It was Sunday, April 9th, 2018. I was sitting in an airport terminal waiting for my flight from Orlando to Atlanta to start boarding so we could begin our journey back home. Mythical gf and I had just spent a lovely weekend at Disney World where we couldn’t possibly have gotten any better weather than we did. We dined on a lobster bake at Disney Springs, imbibed in refreshing beverages at the Hangar Bar. We leisurely ate around the floral world at Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival, and I caught a Heracross in Pikachu Game, the South American exclusive while there. And due to some strategic planning on account of some typical Florida rain, we managed to ride the Avatar ride that typically has anywhere from a 3-4 hour wait with regularity, in under an hour.
It was a lovely trip.
However, Sunday, April 9th 2018 was also the same day that Wrestlemania 34 was scheduled. Obviously, seldom am I ever going to prioritize a wrestling show over mythical gf, and I didn’t even bother crosschecking when WM was going to be when we planned our trip, not that it would have impacted anything in the least bit. But the fact of the matter was that I still wanted to watch the show when I got back home and had a good 3-6 hours of free time because when taking into account of TakeOver and the pre-show and all the promos, who really knows how much time the ‘rasslin is going to account for.
This is often how I keep up with wrestling these days, watching things after they’ve aired, so that I can really flesh out the main storylines and plots without having to sit through all the commercials and extraneous fluff. Obviously, I run the risk of encountering spoilers on a regular basis, but seeing as how WWE programming runs every single week, and multiple times a week, and the fact that personally I don’t know a tremendous amount of people that are really still into wrestling, it’s typically never really a problem to indulge in wrestling the way I do.
Except, when it comes to the big pay-per-view shows; like Summer Slam, the Royal Rumble, or, Wrestlemania.
For whatever reason, the big shows are the shows that somehow often times manage to transcend drawing just the regular audiences, and bring in hordes of tourist casuals who bring with them shitty habits, such as live tweeting, live updating, or any sort of live posting to some form of social media that is seen by other people, thus completely confusing those who have no idea what’s going on, being enjoyed by the two other people who might be concurrently watching at the same time with having their dicks buried in their phones, but also fucking spoiling it for everyone who wants to watch it but isn’t watching it live.
On Sunday, April 9th 2018, I glanced at my phone after I got off the flight from Orlando, and I saw two people already blabbing away about the events of Wrestlemania. I tried to quickly scroll it off and pretend like I didn’t see it, but it was too late; like fucking Inception, once an idea takes root, you can’t even unsee it. I’d already been spoiled to one match, and I knew that if I kept looking at theFacebook, I would inevitably be spoiled to more.
My feeling of having a pleasant weekend became tainted by feelings of disgust and hostility towards people who absolutely just have to live tweet and live update because who the fuck really knows or cares. Mythical gf, who is mutual friends with some of these perpetrators confirmed the spoiler-fest, but because she has no vested interest in wrestling, it didn’t really annoy her to know; but even she agreed at how shitty it is to live tweet and literally spoil things for those who aren’t watching things live.
Suffice to say, I don’t hide the fact that I already think social media is a cancer on the world today. Sure, I glance at theFacebook with some regularity myself, but it doesn’t mean I like it; it’s simply because the world is lazy, and social media makes it easy to have common platforms that are universally used to make connectivity this simple. But it also creates arenas for people to exhibit shitty behavior, narcissism, ego feeding, or in this case, live tweeting. All of which I think are terrible human behaviors, but all of which have been propagated and amplified because of social media.
Ultimately, I managed to avoid spoilers for the matches I was most interested in, but at the same time, I had to go a little bit out of my comfort zone to ensure that they weren’t spoiled. Against better judgment, I stayed up later than I normally do to tune into the WWE Network and risked seeing spoilers by blindly fast forwarding to find the matches that I wanted to see the most, just so I could see them without knowing what happened in them. But then I was disappointed in the results and/or quality of the matches, and I went to bed feeling let down by Wrestlemania, but more furious with the fuckfaces on the internet who can’t bear to be away from their mobile devices for 2-3 god damn hours to just sit back and enjoy something without having to word vomit on the internet where people might see it whether they want to or not.
Live tweeting is the fucking worst. And the extra irony is, I don’t even use Twitter. Yet, thanks to everyone who feels the need to cross-post their Twitter shit, it shows up on theFacebook just as frequently, and I still can’t escape the shitty behavior.
Can the world just shut the fuck up for two seconds and put their phones down? Please?
