Starrcade 2017

Dear Wrestling,

First of all, you know how I'm a big trash heap monster person? Right, so...I left Starrcade at intermission.

You see, I really, really wanted to see Kevin and Sami, and give them the letters I've written--not on here. Paper ones. And I had an amazing day, and I just had this strong feeling like this was my best chance. Obviously if it had happened, I'd've led with that, but I don't really regret it. Right now I'm still awake at almost 5am from having too much caffeine for the drive home, so we'll see how I feel after I sleep.

It was a full day for me. I took my sister to work in the morning and left from there. I don't get to go to Greensboro very often, so I thought I'd check it out, maybe find a cool bookstore, and then hit the arena early to see if I could give them the letters--oh, why don't I just mail them? Because as much as I want to take merest microseconds of their time, I do want that instant of recognition. I lie to myself about that a lot, but not tonight! Anyway.

When I got to town I discovered that they have a zoo--and it has red pandas! We in the Steenerico Society joke that El Generico was secretly a transformed red panda--the way he moved, can you blame us much? So that was a crazy random happenstance. I headed there first. It's the Greensboro Science Museum, and the zoo portion is small but quite good. I had a long, whistled conversation with a cockatoo, got a scarlet macaw to say hello to me and to no one else, I petted SO many goats and an alpaca. I used to farmsit for a few places that had goats, and I miss them. I saw a giant anteater for the first time and he was crazy cool. The red pandas were obviously amazing and precious and perfect--they had long been one of my favorite animals, even before the Generico 'connection'. I went in to the aquarium part and discovered that penguins are almost as much fun to watch as otters.

After this perfect half a day--and it really was, I adore zoos--I got a piece of poster paper and a marker and made a simple sign that said "J'ai une lettre pour M. Steen et M. Sebei" and went to wait at the arena.

If you've never stagedoored, it can be a surprisingly nerve racking experience. It always takes forever, if you're really invested in the people you're waiting for you spend the whole time spinning up your nerves and then reminding yourself to calm down and be a good human to the other human, breathe, no not like Leslie Knope, come on buddy...We saw quite a few people come in. Natalya was funny and charming and very nice, although she didn't come over because "I'm a bad guy!" She promised to send our love to her cat and Tyson. Konnor was very funny, too.

Kofi Kingston came over to us because of course he did, he's amazing. I was relieved that nearly everyone who asked him for an autograph or picture was very polite, a couple were clearly shy and quiet, but it went very well. I was able to shake his hand and tell him that the New Day are why I started watching wrestling in the first place, which seemed to please him.

After that it was nearly 5pm. We all assumed that everyone had been told to be there by five, and with the sun going down it was getting very cold, so I headed inside. Even as we lined up and waited for the doors to open, people were 'woo!'ing like crazy, lots of "Adam Cole Bay Bay!" for some reason, all kind of things. I was pleased to see an LIJ shirt amongst all the Bullet Club and WWE ones.

******************************************************************

So I've been stuck here for hours now. I'm sick with something and yesterday definitely made that worse and I was up for 22 hours and I've been stuck. The postmatch letdown was really hard, too, much harder than is normal for me. Chris told me to just bang out my impressions and be done with it, rather than wait for or try to force the creativity. I hate it, but it's what I've got right now. I'm sorry guys, I'll try to do better in future.

The first match was Ziggler and Roode, with Arn Anderson as a special guest enforcer. I was surprised by how unified the crowd was behind Roode--I'm always curious if people have forgotten what an atrocious heel he was on NXT, if they didn't watch, don't care, or what. Regardless, unified they certainly were. This was by far the hottest crowd I've experienced. It reminded me, in fact, of the single best rock concert I've been to: Cowboy Mouth at the 9:30 Club in DC. If you've never seen them, they will goddamn save your soul.

I'm sure by now you've seen the clip of Anderson hitting the spinebuster on Ziggler: it was even more sudden and stunning in person, and Ziggler sold it beautifully.

Next was the 12 man tag match, which was insane and I literally couldn't keep up with everyone there--although I really like Luke Harper and I was very very glad to see him. I honestly don't know what it is, I just really enjoy him. One thing that stood out was that the crowd was really behind Tye Dillinger, and there was a fun moment of a guy in each corner doing the ten punches with him.

The Naomi/Tamina match was honestly a little disappointing. Naomi was wonderful and everyone loves her, but it felt very one-sided in terms of character, and the crowd was cool on it.

There was a tribute to Dusty before the Dustin/Dash match that honest to god made me--and several others--cry. I think it was one I've seen before, but man. I know almost nothing about that man, I don't think I've seen more than a couple promos, but his heart and his soul ache from him so that even my ignorant ass can see it. He really was special. The match was short, but good, and it was wonderful to hear Dustin speak afterward.

The match between Shinsuke and Baron Corbin was better than I expected--I don't enjoy Corbin at all, but Shin pulled a pretty good match out of him, and singing Rising Sun with thousands of people was wonderful. Afterwards Shinsuke spent a lot of time with the fans, pretending to take one's hat and taking selfies just of himself on another's phone. It was delightful and I like him more every time I see him live.

And then the event that I was really there for: the tag titles on the line, and Kevin and Sami's first attempt at them in WWE. It was a good match, but unfortunately I never felt like the titles were really in true peril of leaving the Usos. Based on who got the best offense and whatnot, it felt like maybe the New Day might get them, maybe, but definitely no one else. I'm glad I was there to represent the Steenerico Society. I look forward to their next attempt, and hopefully one that I can share with my friends.

So after that match I was still really hot to give them their letters, even though I'd sworn that I wouldn't wait again, and anyway AJ matches these days just devolve into chanting USA and I despise that, so I hightailed it back outside to try to catch them.

I'm pretty sure I saw Sami walk to the car. I did get to thank Dustin as he was leaving, and I even conversed briefly with Jimmy Uso before thanking him too. ("How are you not freezing?" "Aren't *you* freezing?" "I *am* freezing, and I'm wearing sleeves!")

Then I came home and didn't sleep until almost 6am. The end.

With Apologies for...all this,
Autumn

Wrestling and Pacifism

Dear Wrestling, 

First my very simple, straightforward thoughts on wrestling and pacifism: I have no problem at all with consensual violence between adults. I'm a big fan, in fact, whether that's wrestling or MMA or karate tournaments or my husband teaching me how to do an armbar.

It's nonconsensual violence that I abhor, and I do abhor it--well, let me qualify that, just like I do everything. I myself am very, very tempted by violence on a regular basis. I think more than most people, although there's no way to know for sure. Remember how I said I grew up wanting to be Wolverine? Yeah, not the healthiest problem-solving method, is it? I'm never tempted to mass violence, so never on an international scale. But interpersonal stuff is a problem.

When you enter a Zen Buddhist monastery, everything is extremely regimented. You all sleep at the same time, eat at the same time, do chores, etc. Since the goal is to figure out to live a free and natural human life without suffering, this strikes a lot of (esp. Western) people as either counterintuitive or hypocritical. The idea behind this is that our culture and our habits have so muddled our thinking that we have no idea what it would feel like to just sleep when sleepy, eat when hungry, and so on. There's too much in the way. So, you break it down, live life in its simplest form, and re-learn how to be a human.

When I finally woke up enough to see how instantaneous my violent impulses were, I decided to go completely the opposite direction as much as possible, and then maybe someday I can just be a human about it. Maybe not though, in which case not hurting other people is still a pretty good call.

And let me clarify that, too: it's not like I was going around picking fights and punching people. I've been in two fights in my life, both as a little kid, and one was over a kitten being abused.  But the impulses were there, always, and that bothered me. When I made this decision to consciously switch my orientation, it wasn't from punching to not punching, it was from wanting to punch to responding with, "Yes I see what you want, but we never ever do that." (And yes, that is how I talk to myself. *shrug*)

All that to say, here's a letter I wrote to a friend about wrestling and pacifism from a Quaker point of view. As far as I know, it is a true story, but I couldn't find the source and so the names and details are my own. Also, the real name for Quakers is the Society of Friends, so you'll see that here.

Ticonderoga Noir and a Clairfontaine notebook

Anxiety and Impermanence

Dear Wrestling,

Today I am thinking a lot about anxiety, which I am feeling a lot of, and impermanence, which we are all subject to.

If you're not familiar with the idea of impermanence, basically it just means that everything changes. Even the sun will eventually die. I'm not usually bothered by this--after all, it means bad weather and pain end too. Or at least change.

Right now we Steenerico fans are in that painful gulf between certainty and flailing panic. We know that Kevin and Sami have gone back to North America from the European tour. We don't know why and we don't know if it's a work. Part of what makes this so painful, I think, is that we just watched Sami step into the spotlight properly for the first time since NXT. Our boys were telling us a story, together, again. It's a glorious thing, and I've been off my tits on happiness about it, even as others wait for shoes to drop and reversals to happen.

We've been waiting for so long for Sami in particular to be treated as we feel he deserves. And not just us: the reason I am writing this now is because of this excerpt of Kenny Omega from Colt Cabana's Art of Wrestling podcast episode 373: "If I ask the Young Bucks opinion, that's pretty much the opinion that counts the most to me. Back in the day like before I was with the Young Bucks all the time and I was in DDT, it was always Rami, like 'Rami what'd you think?' And if Rami gave it a stamp of approval..." 

Let me rephrase that. The man generally acclaimed to be the greatest wrestler in the world, values most the opinions of the Young Bucks, and of Sami Zayn. We've heard similar things from so many other wrestlers--whether they're his friend or not.

He deserves so, so much better than he's getting. I just wish we fans were the ones who could give it to him, and not a capricious businessman.

Anyway, moping aside: anxiety because we have no idea what's going on and this just when things were starting to get good, and impermanence because boy howdy that 'just starting to get good' didn't last very long, did it?

Let me find something less morose to end on--ah, here we go. Here are some bits from my favorite poem: Church of the Broken Axe Handle by Derrick Brown. You should read the whole thing, you'll understand me much better if you do. It's excellent.



I know you are alone and soaking in it
like solitude is blood
and the night is the letting.

Your heart races
with the pressure
of everyone in the room
finding a slow dance partner
but you.

Tap in. Tap the shoulder.
Love is yours.
Make the first move.
Lose the ones who stepped on your shoes.

Love is yours.
Let it be its horrible self. Learn it.


Hug each other, hold each other tight,
Autumn

Being, Obstacles, and Stories

Dear Wrestling,

I learned about Jose Ortega y Gasset in a dual Religious Studies/Philosophy course called "Who Am I and How Do I Know?"  He was a Spanish philosopher and his answer is, "I am myself and my circumstances." We'll skip the how he knows for now, although it's great and you should read about it.

I am very, very taken with his idea. Basically, humans are stories we tell ourselves specifically when we run into obstacles. And in a way, we don't really exist without those obstacles. On the one hand, there isn't really a time in our lives in which we are totally unopposed or free--even as infants, we get hungry or hurt or frightened, and then we have to deal with that. How we deal with it, our response to an obstacle, is who we are--that moment when consideration coalesces into decision or action--that is who we are. Both the choice, and the story we tell ourselves about it.

As an example. Let's say, happiest of fortunes, that you're Kevin Owens. You have one of the most ridiculously idyllic families in recorded history. You love them with a love like the burning heart of the sun, and you want to provide them with everything they could ever need or want. But. There are obstacles. The opinions of others who have power over your career; other wrestlers nearly as good as you; human limitations like needing to sleep occasionally. Lots of different obstacles that could prevent your plan of giving your family everything.

So what do you do? Do you succumb and settle for less? Do you struggle diligently and take life's knocks and eventually reach your goals? Do you change in the ways that people insist upon in order to gain their acceptance and hopefully employment/cash/championships? Or do you spit and curse and promote yourself and stubbornly live life as you wish and simply outperform everyone you're put up against, and thereby gain the things you want—in the way you want them?

That choice, that program of living is how we, and you, know who you are.

So wrestling. You, dear Wrestling, seem to have at some point in the storied past heard about this theory and said, "Well, I guess we know what the foundation of everything we're ever going to do is, then."  I am new to this, as you know, so I can't say this with utter certainty for every character, but of the ones I know, this is absolutely how they work. Kevin's a good example, but look at Sami Zayn too--if ever there was a character defined by running into brick walls and attempting to overcome them, it's him! John Cena is a fun example, because he starts as an underdog and eventually transitions to the corporate spokesperson we know today.

I don’t actually have a purpose with this one beyond telling you about this great way of thinking about life and how we write ourselves as stories in response to the things that would block us. It's so natural to wrestling, of course I fell for you as soon as I started to understand you!

Love,
Autumn

Heels.

Dear Wrestling,

I have always been a goody two-shoes. I got up to some mischief when I was a kid, but nothing worse than lying about where I was going and maybe a little light trespassing. And I never once got worse than silent lunch in school—not ever.

I was pretty wild, don’t get me wrong. In the summer I spent all day, every day on my bike or in the woods. I’d lead my sisters along a highway they are now horrified about to go to the music store, I took the axe from the shed and went into the woods and cut wood to feel better about whatever, I built little shelters, I’d fuck with creeks and dredge them or build tiny dams-all kinds of stuff, pretty much completely unsupervised. My parents trusted me, and that was mostly an ok decision.

But I never smoked or drank. I never threw rocks at people or cars—actually, got them thrown at me a couple times (it was a given that I was a witch according to one boy). I was wild, but in an Emersonian kinda sense—wild, but basically a good kid.

And I’ve always had this overdeveloped sense of justice and vengeance. Very, very concerned with fairness. My parents were hippies, if you couldn’t tell, and I never encountered hate or prejudice in the home. My dad also cheated on my mom when I was little and between the two things I basically thought that once my muscles got big enough, obviously I would be Wolverine, or Batman. Justice and the night, that’s me.

That’s ingredient one—it’s a lot together, sure, but think of it like herbes de Provence.

Ingredient two is my fictional life. I always say that I grew up in Narnia. If I wasn’t running around the woods or streets wishing I was a dryad, I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia. I read them hundreds of times. Of course I wanted to be on Aslan’s side. Whether that’s because I was a good kid or why I was a good kid, I’ll never know. They’re too entwined. The point is that I was certain early on about what a good guy was and what a bad guy was, and it was all spelled out in these books. I was a good guy, like Wolverine. I hated bad guys,and I wanted to help good guys.

Now, one might think that as I grew older these attitudes might become less rigid or a little more nuanced. Ohhhhh, buddy. Not so. My family life was a fair bit of a trainwreck by adolescence so this sense of honor and duty and righteousness was what I clung to when I was raising my two little sisters and trying to figure out how to live. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs isn’t rigid the way it’s drawn, but you still need a moment to breathe in order to start examining your codes and rearranging your internal life.

Eventually I got a bit better, saw a few shades of grey, but I still had pretty hard lines. Still thought, I’m definitely a good guy. I lose my temper sometimes, but holy snails, look what I’m dealing with! PTSD and mental illness and poverty, who wouldn’t lose it sometimes. (Hi, Double Standard! *waves*)

So people around me are often trying to get me to waver, to do things I think are wrong—little things, medium things—but, if it’s wrong there’s no such thing as little. Wrong is wrong. I won’t even kick a chicken in an RPG, because the point is to be immersed in this fantasy, right, and kicking chickens is Wrong. I won’t play baddies, even for alternate endings/storylines. I don’t *like* baddies. That shit is boring, anyway.

This goes on for years. Up until this last year, in fact.

When I discovered Kevin Owens.

At first I don't like Kevin Owens. He's a bad guy first off and secondly that mirror is entirely too accurate for my comfort. But as I watch, I find myself realizing: I like Kevin Owens. I fucking love him. A lot! He’s so sharp and clever, both with his words and with his actions—a powerbomb as a punchline, or a bow as a fuck you. He’s so, so good, and he’s soooo bad! What the hell?? Who am I and what have I done with me?? Worse, I agree with him, a lot of the time! The crowd is wrong to boo him, that ref was unfair, people shouldn’t ask you dumb questions!

It begins to occur to me. I turn to my husband one night as he’s loading the dishwasher.

“Honey…”
“Yeah?”
“I. Um.”

He looks up, concerned.

“What’s up?”
“I think I might be a heel…”

He just laughs: giggles and cackles and a couple guffaws.

“Yeah, babe. I know.”
“You know I am, or you know that I think I am?” I’m nearly panicking, here.
“Both?”
“But heels are bad guys! I can’t be a bad guy!”
“Ok, but honey, what did Willem DeFoe say about bad guys?”

“…oh no.”

It’s been a couple months now, and I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that (figuratively speaking) I’m a heel. Parts of it always made sense to me: I talk a LOT of trash, especially to those closest to me. I’m very committed to not caring about the opinions of those I deem unworthy of that kind of care—for instance, people who think that because I’m trans/nonbinary, I’m undeserving of civil rights. Fuck that, those people can go to hell and they definitely don’t warrant *my* consideration. People who aren’t coming to me in good faith is another example: if you’re starting out by trying to manipulate me or hurt me? No fucks given. Life’s too short and precious, y’all.

But my big insight, the one that really helped, was a version of DeFoe’s “Everybody thinks they’re righteous.” I think it’s slightly different than that: I think faces think they’re right, but heels are righteous. By this I mean, systematically, habitually correct—correct as a matter of course, and with years of accumulated rightness behind them. Of course they’re right, they’re always right because they’re always trying to be right, they’ve spent years learning what it is to be right and then trying to do only that.

Let’s take Neville as an example. For years he was a good guy. A fierce competitor, but he played by the rules and worked hard and knew that someday his time would come. But it didn’t. And then he learned that he wasn’t right: the right thing to do, the actual rules to play by, are to seize not your own, but any opportunities, to force them into existence—those are the rules winners getting ahead had been playing by, and the rules he’d been following were what they told chumps to keep them out of the way.

So he follows the real rules, and he wins, and he is righteous.

Kevin Owens loves his family more than anything, they are so so precious. They’ve made so many sacrifices for him to live his dream, and so now all he wants in this world is to provide them anything and everything they could want. And so he does. He fights and works his ass off and cuts whatever corners are necessary, because he is doing the right thing for his family. Supporting your family is righteous.

Someone like Bray Wyatt is easy: he’s God, obviously he’s righteous. The Good Brothers play by a code of wrestling/lockerroom etiquette that’s older, and operates as an appeal to authority in a way, and that authority makes them righteous.

Sometimes righteousness relies more heavily on kayfabe: supposedly Brock Lesnar is the best wrestler in WWE and therefore righteous by way of his superiority—while in the real world no one who shows up to work so little can be called superior.

This difference between righteousness and doing the right thing is one of the hundreds of things I wish the culture generally would learn from wrestling. In Religious Studies we call this the difference between an open and a closed worldview—between knowing that you definitely have all the answers and are sure you know how to behave, and the ability to use a moral imagination. Moral imagination is one of my favorite ideas ever: the ability to imagine your way out of a moral conundrum. The peaceful protest movements of the 20th century are wonderful examples.

And now we get to Sami. Moral imagination is punk as fuck: society says that poor people don’t deserve to exist or that innocent people in the Middle East deserve to get bombed? Nope, we are agitating and writing music and dropping right the hell out of the kind of evil society that would hold such a view.

Sami is an open worldview personified. While he has a code, he is never certain of himself (at least, not until recently… 🤔). In scientific terms, he checks and rechecks his work and never skates by on confirmation bias. He's open to being wrong. Compare to how Kevin reacts when things don't go his way. Now, I started this long before what Sami obliquely refers to as the character's 'new direction' and I am fascinated to see if my theory here bears out: so far so good, though. Kevin is right now, you see, Kevin is always right about everything therefore Kevin has the right answers--and worst of all, now there are right answers to be had, rather than simply a life to be lived.