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Submitted by Randomguy#5 on Friday, July 21, 2006 at 2:58 AM EST
Welcome back to the column that is really trying very very hard not to celebrate the injury of a sports-entertainer, The Nosebleed Section. I am your host for the next two thousand words or so, Randomguy#5 and today we’ll be talking about some obsessive compulsive bad habits of mine-no not that kind get your head out of the gutter. Though, as long as we’re talking about vices I’ve got this itch…. I don’t like to do it. I really don’t. I always feel bad when I truly bash a wrestler because it’s never really been my style. I respect the art form of what these guys do and I could never begin to accomplish the feats they do or perform on a level they do. Which is why whenever you see me really lace into a guy I try and keep it about his/her character and less about the performer. I don’t know the performer, I know the character. Of course sometimes I break that small rule of mine and usually my hatred is reserved for the wrestlers who don’t perform at all. By that I mean, they do things in the ring that you, me, or Dupree could do with about ten minutes worth of training. The most obvious target for me over the years has been Mark Henry. So what happens? He blows a knee apart leaving me feeling like crap because I’m sooooo torn here. I feel bad-he’d worked hard to get to where he was (I think) and he really had progressed, particularly on the character side. Then again, I still thought his ring work was sickening and it bothered me that he was anywhere near the main event when in reality I thought everything he did well as a heel would be better served in the under-to-midcard. So-basically those of you who have read my thoughts on Henry before know how I feel right now and those who don’t-I’m not sayin. All I will say is that I don’t ever under any circumstances with injury on anybody. That’s it. ;) --My apologies to everybody who's sent in feedback to the last column or last couple audio shows. I've gotten really behind on my emails and I'm sorry for that. Rest assured they are all read and appreciated, and I will do my best to respond to as many of them as possible in the next few days. --Do not break up the Spirit Squad. Not yet. Yes there is talent in there, yes you could get at least two solid tag teams out of it. Yes, I’m done seeing them fight DX, and yes I’m through with them being McMahon’s puppets. But do not break them up. People still hate them way to much. --Speaking of DX they officially need to progress. I’ve loved them so far but its such a thin line between love and hate in the wrestling world that one week they can be making fun of Vince to my delight and the next week I’ll be bored with it and think it’s beating a dead horse. Sorry Vince, I’m a fickle fan. --TNA is dropping the ball with Samoa Joe. He needs to wiggle his way into this Jarrett/Sting thing now. I don’t mind the Jarrett/Sting feud I just don’t think it needs the title to work. Sting preventing Jeff from getting the title is an idea that could have gone on much longer than it did and still been entertaining, meanwhile Joe needs the title because he can’t get much bigger without it. Joe vs. Christian=Money. Joe vs. Styles for the NWA title at Bound For Glory=glorious. --What if Kahli pins The Undertaker again? --Am I the only one who thinks that RVD will come back from his suspension bigger and better than ever? This gives the modern, “Nu-ECW” fan base a whole new introduction into RVD 4:20 and the WWE should quit worrying about scaring off advertisers and push that. It’d rule. I suppose it high time I break down and write a wrestling column, though I worry about how well it’s going to go. You see I’ve always had this problem with being easily distracted. In fact sometimes I’m like a fat kid in a candy store, an engineer in Radioshack, or a fat girl visiting Randy Orton’s homepage on wwe.com. It’s true that in spite of my average intelligence I have the attention span of our president kids-who by the way best be sending some peeps to go fetch Morpheus’ friend out of Lebanon, and while they’re there tell them to swing by Kuwait and pick up a barrel of crude. See, I got off topic already. As I begin typing this column to you tonight I’m listening to a new CD sent to me by an Arizona band named St. Madness trying to get some airplay on Project Radio. It’s a great disk and I encourage you to check it out (“Vampires in the Church“). I have anywhere between two and three IM conversations opened. One is a wonderful lady helping me with some graphic work for my Website, another is a fan of the audio show Monday Night Countdown (Hi Juan!) as we talk about the unfortunate injury of Mizzark Hendizzle. At various points thus far today while trying to write this column I’ve had three or four other IM’s open too-usually trading witty repartee with BC or trying to talk Morpheus down from the ledge after hearing the Spice Girls aren’t getting back together after all. This is of course in addition to the cell phone ringing as my girlfriend calls (not that I mind), the two Firefox windows open as I attempt to finish off the site overhaul, the IE window open because sometimes my piece of shit cpu won’t load certain pages right in Firefox, the Lop forums window as I talk some shit in the PWA, and who knows what else will pop up by the end of the column. And of course as all of this is going on I have a chemistry book taunting me from across the room reminding me that I have a final next week that I pretty much need a miracle to pass (If you’re a religious reader, keep me in your hearts please). Sitting on top of that book is a letter from my employer dictating ten things I need to get done before I report for work on August 8th (suck). All of that going on, with numerous other unmentioned ‘real world’ duties left unattended and I’m sitting here at a little after midnight writing a wrestling column that will only be read by people I’ll never meet. Lame. As that fairly shitty 90’s grunge crap song says by the chick artist I can’t remember: “I’m not an addict!” But in reality I may very well be. I went home to work a church picnic for my Grandmother last week but made a point to be back in town on time on Sunday to record Monday Night Countdown with Morpheus. I skipped class Monday night because I hadn’t seen Raw in two weeks. Actually, I hadn’t seen a whole episode of Raw in longer than that. I was PISSED when a professor broke a promise on Tuesday night that we’d get out early, so even with the start time pushed back an hour, I still missed the first half of ECW. I haven’t seen a live episode of Smackdown in months-I catch them on download or on tape if I’m lucky. Forget rent this month-do you realize what the card looks like for the Great American Bash? (All right, poor example, but I’m trying to drive home an introduction here cut me some slack). All of that and I failed to mention TNA. And those are just wrestling oriented online quassi-addictions. We haven’t even scratched the surface yet with the Nosebleed Section, The Countdown, the PWA, or…shit…everything not pertaining to Lop. The Project, Project Radio, The Cooler…. And a chemistry book….. I don’t like to be too terribly frank about ‘real life’ shit in my columns for a number of reasons. 1) It’s usually boring to the reader. 2) It’s none of your dammed business really. 3) I don’t really have a three but three points shows more emphasis. To deviate from my norm a bit though, I should have graduated college about four months ago. Technically I guess I did, I got the cool little hat and pretty long robe to prove it. Well-actually I probably should have graduated about sixteen months ago but who’s counting-there’s wrestling to watch, columns to write, shows to record, promos to cut, etc. I didn’t use to have any of these problems. Hell back in the day I was decent student. Well-let me rephrase. High school I was a decent student because I could handle most of the material with my eyes closed. What I couldn’t my friends and I had a fairly established method of academic socialism worked out to assure that we all did fine. My freshman year of college I was a piss poor student. College athletics was more of a mental strain than I was prepared for, I got fucked over by a long time love (emo alert!) and then there was the whole “away at college lets all get drunk” sub-culture that I fought to stay out of. There was of course one hell of a night on Mardi Gras where I sat down to watch Smackdown with a bag of Doritos in one hand and a fifth of Captain Morgan’s in the other. Two hours later both were gone and Smackdown was over so I got up and went to a frat party. An hour after that I don’t really remember. Good times. Sophomore year cleaned up though. Moved in with a good friend of mine met some cooler guys to hang out with (quick shout out to Matt, Liny, Elu, and JT) and got my academic shit together. Yeah we drank, like mad actually, but for some reason I was on top of my academic game and did very well both semesters that year. That is of course until a guy on my football team, we’ll call him Jeff, came into my room one day talking shit about how Kevin Nash was coming back from injury at tonight’s Raw and that he was supposedly coming back as Big Daddy Cool Diesel again. Well, Nash did come back but the Diesel thing never happened. Needless to say I soon interrogated Jeff about where he developed this knowledge. Now-If you knew Jeff you’d know that he could have said just about anything and people would have believed him. If he’d told me he’d been abducted by space aliens who were on their way to capture deposit a robot in Oakland to attack DoubleHelix, I’d have bought it. Jeff was a bit different and to find out that aliens had abducted him wouldn’t have surprised me. Sadly there were no aliens and Jeff soon directed me to lordsofpain.net. Of course me and my piss-poor attention span kept fucking up the url, and that’s not a web address you want to fuck up believe me. You end up with some fucked up shit, I’m telling you. Anyway I started becoming a regular and spent that summer walking four blocks to the library every other day just to catch up on my wrestling news. Of course I eventually began reading some columns and thanks to the likes of Daveyboy, J-Train, and Snapple I was hooked. That shit was “more addicting than snorting cocaine off Jessica Alba’s tits” as my good friend and columns forum icon Boss Foxx would put it. One day late that summer a column with the title “COTM: The XY Files” caught my eye which I greatly enjoyed. I loved it but at the same time I thought, “You know-I can do that” and followed that column back to the columns forum. Junior year of college once I had a dependable Internet connection again, The Nosebleed Section was born. So you can blame Tinaali and her COTM column. Well her and the vets of the forum at the time. Xan, DoubleHelix, Pt2, Dubzilla, and yes-even Winter all helped me along and turned me into a slightly less soggy shit sandwich. I quickly became hooked on them forums man. The columns forum was like a brotherhood and I thrived in that environment. I loved it-I loved writing columns every week (yes, I wrote them weekly then can you believe that) and I loved talking wrestling and writing with a bunch of people who thought and Of course by this point in my life I was a full blown wrestling-addict. I say that only half jokingly mind you-remember addiction is defined as an activity that effects one’s day to day functioning and trust me it has. As I said, I skipped class Monday night if not the four weeks before that. While there were other reasons as well I’d be flat out lying if I said that Raw wasn’t a factor. I can’t look at a box of matches or a bottle of lighter fluid without wondering what I can set on fire and power bomb through it. Wrestling catchphrase are part of my normal rhetoric (try telling a student to “just bring it” as a teacher-gets great pops) and to this day I can’t say the word “never” without following it with “EEEEVVVVEEERRRR” ala the original Aytollah, Chris Jericho. I still chop my roommate across the chest anytime I can catch him off guard. I even go “woo” sometimes. He hates me. Anyway, back to the story, I spent a good majority of my junior year sitting at my computer in front of Lop and Microsoft Works (yeah, the shitty Word Processor) plying my trade. You can guess what happens academically when you start writing 15 or so pages every couple of weeks that have nothing to do with Vygotsky, Descartes, Sir Thomas Moore, Statistics or Spanish (three times). Sure there was the whole depression thing that came about but I blame Lop. Chemical imbalance? Pfft. Psychological distress brought on by massive turbulence in my social life? Bah! Drastic shift in chemical makeup as a result of quitting football and going from collegiate athlete to couch potato in 3.2 seconds? GET OUTTA HERE! Laziness? Academic apathy? Existential depression? Lack of direction? A severe case of Fuckitall? These things had no impact! Lop is the reason my grades plummeted! The Nosebleed Section is the reason I failed to pass a single subject first semester my senior year! Monday Night Countdown is the reason that now, in what should be my last round of courses before getting the degree some three 5+ years later, that I will possibly fail one of those courses and thus not get the diploma I so rightly do not deserve! IN FACT! One could argue if one were so compelled, that were it not for the audience that I’ve attained in my three plus years around Lop that I would have abandoned this long ago. Sure, I love writing. Yes I love talking about wrestling. But come on now-would I really spend so much time on these hobbies if I were the only one partaking in them? A column can be great but not without an audience! So, it is at least plausible that YOU are the reason I’m still in college! Were it not for YOU than I would have surely discontinued this practice ages ago, and most defiantly had righted all the other wrongs in my life, including a chronic case of boredom with the status-quo society had carved out for me. Yes its true. Lop is a wrestling website, so without wrestling there would be no Lop. But without Lop there would be no Nosebleed Section or Monday Night Countdown. Without those things, The Project would have never come into existence either, nor any of its time consuming components. And all of these things would have never come to be were it not for YOU! The fans of wrestling, the visitors of Lop, the artists on my websites, the readers of my column and the listeners of my radio show! I won’t blame you entirely. In fact you’re likely as much an innocent victim in all this as I am. Wrestling’s ruined your life I’m sure as well. Is it wrong? Is it wrong that I walk over a balcony in my school’s student center and look at the table below and all I can think about is Swantoning my fat ass through the table? Is it wrong that I once attempted a Matt Hardy leg drop from those same stairs-sending a couch sliding 20 feet across the student center? What about the old lady at Wal-Mart? No-not the one by the ladder that I kept imagining myself diving off. The one who kept cutting in front of me in line to get the eggs. Surely it ain’t right that when she backed away all I could envision was a kick to the gut and Stone Cold Stunner for her. What about when I got shitfaced my sophomore year and F-5’d a couch in the dorm’s lounge-is that my fault of wrestling’s? I didn’t do it-I had no choice. I was conditioned by a wrestling society-a culture of wrestling antagonized by websites like this one and the throngs of readers who flock to your favorite columns and cast upon me your adoration upon us starving artist-internet addicted-depression laced columnists. I think I’m going to go do some Chemistry. (Probably not though) Sanctimonious Son of a Bitch Tod Grisham you are most certainly one dumb SSOB. Cruiserweight Championship? Tell me that line was written in so you’d look like a tool and JR and King could talk about Lillian. As it is I’m not convinced that they just didn’t cover very well and that you sir, are actually, fucking stupid. Cannon Fodder This week‘s Cannon Fodder award goes to the two guys who got beat to hell by the Highlanders for making Raw’s newest Tag-Team look so damned good. I appreciate any good piece of fodder who doesn’t get a ring entrance, barely gets their names said, and whom I can’t even recall the names of now. Way to go fellas-good luck in your wresting careers. Gotta pay dues and all I suppose. I‘m Pro…. Main Page Promotions. Not necessarily for any reason other than that I remember about a year ago when I got my email from the Webmaster of Lop informing me that I was getting called up to the big leagues. I spoke a bit about the toiling of those in the columns forum and for all of its fun you can’t beat the spotlight of writing for you guys every couple of weeks. Regardless of anything else, congratulations to Big Brother and RipBossman for their promotions to Lop’s Main Page this last week. I know it’s a dream come true for you guys and I won’t take that away from you-and I hope you won’t let anybody else either. Welcome fellas. Don’t suck. Alright well I know tonight’s column was sort of random and all, but what do you expect from me. I thought it would be a bit of a different spin on the same old “I’m obsessed with wrestling!” column idea so I hope you enjoyed it despite it’s obviously lack of depth and the glaring absence of true wrestling content. I’ll be back at you sometime soon as I’m carving out a column about Chris Jericho for sometime in the possibly near future. May toss out another idea or two also, we’ll just have to wait and see what I feel like in next time I visit The Nosebleed Section. Hopefully you’ll join me then and until that time I am Randomguy#5 thanking you for reading but reminding you to next time, get better seats. Click here to Email Randomguy#5! The Project is currently closed for a major (and much needed) site overhaul. If you’ve visited the old site in the past, you’ll be shocked and hopefully pleased by the new look and all the new things we’ll be offering. Until then, feel free to check out the forums or have a listen to Project Radio and check out one of the internet’s fastest growing hard rock and metal radio stations.  Monday Night Countdown Last Week‘s Episode Monday Night Countdown is Lop's own exclusive audio podcast featuring me, Randomguy#5 and fellow Lop columnist Morpheus. The show is a countdown type format running down the hottest ten topics of the past week in professional wrestling. You can find it in the “News” section of Lop every week Monday-so check out Lop Monday afternoons-and start the Countdown to your wrestling week. Monday Night Countdown: Hi-Fi **Download Here** --Best audio quality, but may take longer to download. Recommended for broadband users. Monday Night Countdown: Low-Fi **Download Here** --Slightly lower grade audio quality but substantially smaller file size for quicker easier downloading. Ideal for users on dial-up internet connections. *NEW GALLERY* Very COOL and RARE Photos of WWE Stars and Divas OUT PARTYING!
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