Day: May 17, 2026

Ironically, I asked for this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the big selling points I used on my dad when I was arduously trying to talk him to move down to Georgia, other than the fact that everything made sense, was that with him being somewhat in the Metro Atlanta area, not only could I see him with tremendously more regularly than any member of his family had been able to see him over the last 10+ years, he could now participate in things like holidays, events and milestone occasions, like the Pre-K graduation of his granddaughter.

Yes, I know that in the grand spectrum of things, Pre-K graduations are pretty much important only to the parents of the children ‘graduating’ from preschool, but it’s one of those things where I’ve been to enough children’s things over the last six years to understand and have witnessed all sorts of healthy family dynamics where grandparents often show up to events as such, because it’s what family does – show up.

Because graduation day was kind of hectic on account of an altered schedule and in-laws visiting, I didn’t want to have to wake up at like 5 AM to drive the 40 miles to my dad’s facility to pick him up, and then weather the teeth of Atlanta morning traffic to get back 40 miles, I opted to just hail an Uber for my dad, and bring him to my side of town, and then we could go to graduation, and either I drive him back, or I send him home in another Uber. 

We’re adults, and we throw money at obstacles.

I call him at 7 AM, to find out if he’s ready to go, and naturally he doesn’t pick up his phone because communication with my dad is basically a one-way street where he will blow up my phone whenever he wants to ask me a question that I’ve already answered for him at least 15 times previously, but when I need to get in touch with him, he never fucking picks up the phone, and I can usually expect to get a callback in a minute or two, like he’s a fucking ER doctor being paged.

Anyway, when he calls back, I ask him if he’s ready to go, and he says he wants to have breakfast first, which is a fair accommodation, his place has set meal hours, and he’s entitled to get his meals.  I tell him to call me when he’s done eating, and I’ll hail an Uber and let him know the make and color of the car, like we’d been doing for rides to church the last few Sundays, and he gives me an affirmative.

20-25 minutes later, I call him back because now I’m sweating the time, because if he doesn’t get into an Uber soon, he’ll definitely already be in morning traffic, but there would be no guarantee that he’d make it to my side of town in time to make it to the graduation, which I would later discover security was following rules to a T, and basically barring anyone who didn’t check in prior to 10 AM, wasn’t getting in.

My dad basically tells me that he doesn’t want to come, that it’s too far, too long of a car ride, and he actually wasn’t planning on coming.  Immediately, my mind quips that in one hand, I’m actually pretty relieved that he’s bailing, because this means I won’t have to babysit him all morning and afternoon, and seeing as how I was skirting work for the day, I would have my job to tend to, as well as the want to do certain errands, such as vote and go help mythical wife with another errand.

I don’t make a big deal about his abrupt bailing because of the relief at not having to babysit him, but subsequently, my mind started unpacking the underlying messages of his decision, and as pretty much is the case with everything my dad does to me, it began to aggravate the piss out of me.

I had reminded my dad well in advance of this date, and at no point did he ever express any sort of lack of want to come to my daughter’s graduation.  I made him write it down on his white board in his own handwriting, because I believe that even those with deteriorating recollection, if they see things written in their own hand, they’re more apt to be able to recall it.  So it’s not like he didn’t know this was coming, and he waited until the eleventh hour and 59th minute to bail on me, which in most cases, wars have been started for less offensive acts.

Continue reading “Ironically, I asked for this” →

I haven’t felt this disconnected to the WWE since my parents took cable away

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is something that I’ve often wanted to write about, but mostly on account of the chaos that is my life, and/or not feeling like writing about it when I actually have a few minutes to write, it’s just constantly been put back on the shelf

And then other things would emerge from the passage of time, in the WWE universe, and my general notes of what to write about when I get to it modifies, tweaks and I always hope it stays connected enough to where I can consolidate it to all one singular post instead of branching out into separate ones that give me anxiety of an ever-growing topic list of things I want to brog about if I ever had the time (and the drive).

But as the topic of this post clearly states, I’ve never felt so disconnected from my general fandom of the WWE and professional wrestling as a whole, than I am feeling these days.  By now, it’s no secret to fans that parent company TKO has done a number of things that have gotten the attention of fans of the industry, such as cutting a large swath of the WWE roster, reports of requesting massive pay cuts out of those who are still left, and the subsequent voluntary departures of others who did not want to yield their contractually obligated salaries, among numerous other acts of The Man.

Television, which for me is currently limited to just RAW on Netflix, because I don’t want to pay for ESPN Unlimited for PLEs, I don’t want to pay for Peacock for sporadic SNMEs, and I don’t want to pay for whatever service is necessary in order for me to be able to watch theCW for NXT and FOX for Smackdown.*

*I don’t want to jinx it, but there’s also AAA, free on YouTube, which has been extremely gratifying to watch, as it fills a metaphorical void left behind with the closure of NXT UK, where it’s a smaller, grassroots territory with a ton of talent and I’ve been enjoying its product immensely, especially since the book was given to the Undertaker

RAW is next to unwatchable nowadays because at least 65-69% of the broadcast is commercial breaks, stacked on top of the near cartoonish amount of ads that are strewn about the guardrails, on the ring apron and printed on the mat itself.  Wrestler entrances are what really makes wrestling into pro-wrestling, and almost every match has one superstar getting the shaft of having their entrance covered up by 7-8 minutes of commercials.

I genuinely don’t remember the last time I saw Roxanne Perez’s entrance, Io Sky seems to have fallen down to the tier that is at risk of having commercial break entrances, and the New Day’s fantastical entrances have been on perma-commercial break.

Speaking of the New Day, they’re probably the most notable names to emerge from recent events as talents who refused to budge from their contractually obligated compensation, and were subsequently forced into departure as a result.  In one hand, it makes me really sad to see Xavier Woods and Kofi Kingston leaving, but in the other, I’m so proud of both of them for sticking up for themselves, their worth and basically saying fuck no to TKO.

Normally, I think AEW’s track record of converting those who jump into lasting successful results isn’t very high, but if there’s ever been talents that probably have the potential to make a noteworthy splash, it’s The New Day’s who will obviously have to change their names, but the field has been set up to embark on a list of what-if programs, with FTR, Edge and Christian Cope and Cage, and of course, The Young Bucks.  And if they can somehow miraculously both pry Big E away from the E, and get him medically cleared, insert Kenny Omega into the mix for the long-fantasized Elite vs. The New Day.

Speaking of departures, the recent departure of Asuka under ambiguous circumstances was another massive blow, as far as my fandoms were concerned, because there were few more talented packages in the women’s division than Asuka.  Reportedly, she’s not released, she’s not quitting because of salary cuts, but I can’t help but feel that such things weren’t in her head when she chose to step away for a spell.  The firing of her partner Kairi Sane while in the midst of an active storyline, and the lame duck finish to an interesting arc are probably things that she considered, regardless if she refuses to admit.

And just in general, the quality of the product has gotten really poor, in general.  A lot has been made about the reduction of house shows and live events, and yeah it’s great that the talent doesn’t have to kill themselves on these televised events, but it’s not like these events existed solely to cash grab smaller towns.

Live events are basically live training and practice fields for talent to work things out and practice and grow chemistry with their partners.  When you take a lot of these events away, talents have less opportunity to build rapport and practice spots and move sequences in real time, and when it comes time to do them on live television, the results have been noticeably more sloppy.

Take for example, Sol Ruca.  Frankly, I think she is the very obvious face of the women’s division in the future, but her recent demotion promotion to the main roster has been anything but impressive.  And it’s not really any fault of her own, she’s been booked to lose to all the current mainstays, which is not illogical, but when you’re trying to build up a callup, jobbing them to oblivion isn’t the way to go.

But it’s the fact that she’s been thrown to the wolves with very little rapport building with the likes of Liv Morgan and Iyo Sky, both of whom she’s already lost to, but the matches were clunky, disjointed, and way below the standard that the level of talents should be capable of.

The reason why Sol was such a standout in NXT is the quality of the matches she had with all the girls down there, but the difference is that down there, Sol and all the other girls worked out a ton at the Performance Center, NXT runs live events throughout the state, and Natalya Neidhart runs an open training facility for all the local talent.  But on the road with the main roster, Sol has looked exposed and completely devoid of chemistry, because there’s frankly not enough opportunity for it to build.  On paper, there’s no reason why she should have clunkers with the likes of Iyo Sky and Liv Morgan, but if they’re not getting enough reps in off-camera, then it’s definitely going to show on-camera.

Overall, at a holistic level, it just feels that there’s an overwhelmingly oppressive amount of corporate meddling going on in the WWE by their parent company, and although the likelihood of the same result occurring being very low, seeing as how the E is still a veritable money printer, I get a lot of vibes of WCW’s tail end, with how much corporate meddling going on.  AOL Time Warner’s constant interference, and standards and practices basically killed WCW by a thousand cuts, and every time I hear or read some inkling of the corporate meddling by TKO to the WWE, I keep seeing some dudes named Ari and Shapiro at the root of some decisions that indicate that they really have no idea how to operate professional wrestling, and it always feels like there’s always some dude named Shapiro involved whenever it comes to money micromanagement in any arena, be it wrestling, baseball, or any other multi-million dollar industries.

The bottom line is that the WWE has been really, really hard to want to continue to support, and I feel this nihilistic line of thinking that TKO is really deliberately trying to alienate older, passionate fans of the product and industry, preferring to draw in fresh and younger and looser with their money audiences, which isn’t necessarily a bad strategy, but one that can only have fatal consequences down the line for when the ADD-ness of them all decides they don’t like, or wants to cancel wrestling.

There’s a popular saying that, nobody hates X more than X fans, so in this case, it would be that nobody hates wrestling more than wrestling fans, but I used to jokingly add “and Bret Hart” to the end of it, since ‘ol bitter Bret has absolutely nothing positive to say about the current state of professional wrestling, but nowadays, it seems like it’s more accurate to say that nobody hates wrestling more than TKO, because it just feels like with their obsessive pursuit of profit, they’re absolutely killing a property that has proven for generations how profitable and sustainable it can be, when managed by the right parties.

Backlash came and went, and it was one of the first PLEs that I didn’t watch in a while.  I tinkered with VPNs for the Royal Rumble, and plunked down a month for ESPN Unlimited in order to watch Wrestlemania, but the way Backlash’s card set up, it just didn’t look like it was even worth the effort to try and swindle my way to watch it por gratis; apparently my assertion wasn’t wrong, as it turned out to be a very mid card.

The last few weeks have been hectic for me, and I missed RAW last week and didn’t feel like I missed anything (I didn’t), and the latest episode, I kind of watched it for lack of anything better to do with that amount of time, and as I’ve been saying to mythical wife who’s often sitting next to me while I’m watching, the worst part of every Monday night is when I catch up to the live feed, because that means I’m not subject to have to watch the commercials.

As a wrestling fan, I’ve put up with the loss of kayfabe, the steroid scandal almost killing the business, oversaturation of product, AEW’s fans, Katie Vick, the Gobbedly Gooker, and all sorts of shitty stories, wrestler deaths, and tasteless storylines, and stuck around.  But at this current trajectory, there is a very realistic possibility that I’m just going to stop watching RAW, because all the commercials just makes it unbearable, and when it is on, the quality of the performing going downhill isn’t going to help its cause.

Going back to the title of this post, I just haven’t felt this alienated from something I’ve loved for as long as I’ve almost been alive, and it’s kind of sad, and I would wager that I’m not the only one who’s feeling this way out there.