Internet wrestling community legend Raven Mack raises goats, drinks beers, and makes babies. Once upon a time he also wrote about wrestling. This is a 12 Beer Review. 12 Days, 12 Beers. Not for the faint of heart. If you click more you will experience depravity, cursing, and political incorrectness. You have been warned.
Beer 1 follows the break:
BEER ONE: It’s the Sunday before Memorial Day, I’m chilling. It’s been a good day. As I watched the end of the race on TV, and El Hijo Del Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, fucked up and lost to the Viagra car, I heard explosions outside. I live in the country, so that’s all good.
Outside, the boys down the road were setting off some nice fireworks, looked to be of the South Carolina variety, with the ability to actually go above the treeline. I had spent all day cutting our tall ass grass, not because it was tall and I cared, but because I couldn’t get back there to hang up my hammock or to sit on a stump at the back of the property by the barbed wire fence and eat honeysuckle and drink red eyes like an old man. It’s the simple shit. So I step onto the porch, there’s fireworks exploding all over the sky straight ahead, to the right fireflies are bouncing and buzzing through the field I haven’t bushhogged yet this year, and to the left, an orange full moon is raising up over top this part of the World. Grandma Moon, as we’ve got our daughter inclined to call her. Fuckin’ beautiful. I love the fact I live in the country, I just wish it was further into the country.
But coming back from the dump with my mom yesterday, I was made to feel better when she said, "I love y’all’s house, because it’s not like the rest of these houses. They all look the same. Your’s is old and weird." Damn right. Subversive housing. Our American flag’s all faded and still hanging on the porch from the terrorist attacks, which meant we didn’t have to put that shit back out for Memorial Day, not like we would’ve anyways. Apparently, after 8 months of rain and snow and sunlight, these colors do run. So all this firefly, full moon, firework nonsense was going on, so I pulled a beer out the cooler, and sat on top of it and drank the beer. You see, Memorial Day weekend is a three-day weekend, so that means I have to get two big bags of ice and like a case and a half of beer and fill the cooler up for the first time this year. From here out, till it gets cold, the beer will reside on the porch and not in the refrigerator.
I once got in a fight with Jocephus because he was gonna dump my ice out my cooler as we were walking shitty Richmond alley ways back to his house. He wanted to lighten the load. I saw it as wasteful. That was good ice that would still be there in the morning, a solid foundation for a fresh 16 lb. bag and a 12-pack of Olympia. Dumping ice is the type of nonsense outlook on things that leaves you spending a holiday weekend pushing a cart through the Target, instead of sitting on a stump drinking beer.
Anyways, I figured it’s a holiday weekend, I don’t have to work tomorrow, so I’m gonna do some 12-pack reviews for this ECW issue I haven’t worked on since some chump in Pennsylvania ripped me off on twenty bucks and killed my momentum on this thing. And I figure, being a holiday, like baseball would do, I’ll bust out the double header. So these next two reviews are back-to-back. And I’ve been drinking all day. I’m not sure if I’ll make it, but what the fuck do you care? You’re just along for the ride anyways.
Starting off with Anarchy Rulz, on a Sunday night, brings back memories. We, meaning me and the dudes I worked with at Uptown Copy (Walker Preteen Ranger, Matt the Indiana Firefighter, Littlescott, and sometimes maybe Emo-Emory and Clever Star) would meet up at Walker Preteen Ranger’s and drink beer and watch the ECW PPVs. Mostly we would drink, except one night when we only had enough money for a 12-pack between all of us. Usually we would bet Sandman beers on matches, meaning if your dude lost, you had to Sandman a beer, complete with head-smashing can action. Explaining the scarred forehead to my wife was always interesting.
You can’t create good stories for things like that. Eventually, I built a Sandman trophy, complete with a Dollar Store action figure repainted to be the Sandman and holding a tiny beer in his hand, on a trophy base with a forty bottle painted gold (the thing was called the Golden Forty), and barbed wire stapled to it. I wish I knew what happened to that thing. I’m sure Walker probably threw it away, being he doesn’t drink. Anyways, this PPV was one we watched together. Shit, I just drank most of a beer remembering all these things.
Show starts with a limo pulling up, and it’s Masato Tanaka. Ahh, the sweet scarred forehead and confident-he’ll-get-pussy look of the athletic hardcore wrestler. Mutants are in the back chanting "E-C-W" already. I hate anybody who does that, especially today, now that they’ve been gone for like two years, and not really that good for like five years. The worst is the fuck who will shorten it and actually write on a poster "E-C-dub". Those people need to be shot. Joey Styles and Cyrus were a great commentary team, absolutely great. Joey Styles has lost points with me over the years though, for saying "Oh My God!" way too fuckin’ much, for trying to sell me quarters on late night infomercials, and for wearing a Sgt. Carter haircut.
Once ECW dropped the "More Human than a Human" intro, it just wasn’t the same. That fuckin’ guitar part just made you want to smash shit, drink beer, and watch violence. Out comes Dawn Marie and Lance Storm. Dawn Marie is the epitome of a stripper. She looks gorgeous, until you actually pay attention to her face, which looks like a zombie and makes me fear she’s gonna eat my flesh. As I fear this, she works me out of two thirty dollar lapdances, and I get out of it is a Polaroid of her pretending to care about me. Lance Storm needs the rat-tail. It is the Canadian parallel to Samson’s longhair. His opponent is Jerry Lynn. Storm vs. Lynn from a few years back means this will rock.