Of Editors and Wrestling

Cheyenne here.

The Editor is still unplugged, as it were. To confound matters slightly, she had a nasty reaction to something she ate over the weekend, and spent much of yesterday sleeping or exceptionally groggy. She is, however, in fine spirits today – well, as fine as she can be while still unplugged, of course.

Along with the Internet service, they have also lost their cable TV. Which doesn't bother her a great deal, although there is one thing she misses very much – namely her wrestling. She is, as she has stated herself, a 'wrasslin' geek,' which is very much true.

I am not. I can appreciate the level of athletic ability on display, but the entire wrestling mileau, with the good guys and the bad guys and the side switching and the sensationalism and the hoopla never really caught my attention. I've seen it describes as a modern mythology, similar to the tales told in ancient Greece about Hercules and the Argonauts, and I can see that. At the same time, I can imagine there were one or two skeptics listening to tales about the labors of Hercules and saying things like, “Rigged, the lot of them. That lion was doubtless no larger than a small dog or a large rat, and the stables probably had been built in a lowland and the river flooded. One big fake.”

I don't think wrestling is fake, per se. Scripted, yes, much of the time, at least, but I will never call it fake – I mean, you can fake the hits all you want, but no matter how you control it, you're still dropping onto a hard surface supported by tractor springs (I believe) when you get body slammed.

So I don't follow wrestling, but The Editor loves it – she has her favorites, and her least favorites, and if you were to call on a night to talk to her while she's watching her wrestling, chances are she'll only be kind of listening to you. But we all get like that – I get like that watching anything to do with Spider-Man – so we can forgive her that. She's a fan, and fans of something get caught up in it, whether it's a particular TV show, a movie, a sports team, a painter, a book, a car race, looking for a particular bird – or wrestling. It's what makes us fans – the willingness to get swept up in something grand and magnificent and entertaining for a little while. Because sometimes, that little diversion is what we need to help us make sense of the rest of our life.

I helped her with her diversion a little today, by looking up the results of last night's matches and reading them to her earlier on. I imagine I'll do that again before she gets her cable TV back. I don't mind so much, really. That's what friends do, after all – and fans, for that matter.