Entry for @blewitt's "Guilty Pleasures" contest!

Hey, Steemit! I’m just sitting down to see if I can get my entry for @blewitt’s "Guilty Pleasures" contest done before the midnight deadline. I’m happy to see foundational Steemians still hosting contests and promoting engagement during these slow downs. It’s the all about the community, the friends we make and the stories we share. There will be a day where account on boarding explodes and rewards are bountiful, but Steemit isn’t all about money. Without further adieu, let me get in to some of my most cringeworthy guilty pleasures.

This one is hard for me to admit, and ultimately what made me decide to contribute to this Guilty Pleasures contest. It’s not widely known, but in a past life […around the early 2000’s], I myself was a professional wrestler. Back in the days of ECW, me and @customnature organized and promoted a weird in between pro wrestling and backyard wrestling organization called Valley Championship Wrestling. We both performed, along side several other wrestling “marks”, or fans. It was the late 90’s and the backyard wrestling trend was massive.

We began picking up training from professionals like Mike Quackenbush and Strife from ECCW in Canada. We build rings and moved in doors […still can’t believe I convinced adults that owned event venues to allow us to perform with NO insurance or promoters license]. We were both enamored with the violent side of pro wrestling. The hardcore, the extreme. Death matches in Japan. FMW, BJPW. No-ropes barbed wire matches, thumbtacks, fire, glass, you name it. That’s what we liked to watch and what we like to do ourselves.

Our last match was in 2002 in Allentown, PA, but after that, we started attended Combat Zone Wrestling shows in New Jersey. This was another level of violence and our minds were blown. We became friends with @mtbmondo, one of the CZW wrestlers, and was even more immersed in the world of ultraviolet death match wrestling. I was the webmaster for @mtbmondo’s official website, www.nickmondo.com, designed shirts for him, and eventually many other wrestlers within the promotion. 

Around 2010, I moved to Minneapolis […where @mtbmondo was living at the time and my only friend in the Twin Cities]. I lost touch with that scene and it quickly became a dusty chapter in my life as I pursued editorial fashion photography. @customnature and I sort of cringe when the “wrestling days” are brought up, but on occasion, I still watch old ECW matches on my phone when It think @vermillionfox isn’t listening. It’s not a passion like it once was, but it was a significant part of my life for many years.

Bringing this full circle, @tarotbyfergus is a HUGE wrestling fan. His promotion of choice is NXT, a subsidiary of WWE. The guiltiest of pleasures is talking about matches I’m sure he NXT was coming to Minneapolis/St. Paul, but at $70 a ticket, out of our budget when STEEM is at $0.25. My friend Drake, a referee for NXT, but formally Drake Younger, a death match wrestling legend in CZW and IWA-MS, just had a baby, and when I messaged him to congratulate him, he offered all four of us […@guthrie and @vermillionfox as well] tickets to the show.

So, as you can read in @vermillionfox’s recent blog post, “I’ll try almost anything once”, there I was with my old life making a grinding intersection with my current life. Watching a bunch of weirdo wrestling fans chant “NXT! NXT!”, similar to the gone days of “EC-DUB, EC-DUB!”; my girlfriend sitting to my left explaining that had she met me during this time of my life, we most likely wouldn’t be together. @tarotbyfergus and I, though, were immersed and fully owning our guilty pleasures.