Altered States Wrestling: Why This Exists

I’ll be honest, I don’t have a super answer.

That’s not true. I do have an answer. I just don’t know if it’s a good one.

Altered States Wrestling started because I grew up on old wrestling, and the more modern wrestling I watched, the more I missed the old stuff. That is not me saying modern wrestling is bad. I’m not one of those guys who acts like everything made after 1997 should be loaded into a cannon and fired into the sea. From a talent standpoint, an athletic standpoint, and a move standpoint, modern wrestling is probably “better” in a lot of ways.

But is it more fun to watch?

For me, no.

The graphics are better. The production is cleaner. The wrestlers are more athletic. Everyone knows how to do everything now. But sometimes I miss when wrestling looked worse, felt stranger, and somehow made more sense.

This whole thing was originally born out of me taking a reasonable amount of edibles, watching old wrestling, and making jokes along the way. That was the entire business plan. Watch wrestling, get distracted by the ring announcer, wonder why a man in a singlet looks like that, remember something from being nine years old, and write it down before the thought escapes into the ceiling fan.

That was the start.

Altered States Wrestling is going to be smaller dives back into pro wrestling. Old episodes. Weird matches. Mailbag stuff. Hypothetical scenarios. Forgotten territories. Bad gimmicks. Good promos. One guy in the crowd who looks like he just found out his identity was stolen and returned instantly.

To be clear, I’m not claiming any of this is uncovered ground or original scholarship. God knows it isn’t. It’s 2026. There isn’t much left on the plate when it comes to original ideas. So who the fuck am I not to pile on?

This is not a place to come for breaking news. This is not a place to come for political analysis. This is not a place to come because you need someone to explain quarterly earnings, international television rights, or why a 14-minute match on a streaming service is actually brilliant if you understand the long-term story.

For the love of God, do not take this too seriously.

Some of this shit is going to be incorrect. Some of it will be flat-out wrong. You might read something and think, “Actually, that date is wrong.” Absolutely. Good point. I’ll do my best, but I probably won’t fix that. I was once called “charmingly unreliable,” which was touching.

The real idea is to have as much fun as we possibly can while watching this weird thing we somehow still care about.

One last thing.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention and thank Brian Damage at Ring the Damn Bell, who was the first person to publish any of these pieces. I reached out to him out of the blue with the idea, and he was nice enough to not tell me no, which I always appreciated.

Then I did what I tend to do. I tried to do too much too soon, burned out, wandered off, and that was that.

At the bottom of this site, you’ll see references to the Original Eight. Those were the first High On pieces I wrote for RTDB about a year or so ago. Some of the jokes or references may seem dated. Some might not. I’m not entirely sure. But they give you a pretty good idea of the vein we’re working in, where this started, and where it might go.

So I guess with that, this is Altered States Wrestling.

Where does it go from here?

I don’t have any designs on being a promotion of any kind, although it is probably fair to mention that most pro wrestlers over the last 40 or 50 years entered the ring under some sort of altered state.