A1E was the first fed I came up in. I was hella rough around the edges when I started. My first bio, I remember writing under "entrance music" on the template "Anything by Fozzy." Me from 2004 would have looked at that app/bio/whatever and yelled at myself for not taking the time or care to put out something slick or "professional" looking. The me from 2004 was a gatekeeping dickweed though. I only knew this from doing web archive searches. If you wanted a glimpse into my early past in e-fedding, you're at the mercy of how much the archives have stored in their massive servers.
I've lately been doing deep dives on my own history to fill in the blanks in my brain on where I've been. Apparently, I was the only person in PRIME who didn't know I was once a member of PRIME, but the proof is in the pudding there. Content I created with the Captain Suleimon character is on the old site. All the FW forums are still there outside of Las Vegas Wrestling, which is patchwork for the most part. But if I want to go back and relive some promos I did for, say, Empire Pro, they're all there. As an e-fed amnesiac, I have resources available to me to go back and fill in the blanks. I can look at these sites and go "oh yeah! I remember that now. It's all coming back to me now."
That's not true for A1E (and MBE).
For those who don't know, A1Wrestling Dot Com was a wrestling website started by the refugees from the message boards at 1Wrestling Dot Com. Bob Ryder and Dave Scherer ruled those forums with an iron fist as proxy propagandists for World Championship Wrestling in the dying days of the Monday Night Wars. Many partisans who enjoyed the World Wrestling Federation got banned, so wanting to keep the same community, they started the oh-so-cleverly named A1. A1E was the e-fed attached that scooped up all the people who still wanted to do the e-fed at 1Bob, MBE, but were now without access. Over the years, 1Bob's forums deteriorated, and basically, the entire heft of the posting public came over to A1. For a decade+, A1E went strong. It grew in notoriety that it attracted attention from the e-fed hub, FWrestling Dot Com. The rest, as they say, is history if you want to go back into the archives of this blog and see where my journey took me.
However, I fell out with the A1 crowd for reasons that I do not regret at all. If you need to know, core posters there started to go down an alt-right rabbit hole, and I sure as fuck wasn't going to follow them. I had been out of A1E for a spell anyway. Within a year of leaving A1, however, I was ready to cut e-fedding on the whole out of my life. It wasn't that I fell out of love with the concept. Rather, I just lacked any kind of spark, any kind of juice to do it. I spread myself out too thin with all the feds I promised myself to, and I just wasn't able to give it the time it required. Even my truncated final run as Michael Bastard in Empire Pro, which had become my de facto home after leaving A1, saw me run out of gas before I could really get started. I never thought I'd be back.
LOL
The mistake I made was not going back and saving everything I ever did. Even if I was ready to live a life free of RP deadlines or angle jam seshes on IM (and later, social media), all the RPs I wrote, all the angles I helped ideate, all the characters that came from my brain, that was my legacy. It may not have been on the level of a William Faulkner or a Cormac McCarthy, but it was mine. Again, all the Empire Pro and PRIME and New Era and PTC GTT6 stuff was all there. That's not the problem.
A1E being nuked off the face of the earth though? Yeah. That is.
In the time since I left A1, the site rebranded under a new url. The fed-specific site, A1E Dot CA, was scrubbed. The new forums had no trace of A1E or MBE on them. An entire decade or so of my e-fed history was blown to smithereens. The fidelity of the sites archived on the web stores was scattershot at best. Everything I ever wrote for A1E and MBE, the promos, the matches, the segments, the catty, ice-cold gatekeeping treatises on the OOC boards, all in the wind. Only one category out of that I'm glad are pretty much a miasma of electrons on the web now. You can guess which one.
I'm almost certain that a lot of my earliest stuff might be cringe now. I look back at my EPW output, for example, and while the writing is solid, the content is a little dated for my own growth as a person. The early A1E stuff might be both a little rough and a little problematic. But still, one should always want to see where they started so they know how far they've come. There's one promo I'm especially proud of, maybe if not for the actual quality but for the idea behind it and how it played into Jerichoholic Anonymous' mythmaking - the trip to Dudleyville. I want to see that so I know to compare what I thought was good in 2000 and compare it to what I write today. But there's sentimentality and a desire to know history so I can use it as a base for what I'm doing now.
But it's all gone. Every last bit.
On one hand, it's a bummer not to have what I grew up with. Even though I didn't leave A1E under the best circumstances and have legit heat with at least one person who was embedded in the leadership of that fed, no one can take the memories I had there, good or bad, away from me. It was formative, all of it. On the other, there's an opportunity.
E-fedding is about a lot of things. People do it to have a facsimile of what it's like to be a wrestler without the painkillers and horrific bumps and grinding road schedule, but they do it too to have an outlet for writing, for creativity, for imagination. What is the loss of history but an opportunity to do some creative retconning anyway? The idea that you have to grow up is necessary, but the ideas people sell you for what you have to do to grow up are too puritan. You don't have to lose your imagination, and e-fedding allows you to cultivate that part of your brain ad infinitum. If there's nothing there to dispute what your imagination has told you happened in the past, then what's stopping you? What's stopping me?
If I'm going to be real, I'm not going to recreate a history for A1E right from my incredibly slanted brain. However, of all the pinch points I've had in this game, A1E has been the most severe at times. Of all the times I've been mad online, things happening in A1E have been mostly at the center of them. Why not turn negatives into positives? A lot of this run has been and will be about fixing past wrongs. If I can't fix them with A1E... or more pointedly, if I don't want to fix them with certain members of that past, then the best option is to make those experiences therapeutic rather than harmful.
The biggest lesson out of all of this is if you write something, save it and keep a record of it. No one is going to do your archiving for you, so if you find it important, find a way to keep a hard copy on you. Don't solely put it on the cloud. Take a thumb drive, an external hard drive, something, and keep that history with you. The next lesson is that if something is gone to history, make your own, especially if no one's there to call you on your bullshit. Life is pain and we're here for a cosmic millisecond. If remembering something through rose-colored glasses will get you through the day, do it. It's all just part of exercising that creative muscle we all use when we partake in this hobby.
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