Writin' Forty

 You know, I do jiujitsu and go to a seperate gym from jiujitsu to lift weights. I probably could have said that better. I go to Fight to Win Jiujitsu and I lift weights at Norse Fitness. For the 8 people who look at this my gyms get one hell of a shout out! Right. So you know, I do jiujitsu at Fight to Win and I lift weights at Norse Fitness and when you do that stuff you tend to visit a lot of Instagram pages about that stuff and you then get fed in the old algorithm stuff that Instagram thinks you're interested in (and want to give money to, because of COURSE) and then you get to start seeing gym bro culture. That is, assuming you're literally like me. Shout out to you weirdos! A part of that gym culture are a few adages you start seeing over and over. One would be: lifting made the sad man go away or lifting heavy round circles make the sad thoughts go away or something like that. If you're literally like me you'll give me some slack. I always saw that and kind of s...

Trump administration decided they would pause all government initiatives of DEI.  DEI stands for "diversity, education, and inclusion". So if you simply took the denotation of those words you may wonder out loud why would the Trump administration be against efforts at diversity, education, and inclusion in that America is and always will be a melting pot of diverse individuals: black, white, any number of nationalities who come here through any number of means, straight, gay, trans, and every sex or gender in between.  I wish I could say I didn't know the answer as to why Trump administration is against DEI and why a whole lot of his supporters are too but the answer is as easy as the skin on my body: they're all convinced that DEI is an attempt for minorities (especially black but I will allow for the fact that I literally have to be subjective on this topic in that I am a black American) to get into positions that they didn't earn or maybe even deserve. Well, he...

A little bit before the whole election I was discussing some political things on social media. I shouldn't even say that it was "political things". A hurricane (Helene) hit in western North Carolina and it absolutely devastated the area. I just so happened to have been traveling south the Friday during the hurricane and there were already signs on the road telling everyone to stay the hell away from WNC. Great warning because it will be years and years before that area is the same. Google literally took an entire interstate, I-40, off the map.  The discussion that I was having with a then friend concerned misinformation that he was spreading. First he was upset that apparently little to no funds were going towards WNC. This wasn't true. Anyone affected in the area just needed to apply and they'd get $750 immediately while being able to apply for more funds. I shared links, etc, and asked him to vet his sources.  The same friend was then upset that some random dude...

 It’s not like I have anyone to apologize to when I write these things. I’m ok if anyone reads them and yet I feel I should apologize for thinking about Trump and this election stuff but it ties into so many different things and it’s current so it’s fresh on my brain. Things to include one of the reasons I decided to even start blogging in the first place.  I named the blog “writin’ forty” as a pun, yes, but I wanted to write about stuff that’s going on with me in my forties which is more in my rear view than it is in my windshield, crazy as that is to say and think. I would imagine it makes sense that things that happen in your now are often as a result or reminiscent of things that happened in the past and sure as shooting that is what I’m feeling with this Trump stuff.  Imagine that you are a black man in America, specifically the United States. Let me tell y’all, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be any other race in the US: black Americans literally made this country. Ou...

 So in the midst of all of this Trump talk I did mention that I earned the rank of brown belt from my jiujitsu academy, Fight to Win. To say that I am proud of this honor is severely understating it. To get purple belt from FTW I had to test for it. When my name was called to come up for the belt I choked up. The only reason I didn't choke up is because I thought Steve, my master instructor, wouldn't want me to (cue laugh track) but trust me, I was INCREDIBLY proud to get purple belt. I worked so hard to get it. Brown belt is more of a time in grade thing per se but I can tell you there are some...things that happened to me during my purple belt run. I really should take some time and think about those things in detail but off the top of my head I can tell you that things slowed down for me. If you have watched any football one of the best improvements you can ever hear about a player is that the game "slowed down for them". To me what that means is your brain slows d...

 When Kamala Harris was announced as the Democrats' nominee for President of the United States one of the trend that occurred is a lot of left wingers or just folks who didn't like whatever Trump and his group of clowns were doing was that they started calling whatever the Republicans did as "weird". From what I saw it was an effective tactic because sure enough, Republicans would start either calling what the Democrats called "weird" as a response or just balking at being called weird.  Apparently the tactic didn't fully work because Trump won the election and honestly that's all sorts of disappointing in all sorts of ways that there's gonna be a whole lot of history written about. But what's happened afterward can only be described as weird.  Trump basically disappeared from public site for a week and half which is weird. Then UFC happened. I haven't watched much UFC lately because it started getting political. I'm usually not one o...