Writin' Forty

 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...

 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 imag...

 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. ...