want them to be.

Well, no, I suppose I don't really want that.  I like my characters alive and vibrant and fighting.  But the thought that someone can do that, can just drop everything that's happened up to a specific Monday night and say From here on out, what's been before doesn't matter.  What matters is what is going to be.   And I'm in control of that.

I'm inspired again, though.  More than I've been in a while.   I've got characters who are more insistent than ever.  Stories clamoring louder.  And I think, maybe, if I start slowly and just keep building little by little, I'll be able to get stories out again, get them onto paper and make them something worth reading.