Well, I guess we got us another weird situation going on here. I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t have the best staff in the business here. It’s a long story, but Nate’s mother (the actual, legal owner of STRUGGLE Pro) has been really stingy with funding this operation, and it’s really making a mess of things. In fact, Nate relocating back to the Tri-State Area to run this show was originally contingent on it being fully-funded by the parent company, (Ruggle Family Body Bags, LLC) but that’s a whole other thing I probably shouldn’t get into right now. The point is, we’ve had to cut a lot of corners, and in addition to the leaking roof, the barely-functional internet, and the clogged shit pipes, we’ve had a lot of trouble with the staff.

It takes more than just in-ring talent to run a wrestling show, and we’ve got a goddamn skeleton crew of losers and rejects. I’m having to book the shows, keep the building from caving in and sinking into hell, and update the damn website. Nate’s going broke and crazy, putting in 90-hour weeks just to keep the damn lights on. Our entire human resources/personnel/talent relations/etc. department is just one person who’s also an active wrestler, and our medical staff is a first-aid kit, a cellphone with 911 on speed-dial, and the guy who sells dope out of the parking lot. Then, there’s the ring crew.

We’ve got a three-man crew to do the grunt work and lug around the shit I don’t feel like lugging around, which is a reasonable number. The problem is that Jimmy is a fucking wastrel, just completely goddamn useless, Tyrone is an English major who will try to start conversations with meathead-ass wrestlers about Chaucer, but can’t correctly identify a Phillips head screwdriver, and then there’s Buddy. Fucking Buddy.

In addition to being a semi-competent toter of heavy shit, Buddy has kind of doubled as our camera man, on account of his weird obsession with those flying drone camera things. (It’s why we usually have that weird overhead camera angle) He’s always talking about all the ones he has, and all the ones he wants to get someday, and the first time he told me about how far he can zoom in with one of those sumbitches at 1080p resolution, I shoulda known that he was a fuckin’ pervert. When we started finding the hidden cameras backstage, it became all too clear.

But here’s the weird part: We’ve found these goddamn things everywhere, just filming our every move, but they’re never anywhere a normal perv would put them. None in the women’s locker room, none in the restrooms, and none in that spot next to the dumpster where PARTY TIGER pees sometimes when she’s more hammered than usual. (I can’t prove it, but goddammit, I know it’s her, if she’s reading this, FUCKING STOP IT. Stepped in those goddamn puddles so many times. Christ.) The more we dig into the situation, it seems that Buddy is a really weird kind of voyeur; rather than being a garden variety pervert of the dick and balls, he’s a pervert of the mind.

The dude gets off on watching people’s personal interactions with each other the same way most people get off on watching people’s naked personal interactions with each other. After grilling him on it, he says it’s just a curiosity thing and claims to actually be asexual, and perhaps I am but an old fool, but that never made sense to me. Everybody’s got something, and if you think you don’t, you either haven’t found it yet, or you’re just lying for cool points on Tumblr. You know those people you see an article about maybe once a year who rub their hoo-ha against a fire hydrant or stick their dick in a Honda Civic’s tailpipe? Those are just asexuals who finally found their thing. My theory, at least, with the caveat that I am probably just old and unhip to the New Ways. Different strokes for different folks. Literal different strokes, I guess. But anyway, I’m way off-topic, and veering close to insensitive and problematic territory, which is somewhere pro wrestling companies have always tried to avoid at all costs.

So yeah, Buddy’s been filming us all, and he’s got tons of footage, just hours and hours. (Which I guess isn’t technically “footage,” as it’s all digital, and I never thought about that before; there are no feet of anything, really) But he took me to his weird little serial killer-ass apartment and showed me some of the highlights and it was… I dunno, weirdly compelling? It really did tie up some loose ends about why the things were happening in the ring, like what shitty comment led somebody to bash a guy’s noggin with a steel chair later that night, or what petty grievances someone had that made them refuse to tag in and got their partner damn near killed. And I realized that all of this information would also get you, the gentle viewer, a lot more interested in the show, leading you to buy tickets and foam fingers and whatnot, which is why we’re all here.

Thing is, we can’t just dump people’s personal shit out there willy-nilly. Too much of an invasion of privacy, and we’ll get sued, or more importantly, potentially get our asses beat by extremely large men. So we of the high command (basically, me, Nate, and Murray – I don’t know why I called it “high command,” other than it’s funny to me for some reason) had a meeting with a bunch of the wrestlers, mainly the veteran “locker room leader” types, like Evil, Gummo, the La Granges, B.G., Hoss, various Machines, people like that. And eventually, (after about an hour of President Evil doing his Triumph the Satanic Insult Comic Dog act on everyone) we came to an agreement, and laid down some rules.

First and most obvious, the restrooms are off-limits, and there can only be audio recorded in the locker rooms. Basically, no video where people potentially aren’t wearing pants. This is a wrestling company, not a porn company, contrary to those rumors that spread around the dirt sheets and online dirt sheet equivalents in 2008. This rule shall be enforced against Buddy by threats of intense physical violence from several lady wrestlers, as well as Skip Legday. (You might not have guessed this, but for a guy who’s pretty much a human water tower for steroids, he adheres to really strong feminist ideals.)

Second, no wrestler can be made aware of another wrestler’s behavior, statements, and/or sinister plans prior to publication on the website. The secret invisible camera’s role is to observe, not to interfere. Prime Directive, y’all. Also, let’s be real here, this is wrestling, and if evil plots are foiled quickly and potential gruesome spectacle is stopped before it happens, we’ll go out of business. Exceptions might be made for extreme cases, which largely get covered by the next rule.

As for that next rule, Legal authorities shall not be notified of any wrestler’s sinister plans, unless there’s a possibility someone’s going to literally get murdered. This follows guidelines set in STRUGGLE Pro’s strict “no police involvement” policy, as well as the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Slender v. Georgia, where any violent interaction between two professional wrestlers short of gunplay remains legal, so long as it takes place in a wrestling context.

The fourth rule is a wrestling no-brainer, where masked wrestlers and wrestlers with otherwise secret identities shall not be outed by the Secret Backstage Camera. In addition to how it would just be a dick move, it means full compliance with the 1996 Baron Freebird Statute. If a mask comes off, the video gets deleted, although audio can be saved, as long as it’s not something like “oh boy I’m sure glad no one knows I’m Jim Smith” or whatever. However, in the event of an official, definitive unmasking – voluntary or otherwise – the video is preserved.

Finally, and this is more of a loose guideline than a hard-and-fast rule, video transcripts or descriptions will generally only be shared with the public if they might be relevant in a wrestling context. This is mostly so we don’t bore you with a blog post that’s all “BREAKING NEWS: Toxic Walt finally started watching Breaking Bad” or something. (And he’s got a good thirty years of TV to catch up on, so that would be really bad)

Anyway, those are the rules as they stand right now, and more may be added as necessary. Hopefully, the results of this will be interesting to you people, but if not, at least there’s finally some chance that Manchoma will stop bringing this week’s girlfriend to the arena after hours, and the storage room will stop being Patience Halliburton-Vanzetti’s go-to “oh don’t worry, Garfield won’t find us here” spot. This place is a goddamn den of iniquity sometimes. But you can expect dispatches from the Secret Invisible Camera to start trickling in soon. May God help us all.