There's a big event this weekend. Sure, Lollapalooza is in Chicago, but in New York my favorite wrestling promotion Ring of Honor is staging their "Death Before Dishonor VI" show on Saturday night at the Hammerstein Ballroom. I recently had the opportunity to talk to Jimmy Jacobs, one half of the Ring of Honor tag team champions and a guy whose character should be familiar to anybody who has ever shopped at Hot Topic or attended the Warped Tour.

When did you first get into wrestling? I can't pinpoint it down to one exact time. I know I was a big fan when I was in the 1st grade. I went to a WWF show and bought a pair of Brett Hart sunglasses and told everyone at school the next day that Brett gave them to me in the front row.

When did you decide to try to break into the business? My older brother broke into wrestling in about 1998. I was 14. I was always a follower, so I just hung around with him and helped do whatever I could at shows, like set up ring or set up chairs. After about a year, one of the guys trained me and I was all about it. I have no idea why, but here I am I guess 9 years later. I really have no idea why I thought it would be a good idea at 15 other than the fact that I was a fan. But, I guess we all want to make a living doing what you like. I'm fortunate to be one of the minority that actually does.

Have you had to hold down a lot of other jobs while you've been wrestling? When I started, I was still going to high school. Then I was moving furniture from about 16 to 19. Then I started going to college. And then, the day I realized I’d probably never have a real job or go to college again was a great day in my life.

What happened?

I had just done a match on Smackdown!for WWE. And I did that and was doing other shows where I was making enough money and I started realize that all the money I was spending was money from wrestling.

Who did you wrestle on Smackdown? Eddie Guerrero. It was about six months to the day before he died. I live in Michigan but I had driven out to New York for a show and one of my buddies in WWE had a Smackdown show in Reading, Pennsylvania, so we met up for dinner. He told me to come down to the show and they ended up using me because I was there. I almost didn't go cause I wasn't in very good shape. It was just very fortunate that they were looking for somebody to get beat up by Eddie Guererro and my friend vouched for me. He said, "This kid right here can take a hell of a beating."

What a great thing to have on your resume. Yeah, it's good to be known for something.

Your character is, for lack of a better term, an emo guy. Do you think the wrestling world and the emo world overlap? I think any kid who likes pro wrestling would probably be considered an outcast. I know when I was in high school. You look at Jeff Hardy he’s got a very hardcore following of fans. I'm no Jeff Hardy but I think fans that identify with him for having that unique look and that uniqueness about them that people who might like pro wrestling who might feel like an outcast in high school, definitely can identify with him. But it was no mistakes that we did this emo gimmick in 2006. We've used MySpace and stuff like that and integrated it into what we do. There’s definitely a deliberate approach on my part to figure out what’s going on now. What people are doing now, and try to bring that into professional wrestling.

Your character is perhaps best known for writing songs for a girl who was sleeping with another guy. What’s your musical background? I was in a band in high school, and we played this one bar every Tuesday. We wrote our own stuff, but pop punk like Blink-182 was a big influence. I’m glad I had that background, because for a while it looked like I wasn’t going to be in Ring of Honor for much longer, and out of desperation I recorded a song and shot a video for it, and they loved it. So it sort of saved my career.

You were involved in the short-lived MTV show Wrestling Society X. What was that like? I have to say, it was a pretty great two weeks. I've slept in my car before. I’ve done shows for five bucks. But the guys running WSX put us up at this great hotel, gave us per diem and all this great catering. They really treated us well. I just wish MTV had promoted it at all.

That was confusing to me. I was a big fan, and I couldn’t figure out why MTV was burying its own show. It was so bizarre. They paid all this money but then didn’t give us any fucking promotion. Why not put Teddy Hart and Jack Evans on TRL to do flips in Times Square? Plus, MTV had all these strange rules. We were told we werent’ allowed to hit each other with household objects, but they were really excited about using an exploding coffin. So chairs were bad, but exploding coffins were okay. One of the guys at MTV said he wanted one of the wrestlers to be dumped in a vat of acid, and somebody had to explain to him that if you put a guy in acid one week, he can’t really come back the next week. Or ever.

Do you have a favorite match you've been in? That's hard, because I don’t think I’ve had one great match yet. But the cage match with BJ Whitmer was big just because we had a year-long build, and the time I won the tag titles in New York was pretty special.