Smoke Break Psychology: The Permission Slip

I’m watching Psycho Killer — the new one.

There’s a scene where this man performs a full satanic ritual. Drinks a priest’s blood straight from the source. And I am sitting here completely unbothered. Baked. Comfortable. Snacks within reach.

A man just made a chalice out of a holy man and I didn’t even put my chips down.

Then I made the mistake of opening wrestling Twitter during the credits.

By the time I put my phone down I was more disturbed than anything that man with the knife could have done to me. The slasher movie had a body count. Wrestling discourse has a soul count.

The priest didn’t stand a chance against the killer. My will to live didn’t stand a chance against the reply guys.

At least the satanic ritual had a point.

The Clipboard People

There’s a guy on wrestling Twitter — you know him, you’ve seen him.

Hasn’t enjoyed a pay-per-view in three years. Hasn’t missed one either. He’s there every week, every show, every post-show thread. Clocking the burial. Diagnosing the booking. Receipts on every creative decision that got botched since 2019.

He is, in his own words, a wrestling fan.

I don’t know what that is. But that’s not what I am.

I got into this thing when I was a kid because a grown man in face paint was convincing 20,000 people he could conjure lightning. That was the deal. That was always the deal.

Somewhere along the way, the internet handed everybody a clipboard and told them to grade it.

The clipboard ruined a lot of people.

Being a smart mark isn’t intelligence. It’s armor. It’s the thing you put on so wrestling can’t hurt you anymore. So you can’t get got. So you’re always the one in the room who saw it coming.

You’re never wrong.

You’re also never surprised. Never in the moment. Never the person who loses their mind when the music hits early.

You traded all of that for the ability to say “predictable” in the post-show thread.

That’s not a trade I’m willing to make.

The Misery Merchants

And then there are the writers.

Not all of them. Not even most of them. But you know exactly who I’m talking about.

The ones cranking out the same column every week with a different headline stapled to the front. The roster is a disaster. The booking is catastrophic. This guy is buried. That guy is misused. Same paragraph. Different Monday.

I want to ask those guys something directly: why?

Not why they write. Everybody’s got their reasons. But why does it never change? How many years can you spend telling people wrestling is broken before you have to confront the possibility that you’re not covering wrestling anymore?

You’re just farming misery for engagement.

Discord drives clicks. Outrage keeps people in the comments. “This was the worst Raw in ten years” gets more shares than “that match was genuinely great and here’s why.” The algorithm rewards the guy who makes you angry.

Some of these writers figured that out a long time ago and never looked back.

They’re not covering wrestling anymore. They’re running a negativity machine and calling it analysis.

And here’s what that machine actually builds.

A toxic community. A fanbase trained to show up angry, stay angry, and perform their anger for each other until the whole ecosystem is just misery bouncing off misery. It doesn’t make the product better. It doesn’t make the conversation smarter.

It just makes everyone exhausted.

So here’s the question nobody wants to sit with: why can’t the good stuff get the same energy?

Why can’t a five-star match break the internet the way a bad booking decision does? Why can’t a perfect promo, a crowd that loses its mind, a moment that reminds you exactly why you started watching — why can’t that drive the same clicks?

Why can’t joy be as loud as outrage?

It can. It should. And the fact that it doesn’t says everything about what some of these writers have chosen to be.

And nothing about what wrestling actually is.

That’s not criticism. Criticism has a point. Criticism wants something to be better.

What those columns want is for you to feel bad and come back tomorrow to feel bad again.

Misery loves company. And in wrestling media, misery has a Substack and a Patreon.

The Difference Between Thinking and Performing Thinking

The critique isn’t wrong, by the way.

WWE books itself into walls. Storylines get dropped. The wrong guy wins for the wrong reason in the wrong city. All of that is real. All of it is worth saying.

I’m not here to tell you to check your brain at the door.

I’m here to tell you there’s a difference between thinking and performing thinking.

One makes wrestling better.

The other just makes you less fun to watch it with.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know what the alternative feels like. I’ve had stretches where I let the discourse win. Watched Raw with the dirtsheet open on the other tab. Already knowing the results. Already knowing the plans. Already pre-loading the disappointment.

It didn’t make me more informed.

It made me exhausted. It made a thing I love feel like homework.

The ceiling of that experience is being right.

The ceiling of actually watching — of letting it breathe, of meeting it halfway, of being in the building instead of outside it with a clipboard — is feeling something real.

I’ve been watching long enough to know which one I prefer.

Put the Clipboard Down

The smoke is clearing. Psycho Killer is long since over. I’ve had time to sit with both experiences.

The killer with the knife left me unbothered. The wrestling discourse left me needing a minute.

A man committed genuine cinematic atrocities tonight and somehow the scariest thing I encountered was a column about Raw ratings.

Wrestling is still the only thing that can make a room of strangers into one organism. It still has that. After all the bad booking and the discourse and the dirtsheets and the hot takes — it still has the moment when the lights cut and the crowd goes from noise to silence to eruption in about two seconds flat.

You can be in that moment or you can be analyzing it.

The misery merchants are going to keep posting. The same column with a different date on it is going to keep getting shared. Those guys are going to keep watching a show they tell you they hate every single week.

Let them have that. Let them have each other.

The killer got his ending. Wrestling Twitter never will.

I know which side I’m on.

Put the clipboard down. Let it be good.

— That Donnie

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