Home movies & hammer locks

the pxl 2000

All in all grade nine was starting out pretty amazingly. I was making new friends, I was discovering new things that ranged from alcohol to recreational drugs to incredible music, I had my own identity in the BBS world, and most importantly I finally had a band. Even though we had our band now we still didn't put as much effort into it as we should have, instead we opted to run around and get into trouble every chance we got. And as winter was rolling around nobody wanted to be transporting instruments and walking to band practice.

That year for Christmas my folks got me a black and white camcorder made by fisher price, the leaders in durable kids toys. I even had a very small black and white television that I could hook it up to and use as a monitor. The tv was literally about 6-8 inches squared, so it was very easy to carry and to conceal. We would hang out at the Ching library a lot in the evenings. We were supposed to be doing homework and school assignments, but instead we'd be creeping around with that camera, looking for funny things, people, or situations to record.

Some kid at our school got caught masturbating in the boys washroom so whenever we saw him in the halls we would roll film and get up in his face declaring "hey it's the loser who got caught wanking" that's an example of the things we felt were worthy of documenting. I also tried to do a lot of stop motion animation with the camera but not having a tripod made it extremely difficult, so back to pranks and humiliation it was!

I was now in my fifth year of hockey as well, and to be quite honest I was starting to get bored of it. Plus with the discovery of partying and drinking came the discovery of the dreaded hangover. Getting up for a hockey practice or game at 5 or 6 am after a night of mixing every type of booze under the sun was getting tiresome to me. I knew without a doubt that this was going to be my last year playing hockey, I just had to break the news to my old man now without breaking his heart.

The truth of the matter was, is, and forever shall be, that I despised sports and most of the jock-ish people related to them. Over the years I had played soccer, t-ball, softball, hardball, basketball, and hockey...all to appease my father who was a basketball and football star throughout his high school days. I suppose him marrying my mother at such a young age and in turn having no choice but to work for a living cut his dreams of sports stardom short, causing him to vicariously try and live his dreams through me.

In reality there was only two sports I truly loved, wrestling and skateboarding, both of which seemed incredibly hard to make a living off of without the proper discipline and dedication. I had no clue at age 14 that one could actually be a pro skateboarder, so naturally wrestling seemed like the only option. The question now was did I have what it took to become a pro wrestler?