Rant #2,459: Wringle Wrangle

Good news on the job front! Maybe ...

Yesterday, I actually got a call from a company that wants to interview me face to face on Wednesday morning. The job description is right up my line, and the place I am going to is about 30 minutes away from home, which makes it even better.

Let's see what happens, and I will certainly let you know on Thursday.

Last night, my son and I went to a WWE Raw wrestling show at Nassau Coliseum. The tickets were bought just weeks prior to the loss of my job, so we had the tickets in hand way before the sword of Damocles cut my head off, so everything was copacetic for a nice night, a few hours away from reality.

And when you go to professional wrestling, you are completely leaving reality, you are entering a world created by writers and the athletes that act out the scenarios created by these writers.

(As an aside, yes, I have applied to WWE for a writers job. I probably won't get it, but it didn't hurt to apply.)

Anyway, we received exactly what we expected from the nearly four-hour show.

We got good guys versus the villains, we got rough and tumble action that looked real but was often--but not all the time--fake, and we got a procession of storylines that make the show what it is, episodic live television every Monday played out in arenas in this country and around the world and delivered on TV via the USA Network.

As I have said numerous times, I have been a pro wrestling fan since the days of the old WWWF in the mid-1960s, actually attending my first match at Madison Square Garden in the late 1960s or early 1970s, so during the last 50-plus years of watching pro wrestling, I have seen it all. There is nothing really new about pro wrestling, only that the characters have changed from the Bruno Sammartinos and Chief Jay Strongbows and Bobo Brazils and Ernie Ladds and Freddie Blassies to the current crop of wrestlers like Braun Strowman, Brock Lesnar, Bobby Lashley, Drew McIntire and Rey Mysterio.

The women wrestlers are also a new breed. They are more athletic and more able to sustain a match than their counterparts, and yes, most of the WWE female wrestlers remain eye candy, looked at by the men and looked up to by young girls.

It is certainly the wrestling equivalent of K-Pop, but it works, kind of. The women's matches are longer, more athletically oriented, but are still generally sideshows--with a few exceptions--to the men's matches.

And I still wonder at the makeup of the crowd. The fans in attendance yesterday--not even near a full house, by the way--are still overwhelmingly male, but there are plenty of females there, and not just the moms of the multitude of kids in attendance. There are plenty of teen girls there, plenty of young girls who were in diapers just about two years ago, and this has increased seemingly each show my son and I go to.

Sure, they get to see fellow females tangle in the ring, but I guess they like the male wrestlers too. And vice versa for the little boys in attendance.

My son loved the show. He rarely shows much emotion, but I saw him pumping his fist at times, clapping for his favorites, smiling at some of the completely inane storylines--one is that a black male wrestler is having an affair with a lily white female wrestler in plain sight of her husband, also a wrestler, and the inane part of this is that in real life, the three wrestlers, and the black wrestlers wife, a former wrestler herself, are among the most happily married couples in the sport--and generally having a great time.

Me, it was a brief respite away from my situation, and with the help of a large Pepsi--no Coca-Cola sold at the Coliseum--I was able to stay awake for the entire show. At home, without anything to keep me going, I generally fall asleep during the first hour of the show, but not here.

And getting out of the Coliseum and back home was a snap. The show ended at about 11:10, we were in our car (I can proudly say that now that I officially own my car) at 11:14, and we were home by 11:31. I was in bed by 11:43, and slept until 6 a.m.

Not bad, not bad at all.

And yes, today is Election Day. Please vote. It is your obligation as a citizen of this country to vote, and not to vote is throwing away what men and women in this country have fought for for centuries.

Sure, it matters who you vote for, but it is more important that you vote.

Go to the polls when you can, and do your duty.

'Nuf said.