Writin' Forty

 I honestly just want to see this in print. I know the ending of it already but I want to go through the process of seeing it in print. So, Trump Administration and the whole MAGA movement calls DEI this terrible thing. Ok. I think that them doing that is racist as hell. But let's see. They are pretty obviously using the term "DEI" to mean "black people" mostly but sometimes it expands to "women" or "LGBTQ". That's dog whistling, which is racist (and bigoted. and misogynistic...I'll just stop here) They needed a term to use that isn't the word "n*gger" so they now use the term DEI as the acceptable hateful term to say in public. Even if the first paragraph weren't obvious, what does DEI really mean? Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. They intentionally left off the A of DEI because the A stands for "accessibility", which means that MAGA would openly be saying they're against people with disabilities. That is...

 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...

 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. ...

 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 arou...

 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 ...

  In my  oldish  age I definitely have come to realize that not everyone in America is on the same page. I mean, variety is the spice of life right? Nothing wrong with that. What constantly amazes me and saddens me is that America isn’t on the same page as to what freedom means. If you think this is going to get political, you’re probably right but I can at least let you know where I come from when it comes to how I view politics. Ever since I was basically made to pay attention to politics, which has been about 15 years or so now…let me back up. When I was still in the Air Force and stationed in San Antonio I first started paying attention to politics. More pointedly, I would hear some of the guys in the office call things “liberal” when it was a policy point that was ongoing which they disagreed with or if you were a person to say something that wasn’t the way they wanted you to say it they would call you a “liberal”.  I even saw what that was then: if you don’t th...

  I’m going to do the military thing where you start with bottom line up front. Here goes: I don’t care much for Joe Rogan. That statement isn’t really much in itself and I’m going to do everything I can to support it but it’s going to be indirect and may not even necessarily be about the man himself. It’s highly possible I do like the dude; if we were somehow to meet without cameras around we would have conversation and I would be blown away by what a complete human he is. Maybe. I try to be open m inded so that is a possibility. With that out of the way: One of the…things that bugs me about, I  dunno  if it’s even endemic to just MMA/ jiujitsu  culture or if it’s widespread to overall “manly” culture…ugh. Let me try this again. I am not the hugest fan of the “image” of being a man. No matter what, there aren’t really a ton of things around that are required for you to be a man anymore. One might say that’s the problem overall with society and I’m not really here to...

  It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 7 years total time since I started jiujitsu. I prefa ce total time because with many things that happen in life there are always interruptions, via injury or  idk , moving from one state to the other because your job dried up where you were.  Seven years being a part of something and you definitely get an idea of what the culture is of the thing you’re a part of. Make no mistake about it, jiujitsu has its own culture. That culture is intertwined with MMA culture (mixed martial arts). In no particular order here are a few charact eristics of jiujitsu culture: 1.  Everyone listens to Joe Rogan’s podcast.  Ev .  Er . Y. Bo. Dy. 2.  A whole lot lean to the right side of the aisle politically. A whole lot would describe themselves as being anarchist. 3.  A whole lot love guns. Talking about them, shooting them…talking about shooting them. 4.  Most don’t like watching any other sports but MMA or jiujitsu a...

  I can tell I haven’t written in forever because somehow I got through the entire 75 hard challenge and didn’t write about it. Lord knows I talked about it enough though   🤣 In case you don’t know 75 hard is a challenge created by Andy  Frisella . The requirements, every day for 75 straight days you have to work out twice a day for at least 45 minutes (one of them outside), drink a gallon of water, stick to a diet, read 10 pages a day of a  non-fiction  book, and no alcohol. Why the hell did I do this? Well, after going through the first half of 2021 in pursuit of a purple belt that I ultimately did get  I kind of  felt like I was just floating. I had a knee injury that I was sure was going to require surgery and so I slowed down a bit in jiujitsu. That does not mean I stopped going, quite the opposite. I kept going but I had to lessen the intensity. Which really bothered me at first, if I am being completely honest but a little feedback from Steve (...

  There’s this meme I’ve seen circulated. There was a guy who wasn’t good at swimming. He made the decision in his life to become a  trans  woman but still competed in swimming and went from being not so good as a guy to winning a tournament as a woman.  One time I saw the meme posted and about 5 comments were under it with various version of  smh  or I can’t believe it. The last time I saw the meme a cousin posted it. It was something she shared from a senator. I don’t know if the senator was a state senator or a US senator. For the sake of this discussion it doesn’t matter. What chilled me was the last sentence the senator wrote, something to the effect of: if you don’t understand what’s wrong, you’re a part of the problem. What’s the problem? That was the first question I had. Let’s assume that the statement this senator this senator wrote had no pretense to it, which of course it did. But let’s assume it didn’t. If the problem is that a  trans ...