Wrestling: Soap Operas for Beer-Guzzling Fat Guys

How did this happen? One minute I'm sitting at a restaurant, looking over their menu, trying to decide what's for dinner tonight. Then, one hour later, I'm sitting in a house, surrounded by World Wrestling Federation figurines, yelling phrases like "Can you smell what the Rock is cookin?" or "Check out that inverted kryptonite crunch."

To try and get where I ended up, let's first try and understand where I began. There are two things in life that I know for certain. One is that there are two things that I know for certain, but I can never remember what the first thing is. The second thing I know for certain is I do not watch wrestling.

Wrestling isn't a sport. Wrestling is a haphazardly created soap opera with folding chairs and fire extinguishers. At least soap operas have diamonds and glitz. Wrestling is the cubic zirconia of the gem world. It's a fake.

That's what I thought. It was this second thing that I knew for certain that I was thinking when I was sitting and thinking about dinner.

Then in came trouble. In came Shannon. He's a bartender down the street at the local dive bar. Shannon pulled up a seat and asked if I'd watched the WWF pay per-view from the night before. Rock was the new champion, he said. It was the Rock's sixth championship. Of course I watched it. That's what I said to him. And after spending money on the WWF, I then took a bath in hydrochloric acid paying specific attention to washing my genitals.

Shannon knew I was kidding. Of course he knew, he's a wrestling fanatic. He knows fake. What he didn't know was that I didn't know what the "Rock" was. Let alone, "who" the Rock is. For that matter, I don't even know when Bo and Hope will realize they took home the wrong baby on Days of Our Lives?

As I listened to Shannon talk about wrestlers with names like The Undertaker, Slap Nuts and Stonecold, we split a pitcher of beer.

At about this point, Moon Dog (not a wrestler, but a cook) came out of the kitchen and gave us a run down on the menu.

If I'd take a bartender's advice on beer, it would only make sense to take a cook's advice on the dinner. Like a mother with facial hair and tattoos, Moon Dog suggested we start our meal by eating some vegetables.

We ordered a couple more pitchers of beer and, in public, started croaking like the cartoon frogs "Bud-Weis-er." Then I remembered what that first thing was in life I always remember, but also always forget. And it's that beer makes you do things you later regret, beer makes you act stupid and beer makes you say, "Yeah, I'll come to your house and watch wrestling." And that's how it happened.

Beer, darn liquid life. That's how I ended up at Shannon's house with hundreds of wrestling figurines and nine wrestling fans/freaks surrounding the cathode ray god of television.

And next week, man oh man, that Mr. Rock better watch out, because he's going to be cookin' up some Stone Cold Steve Austin trouble. Hopefully Steve's knees will be out of their braces, otherwise, even Molly Holly will kick his ACL tendon weakened ass. That is, of course, if her silicon doesn't pop when the ninja wrestler stealthy sneaks into the ring giving the ole Hong Kong Phooey to Stephanie McMahon-Helmsley, the daughter of Vince McMahon, the owner of the WWF and the XFL. Luckily, to fight the good fight, there's a group of wrestlers that dress up like Mormon missionaries and call themselves the Right to Censor and, with pile driver-prayers, trash can pennants and rosary beads made out of metal folding chairs they'll keep everyone on the straight and narrow.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our WrestleMania.