Writin' Forty

 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

 I have lost friends over this Trump situation. You know, the whole he got re-elected for president of the United States again, which is going to be a got damned disaster on a global scale: you don't put a conman who owes unsavory characters money in charge of a country (which should be very, very obvious) but the macro level of this is something I can talk about later. I want to talk about why I lost friends. I have been ringing the alarm bell on Trump since he took stage in this tragedy of errors we call a political landscape. He lost me from his first speech where he railed against Mexicans. And he really lost me when one of the first people to commend that speech was David Duke, a well known Klansman.  I could go on and on about the outright racist, bigoted, or xenophobic statements that Trump has made. I could come up with a hell of a lot of thoughts about the rancid cult of personality that Trump has cultivated: it's awful and full of all of the worst people you can imagi

 It has been forever and a day since I wrote and I could make any number of reasons why. Ultimately, you make time for the things that are important to you and clearly, this wasn't something that was important to me, right? Ehhh...maybe. I would have thoughts about this or that and then just not commit. I would get in my head and think that no one would want to read for the 718th time about some lesson I learned from jiujitsu. I still do that, by the way. I got brown belt this January. In a whole lot of ways that shit is absolutely crazy to me. I earned it the way that you're supposed to earn things, with blood and sweat. And as the case is with any promotion you get it not because of what you've done but much more with what you can do. Almost a year in and I'm still figuring out what that means and the journey of that is allowing me to grow. That growth is going to come into play very soon because for some reason this country elected Donald Trump for president, again,

  Recently I reached a milestone in jiujitsu that had only somewhat to do with belt rank: I helped instruct in a class for the first time!   Technically, this is something that you can do at blue belt,  provided that  you can get out of work early enough and come to help teach the children’s class. Well, I can’t get out of work early enough consistently enough to do that so that’s out.  So  the next level of teach is teaching the adult class. We normally have enough black belts and brown belts at our school to cover down on that during our regular classes. This leaves Sunday’s class that specifically teaches blue and white belts about the techniques you learn to become purple belt.  Because I haven’t provided enough caveats, technically I have been asked to help stand in as an instructor for this Sunday class. Twice, but I was given direction to not provide instruction per se, just guide the people there since I was the most senior person in the room. This time, with Steve’s (head inst

 I can’t remember the exact date, but somewhere around 5 years ago this week I walked into the doors of Fight to Win.  I wish I could say I did so because of Steve Hall’s lineage. Nope. It was the closest to my house 🤷🏾‍♂️. I saw a Facebook ad and reached out. Steve said I could come in that Monday and to please let him know if I wasn’t going to make it; don’t waste his time.  I mean, I showed up but I have to leave it to Steve to say if I’ve wasted his time 😂 When I walked through the door there were like 8 purple belts lined up against the wall. I left a school that was run by a purple belt…I felt I was wading into deep waters. Every single one of those purple belts were tough in their own way. I kept in my head what it was like to be a purple belt… Now I am one. Today, I helped teach a 370lb guy how to hip toss. Which means I lifted a 370lb guy and hip tossed him. There was a time I would not have even have the confidence to even try that.  Today, I looked around the room and saw

 So in the end I guess the most important thing is the friends we made along the way. I'm getting ahead of myself. My friend Phil likes a lot of music. All types. I think it's safe to say that metalcore is his favorite. Well, metalcore is not my favorite. Matter of fact, I hadn't really listened to any metalcore until I started hanging out the big guy. I'm still ahead of myself. Phil and I met through jiujitsu. As it turns out, he is a big guy at 6'6" 275 or so and as you can guess, was the biggest guy to walk through the jiujitsu gym. At 6'3" 240 or so I was the biggest guy in the gym and with a little experience under my belt I was paired with Phil a lot.  As things normally go the person you spent time with a lot at the gym is the person you become friends with outside of the gym and I'm certainly no different here. Phil is twenty years younger than I am. Twenty. TWENTY. XX, if you're old school Italian. I can honestly say that while I have