THE MOST CONSISTENT presence throughout my life has always been professional wrestling. The fake sport that calls itself Sports Entertainment. But I’ve never really understood why wrestling wants to be talked about as if it were sport. Isn’t being a piece of melodramatic physical theatre enough? It was enough to make professional wrestling become my lifelong obsession – what autistic experts would refer to as my ‘special interest’. 

In Grade 3, in front of my entire class, I pretended my pencil was a microphone so I could address the room and cut a promo, giving an animated interview in character as ’80s/’90s wrestling superstar ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage during show ’n’ tell (Oh yeahhh, dig it!). The class was in hysterics as
I spoke in a tough-guy drawl, making my voice as gravelly as I could, curling my mouth so it forced my left eye into a squint, holding my hands up like I was speaking an alien sign language. After that day, other kids would often quote me quoting the Macho Man when I passed them around school (‘I’m the tower of power – too sweet to be sour. I’m funky like a monkey – sky’s the limit and space is the place!’), and I thought to myself: I’m so cool. From that day on, everyone knew me as the wrestling kid.