okay listen creepy dude, just because i have a couple of tattoos, no, that doesn't mean that i want to hear your naked-bondage-lady-experience-and-subsequent-backpiece-tattoo story. that story is creepy, and you're like seventy years old. i just want to get into the bathroom and pee. please stop talking to me. no, i don't know rudy mapleton from new westminster who does tae kwon do. what the fuck kind of question is that. how are people seriously named rudy.

i hate having tattoos. the most common anti-tattoo talking point is "well they'll look silly when you're old and wrinkled !" but hey dummy, EVERYONE looks silly and wrinkled when they get old. and what a silly thing to say anyway because if you wanna see your future you may have to pay a price. because you may look in there and see how you're gonna die ! you may look in there and see what you're gonna look like when you're OLD and ROTTEN and SHRIVELED and MEAN and THROUGH !

you want a real argument against getting tattoos ? you want to get serious about stopping someone from getting tattoos ? mention all the fucking retards you'll have to talk to about tattoos. "hey bud, wherrd uhhhh.... wherrdja getcher paint ? hurrrrrrrrr.."

and i mean, there's no winning that conversation. you're not coming out on top in THAT one, are you kidding me ?! "oh, a friend of mine does my--"

"yeah man i got this one back home. pretty bitchin huh."

oh sure, yeah, totally bitchin. your quality-control-by-a-sleeping-retard tattoo is totally fucking bitchin. sure yeah man, tell me some more about it even though my body language is screaming my total disinterest in anything to do with you. oh yeah ? you've got big plans for a sleeve ? cool, i bet that'll fucking suck too ! hey here's a fun idea: why don't you take a hike, jerk.

i've been on layover in bangkok for two hours and i'm already going stir-crazy despite filling the time with eating and reading and other general debauchery. charging my ipod because for some reason it just decided not to charge when i plugged it in last night. ain't that some shit.

i'm excited to play some video games and excited to do some jiu jitsu but otherwise maaaaaaaaaaaaaaan come ON. i just ate horrendously bad soup that i paid three times what i would have for the good version back in rawai. hey fucking rubbery airport chicken and overcooked noodles: fuck you. you're bullshit. someone do me a favour and put me on a nice beach with sand so fine it feels like walking in pudding and some a them big noisy waves that crash loudly on a wall of large rocks. and the beach has an arcade and a BJJ gym. bring da mufuckin ruckus.

"knee !" i drive one in there, and follow it with an elbow. "oh heeeey." oron says, but i can tell he doesn't mean it. he drifts over and leans in the corner, arms resting on the ropes, wearing a look of concern.

"riree. why no boom-boom."

oron harassed me to fight from the first day i got here (and continued even after i agreed to it) and has been harassing me to fuck the girls for just as long.

"what ? fuck man, i dunno," i put my fists back up, hoping he will put up the pads in response. he does for a 1-2, then drops them again.

"you maybe... ladyboi ?" he asks, and smilingly points at my pink skirt-shorts. then the smile fades and he raises a serious eyebrow.

i sigh and drop my hands. "no oron, not a ladyboi," i assure him for... i have no idea at this point how many times i've assured him i'm not a ladyboi. the number is astronomical. "i'm ugly as a woman," i add helpfully.

he nods solemnly at this undeniable truth, taking this information in like a therapist looking for the heart of the problem.

"you like ladyboi." he concludes.

i feel like frustratedly dropping my hands in mock-surrender to his obtuseness, but they are already hanging lifeless from having done this just a second ago. i pick them up just so i can drop them again, a gesture that surely must have looked as silly and ineffectual as it felt.

"you like... boy ?" he asks, his brow furrowed.

"i ain't tryin to get after none of that," i tell him.

"WOT." he quips, and mugs for the camera. the live studio audience roars their approval and shouts of "ORON !" sound from various spots in the crowd. a regular bud bundy, this motherfucker.

"no." i clarify, and when his brow clears its worry i elaborate, "straight talk homie: all i want is bitches-- big booty bitches. and if i gotta choose a coast, i gotta choose the east."

"WOT." he demands again, and the crowd stomps and applauds in a frenzy of delight.

"girls ! good !"

he loses it. "THEN WHY NO BOOM-BOOM !" he slaps my shoulder hard with his thai pad and mean-mugs me. "YOU HANDSOME MAN ! YOU LOOK BRAD PITT ! WHY NO BOOM-BOOM !" i suggest to him that his comparisions might be something of a misrepresentation on the order of saying the moon and sun are the same temperature because they're both round.

all the while i'm wondering how i am supposed to explain to this guy who speaks maybe 200 words of english my concerns about the morality of coming to an extremely poor country and fucking women for moeny ? then i can't help but wonder if it's morally any less repugnant than beating up some poor part-time fighter who's fighting me for money to feed his family ? i'm not one to sit here and judge what anyone does for familial obligation/a living and i won't deny that my biases against prostitution are rooted almost entirely in cultural customs i almost entirely don't relate or subscribe to otherwise. i'm having a hard time, i don't want to say rationalizing (although that's probably the most honest word for it), but justifying to myself these differences and why one form of taking advantage of those economically depressed is morally sound while others are not (and i'm not trying to build a case to use later for seeing prostitutes)... not so easy to untangle i guess.

the whistle blew to end the round, the last on the pads. "too much talking you." oron says, and shakes his head while pointing at me. the audience laughs and someone yells "ORON !"

okay officially sick of alcohol. songkran fucking rules though and standing on its own merits, is easily the best holiday idea ever and the most fun one i've ever experienced. i seriously can't believe it's not a world-wide tradition. goddamn. best birthday ever.

the relief of having fought is even more considerable than what i imagined it would be. unburdened. in terms of improving as a fighter, the experience was vital and necessary on a level i had vastly underestimated. between the nerves and pace and competition, it really is the next level of the game. i will need to do some BJJ tournaments in the future, definitely. but for now: a couple days of pizza, booze and desserts. welcome to the party zone.

things are a lot different once you're in there.

as i said, my biggest fear was that technique would fall apart and i'd gas in a minute, and technique did go out the window to some degree. the timing and rhythm of everything felt so much different than they do sparring, and my first thought once the fight started was "hey this guy is actually trying to hurt me !" without an ounce of that ironic humour the young people nowadays like so much.

but i should start more at the start. or at the beginning of relevance at least.

it was lying on the table getting oiled up when the fear really set in.

"don't be scared homie don't be scared homie don't be scared homie" i tried mantraing at myself but even nick diaz wisdom wasn't cutting it.

i'd gotten my hands taped a half hour earlier, and sat with fede and chris distractedly watching as carlos handily dismantled his opponent. i'd felt keyed up and excited at that point.

but this fucking oil-down, christ. it burned my flesh wherever they put it, and they put it everywhere. it felt like wearing a suit made of bee stings. i had thought wolf was joking when he mentioned they gave him a little flick on the balls with it, but i remembered that wolf was no comedian just as i got the bad news. "who thought this was a good idea and why." i wondered aloud, and was greeted with a number of "WOT"s from around the table. even the studio audience understood the gravity of the situation, though, and let the fact of my fiery balls pass with only a brief outburst of laughter and hooting. gloves are tied onto my taped hands.

oh fuck, the taping. i have a half-inch thick wad of hard athletic tape on the end of each fist, locked on in a cast of gauze and more tape.

"shadowbox shadowbox," oron urged as i slid off the table. okay, i think, shadowboxing. which one is shadowboxing again. it eventually comes to me and i slide around on my oiled feet, trying to keep my balance as i throw jabs at nothing. my quads feel like they're cramping
to useless; i flex them and stretch them but they're just locked tight.

what the FUCK am i DOING alarms go off in my head. all the mental defenses i've set up in case of this eventuality:

-stay calm !
-you traveled across the world specifically for this.
-you just need to touch this guy to hurt him.
-once you get hit and are aware of the fight you'll be fine.
-YOU LOVE FIGHTING.

do nothing.

i panic a little and consider outright desertion. i've got money in my bag; there's taxis right outside. just bail man. just get out of here. no problem. walk out the door. anyone tries to stop you, BAM. right in the mouth. the contradiction of how i wouldn't think twice about popping someone in the chops for trying to stop me from running away from a fight is what saves me. i tell myself the dude i'm fighting is the only guy who's really trying to stop me from leaving tonight, so i just need to pop him one, right in the ol kisser, because this guy, i mean, what a dick, you know ?

the fight before mine is a couple of thais. dee comes to tell me it's time to go to the ring as their fight nears its time limit. as i walk down the stairs to the ring, it's not bad enough that my feet are coated in oil and my sandals don't really fit anyway. now my legs are in open revolt; my quads quiver and my calves tremble like i'm getting electrocuted. i try to hold the hand-railing, knowing full well that if i don't there's a solid chance that i'm going to go tumbling down these stairs. oh hi boxing glove, i greet the forgotten hand-encombrance, i see we're doing this the hard way.

i get to the bottom of the stairs without incident (beyond hilarious granny-driving-a-car lack of speed) somehow. i sit in a chair in my cape waiting to fight. i struggle to breathe; trying to do breathing exercises fails because i feel like i'm going to pass out every time i hold air in for even a second. i settle for just breathing as deeply and as slowly as possible.

people talk to me. it's all confusing; i don't understand what any of them say even though they're talking english. i smile and say "right." "sure." "oh yeah ?" at the times it feels appropriate to say those things. i'm encouraged that i'm able to do this right now because it means that all the years of practice have ingrained the ability and made it easy to perform while under mental strain. please fists, do the same, i say to them.

the fight ends. one thai has won a decision, the other has lost. i squishily walk to the ring, calves and quads laughing and demanding to know if this is some sort of joke. the burning of my flesh has subsided somewhat, but the skin is also curious to know if i'm kidding here.

i guess i'm not because i get into the ring.

well i mean, that's not fair.

i AM joking in a lot of ways. or at least i'm in on the joke.

this is fucking ridiculous and anyone who says otherwise is just fooling themself. i'm a man in a foreign country and i'm going to fight some guy for strange, probably comical reasons. i've never even met him for god's sake. of COURSE i'm joking.

i'm just serious as well.

i walk around the ring, stop at the corners, tell myself to fight smart but hard and to stay calm. the ref calls us to the middle, grabs both of our cups and shakes them in the traditional referee's greeting, and starts the contest.

"hey this guy is actually trying to hurt me !" i realize, as he stomps a front kick at me. the fight is fast both because of my mental state and the fact that this guy's goal is to leave me unconscious. it takes me a minute or two to get the timing and rhythm right at this speed; every time i attack him he dives into a clinch with me. after this happens a few times i'm able to time him coming in with a hook that staggers him, then drive home a knee that finishes the night.

"go over, go over," oron reminds me as he raises my hand to the crowd.

for the last month, every time i've gotten in the ring or out of the ring, oron has had me do the ol' "fall over the top rope" gag that he does after his fights. the trainers LOVE this for some reason, and laugh with hearty guffaws at its proper performance. oh yeah, only when you perform it properly-- i'll tell you something which may be surprising to you, perhaps you are unaware of slapstick comedy ? i don't know the answer to that question, so i'll just assume it's "yes i am unaware," so i'll tell you that there is a technique to this fall, just like there is a technique to anything done well. if you don't commit to it you just leave the audience cold, thinking, "who does this guy think he is, wasting my time here with his amateur-hour novelty shit." but if you dive too hard on it then you spill out into the crowd, which when you're covered in sweat and burning oil and the general grime of battle, is unacceptable apparently. plus how embarrassing and unforgivable would it be to get injured not actually in a fight, but being a fucking jerkoff directly afterward ?

"woah dude you broke your leg ? was that in your fight ??"
"uhhh... not exactly..."

so for the last month i've dedicated myself to learning this art, and i think when it comes down to it, last night, that fall is the only thing i performed with excellent technique until much later when, after getting celebration wasted, danced the night away.

i arrived at the gym today to a banner for the fights on friday.

a feeling i can only compare to a mushroom trip taking a wrong turn washed over me when i saw it; my ears started ringing and my stomach dropped away and oh god i've made a huge mistake and i'm going to get caught and everyone will know and i fucked up bad and there's no turning back now the threshold is breached and what is life anyway

it passed quickly, however. just another strange emotional response to this whole experience.

since after dinner i've been feeling a wonderful calm about this fight. i know i've put in hard work, and, victory or defeat, my only goal is to fight as hard as i can. i know i can do that, and i feel that i simply will do that because if i don't, it's the only way i can actually lose. i hope i can carry this feeling through the next two days.

this shit is rising like approaching a mountain range that seemed small and negligible from a distance but quickly takes up your entire field of vision.

i've put in the hardest two months of training i've ever done and i know i gave all i had in that time; my skill is as sharp as it can be at this point after working around injury and other constraints.

my biggest concern is getting in the ring and just having technique fall entirely apart and then gassing after a minute. i'm seriously worried about this (for a couple reasons actually-- first, i've seen it happen here a few times to better fighters than me that they just end up deserting skill and look like a glorified bar brawler; second, i haven't been able to run or skip for the last month and a half due to a badly sprained foot, and running [particularly sprints] are a huge part of my cardio conditioning) because even more than i want to win (and holy fuck do i want to win), i want to be able to fight smart when it counts.

i haven't done nearly enough sparring of kickboxing with skilled guys-- it's been a lot of kickboxing with guys not as good as me, or just sparring boxing, or doing clinch work. all of that is good and beneficial in ways, but the best thing you can do in training is replicate as closely as possible what you're actually training for, except harder, and i think i haven't done enough of that. it's too late to change now of course, so i'm doing my best not to worry about that. but here we are.

"you fight, first round, soft-soft, you know ?"
"i don't think so oron. want to win, i'm going hard."
"ok ok but train hard you ? two month. train. train hard two month, fight... one minute ? no, good fight. two round. two round hard."
"we'll see how it goes."
"ok no body," he slaps his side, "no punch body one round."
"mmm, can't promise that one oron." i can't do my boy liver punches like that. what would bas think ?
"okay ! okay... but you.. one round soft-soft. yeah ?" he smiles expectantly and raises his eyebrows, seemingly quite proud of the incredibly generous nature of his compromise.
"you no-good, dirty..." i laugh.
"WOT."
"if over first round, good !"
"no !"
"no good ?"
"no goooood ! good you win, no good fight !"
"welp,"
"no you welp !" this criticism is punctuated with a hard slap on my back and a mean look. "one round soft-soft ! two round ok, KO, but one round, fight soft you ! no hard one round ! two round KO, three round KO, ok ! ROUND ONE SOFT-SOFT !!"
"first round KO ok !" i suggest, then add, "good even." i reach deep into my smile bag for my most disarming and charming smile. oh no, it's missing ! guess i'll settle for a smug and dickish smile ? pretty much the same right ?
"you stay." oron says, fuming, and storms purposefully out into the hitting-stick field.

i bought an ipod after i killed my other one by thinking it would be cool to take it out for a bike ride in a torrential downpour that was so bad i started collecting pairs of animals for an ark. okay honesty time, i just thought about elephants and squids and said AWWWWWWWW a bunch. anyways i killed my ipod and i bought this replacement ipod so i could listen to essence of the northern fists before my fight and it is such a hilariously bad piece of shit that i have to believe it's an intentional malicious joke. check out this list of awesome features:

-is not recognized by itunes
-files must be drag & dropped like a memory stick
-will not take more than 50 files at a time
-sometimes rejects all the files
-sometimes rejects some of the files, leaving me unsure which were accepted
-will not charge with ipod wall charger
-sometimes doesn't charge through computer
-cannot customize any settings
-does not acknowledge band names or albums (all songs are by "unknown artist" from "unknown album")
-has battery life of 7-11 house-brand AA cells
-sometimes scrolls down when i'm not touching it (the only time the scrolling works)
-fast forwards songs it doesn't like when it's halfway through them
-has no shuffle
-cuts the volume in half directly after i turn the volume up
-turns off just because

and i want to be mad about this but its sense of comic timing is just so good that i can't. also i paid like $80 for it and just need it to play songs for an hour on fight day. but now i keep expecting to wake up and find it setting up ponzie schemes and then posting on stormfront about racial purity under my name.

yeah definitely getting irritable. definitely need to fight.

the grind of training twice a day for over two months (minus injury time, which, the entirety of the time off was maybe a week and a half, and it was spent thinking about fighting and wishing to be fighting) without having an outlet of a fight, or a decisive ending without going home to fucking real life, is leaving me short with people and generally irritable. this is the aspect of myself i dislike the most and the one i'm least able to control. i've got something of a temper at times but i can mostly keep it under wraps; at least nine out of ten of the people i've ever met deserved an absolutely savage beating but i never savagely beat them which can only speak to my impressive temper-control and general worth as a man.

anyways basically i think i should probably fight. my foot is still a mess and improving at a very, very slow pace, but if i give it a few weeks before fighting (and don't re-injure or new-injure myself) i should hopefully be ready to go.

wish someone had warned me beforehand that it was "clownings and savage beatings of the farangs" day so i could've just gone to one class instead of somehow volunteering for a "two vicious beatdowns in one day" day

i mean i normally like to have at least a short nap between assaults

apparently i somehow involuntarily signed up for another go with with sing on friday too, so pretty fucking sweet to get clobbered by a k1 vet three times in one week

boxed with sing today. what a ridiculous monster, he had reflexes like i've never even seen before. as always with the thais, the first round went great for me; i'm so smooth, landing shots, generally looking like i have any idea whatsoever what i'm doing. second round starts and he has my entire game figured out already, slipping and moving around every punch i throw, then countering with ridiculous timing and accuract. dude started completely clowning me with roy jones jr hands-down-chin-out nonsense and i felt like i technically should be mad ? but he was so adorable and fun-loving about it that i couldn't help laughing along with him.

anyways long story short he beat the living shit out of me for the next some number of rounds that i can't honestly be expected to remember in my current state

back at training for a few days now. i don't move well at all and there's a bunch of shit i can't do on my foot, but i also can't sit around anymore either, so i put up with the annoyance of crippled training sessions and feeling like a pussy for not sparring or clinching. and i fucking hate saying "nah i can't do that," to the trainers because they think you're just being difficult or a drama queen or whatever. argh. hope this shit heals fast.

i hate to take sleeping pills, but it's one of the sacrifices you have to make sometimes when you have to start training at 6am but your body tells you to go to sleep at 4am. i got some from the pharmacy a few weeks ago but have avoided using them until last night, knowing i was going to be getting up early to try to get back at least some level of fight cardio, even if i can't do a lot of the exercises.

insomnia is a funny thing. i can be utterly exhausted while running on very little sleep from the night before and still be totally unable to sleep. the closest thing i can compare it to is if you've ever had a muscle cramp that won't let go, that's what my brain feels like. at some point in the night i can feel my brain release its squeeze, and then i can finally go to bed and sleep instead of looking around my room in frustration, focusing on the shadowy right angles of corners until my eyes cross.

sleeping pills shorten or sidestep this period one way or another. some make me feel like i'm sinking slowly deeper into fatigue as my body gets heavy until i am almost conscious of crossing the threshold of sleep, like walking down a nearly level beach into the water. others i won't feel a thing; i'll be lying in bed wide awake wondering when the drug will kick in and then BAM it's morning.

these pills were different than that; i took one around 8pm thinking i would be falling asleep by nine at the latest. eleven o'clock found me lying in bed staring into corners cross-eyed in frustration when suddenly it began to look like coloured veils were being put in front of my line of sight. i shut my eyes but even the darkness went through various shades. i chased the veils across the backs of my eyelids until they floated away over a hillside i recognized from dreamland. i clearly remember feeling relieved in my dream that i was asleep.

so after training this morning (which i thankfully survived without further foot damage and only a moderate sleeping pill hangover) i checked online to see what sort of potency those sleeping pills were, thinking maybe i needed something stronger or at least different. welp, turns out "alprazolam" is xanax ! hahaha this fucking country rules...

ok old lady look.

maybe i look like a soft-touch; the kind of guy who you pull one of your scams on back home in venice. i don't know, i can't speak to that.

but listen: i clearly arrived at this toaster first. why are you trying to bully your piece of toast into the toaster when my bread is entirely already in it. your bread doesn't fit. this is a simple IF THEN situation. IF toaster has guy1 putting bread1 in it THEN don't try to put bread2 in it.

hey elderly woman. i don't have time to stand around smirking about the fact that you're baffled by technology to the point that a toaster is leaving you making faces like it asked you to resolve the collatz problem. i need to fill my plate with calories for my big day of lying by the pool with my sun-shades on.

say, is that sushi ? why, i daresay it is... perhaps i'll have a piece or two ? who can say for sure... the future stays unknown to all men, but i can't deny having clouded, shocking visions of a world where i'm stuffing that sushi into my face...

it feels so real...

{the toaster popping snaps me out of my trance and i wipe the cold sweat from my brow and try to catch my breath, hoping to avoid the fatigue the foodvisions sometimes lay upon me. i needn't have worried though, as a fire was about to be ignited in my blood.}

oh, excuse me, fucking old lady, but that toast you're putting on your plate like it's fucking yours or something ?

dude seriously ? are you fucking aiming to get brutally fucking TKO'd ? this one is NOT going to a decision you wrinkled horror i ASSURE you. while it is normally quite beyond my nature as a gentleman to clobber an old lady with my steel fists and then dance in circles around her like she's the sweet corner maid, you are balancing precariously on the fine line between my menacing, trembling rage and the point where they are going to have to pull me off you after i unleash a savage combination that buries my balled fists up to the elbows into your leathered about-to-be-dead-even-sooner-than-you-thought-it-would-be body.

i'm looking through your eyes directly into your soul, withered shuffling lady, and i can see you don't have the heart it takes to defeat me. sure you might stick and move for a few minutes. and though you may try to frustrate me with slick footwork while landing a few nice combinations, eventually i will corner you between the salad bowl and the sausage tray and then i will end your breakfast in absolutely bestial fashion with two hits: me hitting you, and then me hitting up the buffet again for another helping of bangkok stir-fry.

oh you don't like that i'm in your grill like it's 2003 and i'm mirko filipovic and you're wearing a lucha libre mask ? well maybe then i could suggest a compromise wherein you put my fucking toast on my goddamned plate and i don't paint this buffet with your blood even though it goes against every natural fiber of my being to offer you probably the sweetest deal you'll ever get in what's surely guaranteed to be a very short rest of your life, with or without my intervention ?

the FUCK you mean "oh are these yours." you watched me put that bread in the fucking toaster you ridiculous walking corpse. don't mumble to your other sagging animated-dead pal in your zombie language ! you can voluntarily surrender the toast immediately onto my plate or prepare yourself for a very short career as a heavy bag and then i take the toast anyway and probably fashion a championship belt out of it. yeah, the plate on the table with the huge stack of pancakes. i had to set it down to do do a wanderlei wrist roll.

i'm torn between the frustration and curious guilt of not training and deeply enjoying lying in the sun reading for hours on end without a care in the world, sliding into the pool and cruising around in three dimensions, then back to my pool chair for some big time relaxation...

i do want desperately to get back at it; i've shocked myself out of sleep shadowboxing the last two nights but the reason i'm out right now is because i hurried back too fast in the first place. so i'm taking it slow, hoping to get back to at least doing some pad and bag work by monday.

also i've spent the last week eating like i'm still training twice a day. haha uhh, whoops

wang: do the saenchai kick !
me: yeah the saenchai kick, that's a really good idea, do the saenchai kick !

(the saenchai kick:
)

which, of course, i land with my foot, on his elbow, and when i come down my foot sings in agony. cool idea !
and i just paid for a month of training this morning. cool to be back on the bench again while that money just drains away with my fucking time in thailand and i can't even fucking walk.

this shit man, seriously. i finally get back to sparring, i'm finally kicking again, and BAM. take a seat, johnny.

so i went to the pharmacy to get more celebrex and asked if they had any pain killers.

"how bad pain ?"
"well i can't really walk so much as do some terry fox shit."
"... ?"
"pretty bad."
"ok these prescription only. you be careful."

cool security measures thailand. i should've asked if they had any opium.

there's a fight night every friday in patong, on sundays quite often as well, sometimes mondays and wednesdays. i've been to seven or eight of them so far but tonight's was special. it was a fight night put on by sinbi gym, so five of the ten fights were with sinbi fighters. it was great to watch; there's always a large group of people from sinbi who go to watch the fights, but with so many sinbi fighters on the card, the sinbi section was absolutely packed.

i got there about twenty minutes late and i had already missed three fights ! all first and second round knockouts, two for sinbi fighters. everyone was in good spirits because of this, naturally, but there was a definite nervous energy because there were still three more fights for sinbi to go.

watching a teammate lose is depressing and draining in a way that is untranslatable, particularly if you've sparred with them or grown close to them. last week, the main event was a guy from the gym named shane, a big, well-liked 240lb fellow. he was fighting another big guy, and right from the start it was a hard-fought war. shane's opponent was landing some good punches, but shane was going to work on the guy's lead leg with kicks that were adding up. shane was dropped in the second round but showed a ton of heart getting back to his feet and fighting into the third, and even looked like he was starting to out-work his opponent when he landed a punch awkwardly and injured his shoulder. i don't even know the guy well and it was incredibly deflating; you want your teammates to win so badly, especially in the brotherhood of shared hard effort. watching someone work so hard but come up short is ugly stuff and i can only imagine how much more difficult it was for the people actually close to him.

i've sparred with the three guys who still had fights to come; kion, who i don't know well but enjoyed working with and respected a good deal, brendan, a thoughtful australian who's laid back and very friendly but with a piercing scrutiny who works very hard, and oron. the idea of any of watching any of these guys lose makes my stomach twist uncomfortably, but they're all talented guys and i'm confident in all three of them.

brendan's fight is first. he fights a thai man who abuses brendan's leg with kicks; brendan wades through them for the first round and a half, then lands a fight-ending flurry of punches. i'm excited and relieved to see him win; brendan's a good dude and he worked hard for this.

oron's fight is a very thai affair; slow, technical and patient. oron slides into the pocket smoothly to throw more hand combinations than one usually sees from a thai fighter, but he is also active enough with his legs and lands good knees from the clinch that the judges won't penalize him (they don't like boxing !). his opponent is overmatched the entire fight and never really mounts much of an offense, and oron doesn't abuse him for it. oron takes a one-sided decision and the cheers are loud and delighted for the much-beloved trainer.



the next fight features nobody from sinbi but is easily the best fight i've seen at bangla so far; an absolute tooth and nail battle that more than anything is a display of tenacity and heart. the technique is just magnificent and they are throwing counters to counters to counters. the level of skill on display from both fighters is immeasurable and the crowd appreciates the performance with waves of applause and shouting. neither man hits the floor despite the absolutely vicious nature of the contest, and while one man was declared the winner it would be absolutely backward to call the other a loser.

kion enters the ring and prepares to fight the last fight of the night. his opponent is a brit; he's relaxed and composed. traditionally the last fight of the night at these events is a squash match where one opponent grossly outmatches the other and is just putting in some ring time.

this was not the case here. from the opening bell it is a case of kion's aggressive boxing vs. the movement & heavy kicks of the brit. kion eats a number of leg kicks and mostly defends himself with smiles and nods at his opponent. he's definitely game but solidly outpointed in the first round.

in the second his boxing begins to get a little wild; lots of power but less tight. the brit uses the clinch a lot and lands some good elbows. near the end of the frame kion eats a vicious shot and his legs go stiff, he takes a couple of awkward steps but manages to stay vertical, covering up well as his opponent attempts to capitalize.

kion's survival gets everyone in the crowd going and the excitement in our section becomes a physical thing; heavy and electric like the air here gets in an afternoon thunderstorm. at the start of the third kion presses forward relentlessly and his heart for battle is incredibly inspiring. he wears down his opponent landing good strikes and beginning to out-muscle him in the clinch. the brit is staggered and kion throws him to the mat where the referee waves off the fight. i've never felt the level of infectious enthusiasm sinbi showed as its fighters went undefeated, showing both technique and incredible heart.

back to training today. i'll probably spend the next week or so not throwing any kicks and not sparring because my movement is severely compromised (i can't be on the balls of my feet, which is where i spend all my on my feet time normally). can't wait to get back to running and sparring; i've got a lot on my mind that i need to work on; running's when i think about it best and sparring is the laboratory.

i want to tell you that i'm strong enough to not go have pizza again tonight but i also don't want to lie to you, which leaves us at something of an impasse. does it make a difference if i tell you how good this pizza place is ? because it's fucking awesome. they don't even charge me for extra toppings ! "would you mind if i got some pineapple on that ?" no prooooooblem !

so anyways i guess i just won't tell you what i'm doing for dinner for the third time this week so i don't have to lie to you.

worked with oron this morning but my foot was prohibiting sparring so i mostly did boxing pad work. afterward i went to the doctor, foot is not broken which is a huge relief, i just have a bad sprain in the joint between the second metatarsal and some other bone. the doctor gave me some celebrex for inflammation and told me to stay off it, so i'm staying off it as much as possible (ie. not training for the next little while, which of course sucks but injuries have to be expected and could be a lot worse).

i rented a scooter finally, which i've been sort of putting off doing due to a combination of the intense nature of the streets here, my general unfamiliarity with driving in the first place, and my specific total lack of knowledge on motorcycles. but considering a taxi to the hospital was going to cost me at least $30, and renting a scooter for a month cost a little over $100 and it's causing me considerable pain to walk anywhere, i figured it was time to man up.

and holy fuck these things are so goddamned fun. the first five or so minutes of getting used to the accelerator, steering, braking etc was frustrating but once i got it, i announced, "hey these quiet roads are totally easy to drive on let's go try the highway." to no one in particular, and no one suggested, "hey maybe the highway in a country where they don't seem to have road law isn't the best place for someone who has never ridden a scooter before." and i damn sure wasn't going to say it.

i took a gander at google for the directions and at first i was like hey no proooooblem. but then i took a closer look (here, go do the same: zoom in and follow the path on this map) and noticed that a number of the streets off the highway had the same number running in different directions-- sometimes the highyway split off at right angles with both keeping the same number, or once there were two streets running parallel off a roundabout again with the same number.

"welp," i figured aloud, and put on my stupid helmet and loaded the map into my ipod while i was still close to internet access. i figured if i got off track i could take a look and know which road i would want to get back to and even if there's multiple roads numbered the same thing, there's only going to be so many with that number. i'm bound to get where i'm going eventually

"welp," i reasoned further, and hopped on my bike.

the good thing about there being no law on the roads here is that you can totally suck at driving and there's still someone doing something way worse than you. i saw one woman on her bike, talking on her cellular phone, and every once in a while cradling her phone with her shoulder while she drank a fancy coffee smoothie thing. and she was smoking. i actually don't know how she was operating the vehicle. not mentally, i mean she clearly wasn't doing that, but i mean physically i don't understand what on earth was keeping the thing moving forward. up until that point i was concerned about keeping a steady velocity and not swerving too much-- after that i figured if i was going to die, it probably wasn't going to be my fault so much as some pre-teen playing a gameboy and driving with his feet cutting off a truck overloaded with a football team and spilling on top of me while i'm checking to make sure my lights are on.

so i get to that round-about and there's like fifteen streets off it instead of the five on the map. and none of them are labeled with numbers, only "patong", "promethep cape", things i didn't look at when i looked at the map.

"oh i'll just check my ipod while in the middle of this roundabout going 60km/h," i mentally ridicule my planning, then think about how that would not be out of place at all on these streets and laugh to myself. i end up taking a street that's approximately the direction i think i want to go and get to my destination, really without incident. i'm flooded with my first flush of driver's cockiness, credit the years of racing video games for my success, accept an imagination bouquet of flowers and start to swagger to the winner's circle emergency room until my mangled foot almost spills me flat on my face.

fucked up my foot although i'm not sure when exactly. probably an accumulation of kicks landing on elbows and knees finally leading to limping and now missing classes. i did all my classes this week, worked with oron yesterday morning, then ended up throwing up all last night again. felt better this morning, not nauseous but a little underslept and generally weak. didn't train today (i usually only do one class on thursdays anyway so it's not a big deal) and i'm having a lot of trouble walking. i called my insurance company about going to the hospital for x-rays and they were very evasive over whether or not they would cover the costs. fuck it, i'll go tomorrow anyway. not looking forward to dealing with an injury at all but i guess it has got to be expected when you're flinging your body parts around hundreds of times a day for weeks on end.

clinched with some aussie dude today, focused not on how to fix his mistakes but how i should capitalize on them. i tried not to just overwhelm him because i clearly had the advantage, but instead experimented with a lot of the techniques i've been shown for clinching. some worked well for me but others that have been working did not work so well.

first thing he said to me was "so yowah tha BJJ goy."

"i roll once in a while," i replied, sort of confused. i've grappled with a couple of guys here, but only briefly. how come they aren't tha BJJ goy ?

anyway, we went sort of hard but not viciously hard. his girlfriend was watching the whole time which was sort of strange-- made me wonder how stressful that is for both of them, particularly when he's getting molested.

pot was refereeing and every time i got an advantageous grip he would break us and then give me a devilish "yeah that's right" grin. these motherfuckers are all so playful and fun to train with that you really can't get mad at them, even though they're constantly being dicks.

i'm so frequently impressed and inspired by the people around me, both the trainers and those training. there are so many people training, and training hard through fatigue, injury, heat, frustration and a multitude of other blocks that it just forces me to elevate myself out of some mix of desire and pride (and a dash of inertia).

i've decided i'm not going to gas out anymore training and today was the first day in the experiment-- it actually seemed to go really well. just remembering to breathe, not throwing every fucking single strike as a KO punch, and trying to stay relaxed. sparring went so smoothly, counters came easier, the guy i was sparring with gassed after one round while i was staring at ann waiting for him to start the shit back up.

just had my first fanta. i wondered why fanta is so popular here, with fanta being much easier to find than any other soft drink. a brief perusal of the ol wikipedia shed some light on things:
"As common in the south east part of Asia, the sugar content of these flavours are exceptionally much higher than in the rest of the world, giving the drinks a quite different taste compared to similar flavours around the rest of the world. Red Fanta has been officially endorsed by the King of Thailand as one of his preferred drinks. Consequently, glasses and open bottles of red Fanta are often seen as offerings on the small Buddhist altars displayed by every Thai home and shop."

it was very green, and it's called nam quiew which further according to wiki translates as "green water" and is cream soda flavoured (although according to my face no it isn't). the first gulp left a miserable aftertaste, but subsequent gulps convinced me that the stuff was actually pretty tasty (ie. sugary as fuck).

i drink so much liquid here it's sort of shocking. i didn't train today (sunday) and i put back at least 4L of water, as well as the aforementioned fanta, a mango smoothie, probably about a litre of milk, and a gatorade.

oh ! gatorade here comes in only 500mL bottles and only in two flavours: lemon lime, and grape. no orange, no fruit punch, no mosh, no core, no joke. i offered oron a drink of my gatorade when he was looking at it particularly longingly one day, and he took that to mean that all future gatorade concerns belong to him and he slaps me on the shoulder and shouts "NO !" when i drink more than him. also if i don't produce the gatorade in a timely fashion, he will happily and shamelessly root through my bag insisting "yellow !" the entire time (responding to me saying, "it's in there." with both demands of "yellow !" and follow-up queries of "...yellow ?") until he finds it. one day i made the mistake of bringing a grape gatorade and he was positively inconsolable. i think i deeply tested the thai patience that day.

"yellow ?" he was asking into my bag as i wrapped my hands.

"there's one in there. might be a grape actually."

his eyes went wide and his digging took on an edge of concern (it was actually panic but he would deny that it was panic so we'll call it concern). upon finding the bottle, disappointment, frustration and disgust mingled across his face. "no yellow." he asked rhetorically.

"nah, they just had grape at the 7-11."

oron shut his eyes to gather himself, tapped his foot, the fist not holding the detested bottle firmly planted into his hip. he looked skyward, then left, then at my feet. everywhere but my eyes until i snickered at his not-so-carefully concealed anger. the disbelief in his eyes was sharp, like superman using heat vision to burn a hole in a lake because it had the wrong flavour of fish in it.

"ok," said oron, shaking the bottle at me, "i no like. grape, i no like."

"hahahaha tough it out princess," i say to him. he doesn't understand my words, but i think he gets the scorn in my tone because he kicks me in the ass hard enough that i yelp "hey !!" at him.

"GRAPE I NO LIKE !" he yells back, and kicks me again as i laugh and try (but fail) to dodge. "ONLY YELLOW ONLY !" he dropped the bottle on my bag and went into the field in search of a stick.

he found one.

pulled out the question mark kick sparring with senchai today. he smiled and his eyes registered something a few steps below surprise and then he punished my legs. his catch and sweeps are magnificent, somehow leaving me sailing down from about six feet high. he goes to touch gloves as i get up, pulls back at the last second and drives home another leg kick. i try to check them but the guy is like lightning if lightning were five or six times faster and targeted your leg and instead of thunder the skies echoed with calls of "OH AYYY !"

i'm facing a strange mental situation where i'm so used to going slow and training for the benefit of others as training partners that getting used to being selfish and being okay with others being selfish in their training has been hard mental work. sparring here with a few of the other falang means a fight a lot of the time. it's not just a matter of being okay with getting hit, it's a matter of getting your game ready and going to war. it's not a place for experimentation with technique. i'm not used to that.

on the other hand, sparring with the trainers is a lot of fun. they hit you hard but they never go in to take your head off, and they have a keen awareness of your abilities. i've been hit by hard kicks, hard knees and hard punches from a number of trainers, but they were almost all because of my mistakes.

i apologized to the guy who kicked my balls that i treated badly. he took it well, then tried to take my head off sparring again. it's fine-- i shouldn't expect other people paying to train to have the best interests of some dude in mind; they're just trying to get as good as they can and that's the way they feel is best. if i don't like it i don't have to spar with them. and i want to spar with them.

was sparring with some dude today. he kept going full speed and the trainers kept telling him to slow down. "ok right ok" he'd say, and i'd throw light and slow, and then OH SHIT he's throwing haymakers at me, driving full power leg kicks and is jumpy like cracked out motherfuckers. "slow down, relax..." bam, leg kick to the balls. in spite of the cup it definitely registers. i take a minute to make some adjustments to my testicles and go back to sparring. this guy's seriously trying to take my fucking head off. "alright, all in." i figure, and launch a hard straight to his body and come up with a hook to his head. he tries to clinch after i land but i circle right and throw a rear cross with my right that lands behind his ear. i take a boxing stance and walk through his leg kicks to land better power with my hands, then BAM kick right up the middle into my balls. i fucking crumple and try not to throw up. the trainers all try to be polite about it to the guy when he's apologetic, but when he comes and pats me on the head i push it off and tell (whimper at) him to get fucked.

goddamn it, temper again. i forget that the thai culture has no respect for anger; they only respect being polite. it's just weird and embarrassing to them when someone gets angry.

it takes me a while to get to the point where i can stand. douchebag is sparring with one of the trainers who tells him after every combination "ah, slow, slow..."

eventually i spar with oron for a bit, working against waves of nausea and his superior technique. we go a few rounds (he manages to not kick me in the nuts and i return the favour), and then senchai asks if i want to spar a bit.

fuck yes. light me up dude.

he obliges. he's so fucking fast and sees almost everything i do. his counters are perfect; my boxing defense is usually pretty okay but he makes me feel like i don't even have arms. his movement is impeccable. i land a few jabs and feel like the fucking champ of the world but he's just cataloguing, analyzing, waiting. he starts countering off my jab, making me tentative to throw it even though my hands are really my only weapon. what the fuck am i supposed to do, kick this guy ? haha.

fuck it, i kick him. it lands. "oh, heyyy," he announces, and his eyes light up at how unexpected it is. i land a grand total of zero more while he continues landing on me. any time i throw to his body he catches it and immediately hammerfists the quad. it doesn't hurt but we both know those are actually elbows in the real world and that they in fact hurt quite a lot.

we spar a couple of rounds, he dominates me everywhere, but afterward he tells me i have great technique. i'm sure it's what he says to all the boys but i still feel like a fucking champ again. thanks senchai.

douchebag comes over to apologize again and i tell him he's an asshole in spite of trying my absolute hardest not to. that doesn't go so well. thanks a lot, temper.

this trip has been great for understanding where i am, what i'm good at, what i need to work on and most of all who i am when it comes to fighting and who i want to be. how i move, how i want to move, what i see, what i do, what i feel. all of this is malleable and must be put through the fire of judgment and go under the hammer of refinement. i have so much time to focus on fighting; thinking about fighting in addition to spending my day actually fighting.

i sparred twice today, which is what i desperately need. working the pads with oron in between, one of the old dudes came over to me and told me in the month he's been here he hasn't seen anyone as good as me at working the pads on boxing. that's great, but connecting with this shit on a moving, blocking opponent who doesn't want to be hit is something else entirely. particularly when they're also kicking you when you're punching them. i land some punches here and there but the importance of setting this shit up, of moving, of feinting, of changing things up has really been impressed upon me. i've been trying to work my movement more than anything but the footwork is so much different for muay thai than it is for boxing (and has to be depending on if you're basing your weight more on your lead or rear leg). i frequently use a much more dutch style of kickboxing and it just infuriates the trainers here, which is understandable. i have to remind myself i'm here to learn muay thai, not out-box people.

my clinching and boxing are both excellent relative to the other people here and based on trainer's feedback. none of them have tried to change anything about how i punch, and the clinching is all little details for better execution.

my kicking largely sucks. i feel like i'm on page one of my kicking 060 textbook going "uhhhhhhhhhh".

that's probably an exaggeration for effect but every trainer i work with wants to change something about how i kick. it's good, kicking is probably the single greatest element of muay thai in my eyes and the thing they do better than anybody so i want that correction, but i feel like i'm actually losing power in my kicks trying to do it the right way, which is incredibly frustrating. although not unexpected: it makes sense that i've gotten comfortable with how i kick and can kick with a relative amount of power even if my technique is ugly. learning a new style, of course i'm going to be awkward and uncomfortable with it until it's natural and i can swing it without muscling it.

however, currently my kicks suck and oron is still hitting me regularly with a stick. he found a bigger one recently.

i think i finally get question mark kicks ?! god, i hope so. they're definitely not perfect but they follow the mysterious path of the enigmatic question mark and land on faces, so,

oron wasn't around this morning so i worked with wang. he had me doing those repetitive kicks in brutal sets that left me gasping for breath, but he was complimentary of my technique so no beef.

yesterday working with oron, he was totally dissatisfied with my bag kneeing technique and ran out of the gym into the adjacent field and got a stick and brought it back and hit me with it when i fucked up (which was regularly). he giggled every time he did it too. i'm fairly certain that oron is at least part demon trickster; likely his granddad is half demon trickster and his granddad's dad was a full-blooded demon trickster that used one of the oldest tricks in the demon book to bang his great grandma when she was a gorgeous young thai princess. no one believed her that the demon came to her in a dream and impregnated her and she was therefore outcast, raising oron's grandfather in poverty while she worked three jobs etc etc and now oron hits students with sticks and laughs because it's simply in his blood. that's really the only conclusion i can come to using occam's razor.

got up and went to the shitty breakfast place that has wifi but does NOT have amazing minipancakes. i want to watch strikeforce but at what a cost... i can't stop thinking to myself. this buffet is more expensive and has way shittier food. seriously can someone explain the fucking gall it takes to pull a bitch move like that, this late in the game ? i mean it's 2011 here. and you're STILL being racist and you can't get the breakfast buffet price/quality right. says a lot about us as a species.

on the other hand, that means the better buffet is cheaper. so fuck it.

watched a choppy stream of jacare and diaz being awesome, ate some mediocre breakfast, and finished another conan story. went back to my place and napped, got up and swam for an hour, and floating in the pool i thought about how wonderful it must be to be independently filthy rich and able to spend your entire life doing whatever the fuck you want like i've been doing for the past ten days. the thought sends a chills-cocktail of desire, excitement, greed and envy crawling up my spine. beter not to think about these things i figure; end up buying lottery tickets or something worse.

back to the trough.

i wake up to a broken fever in a huge pool of sweat after 16 hours of an on and off sleep. my head is clear. my joints ache less and while my stomach is still violent, i can actually move around without feeling like the end is come. i spend the day uploading videos and photos. i still feel a residual of last night's overwhelming guiltstorm due to missing training. there's no way i can work like this without shitting myself so it's not in any way logical, although maybe there is something to the shame i feel over how i've treated some women.

"but maybe not too," i confidently reassure myself, as i finally have an appetite that is yelling much louder than my past. what a fucking relief it is to want to eat food.

i slip into an ugly shallow sleep haunted by steel talons gripping my flesh. i wake up and excrete violently. the smell makes me heave involuntarily; like i ate rotting meat, threw it up into a jar, then left it in a cupboard for a week before opening it just to see.

i get back into bed and am assailed by a curious overwhelming insistence of guilt and shame. a film runs through my brain of women from the past and i see in vivid detail how i wronged each of them. it feels like a bogus journey of going into different doors in hell only each one contains a brutal scene with a different ex-girlfriend.

"but that never happened !" i startle myself awake with the realization that i'm dreaming and most of these things are imagined. i eat a fistful of tylenol and wash it down with ginger ale and remember being at the seven eleven at some point in the last few hours. getting there and back i do not remember. i also find a package of fruit mentos and eat them ravenously. my fridge is absolutely stocked with ginger ale and gatorade. i imagine that i'm a helpful fairy to myself and giggle my way the short trip to stupid even though it makes my stomach feel like it's getting needled by stomach goblins.

i do a 1pm private with oron. it's already paid for so i tell myself it's mandatory. i get there right at one and wrap my hands slowly. i napped briefly but it didn't change that everything hurts like few things have ever hurt. "skip, skip," oron mimes. i skip and my brain throbs every time i hit the apex of my one inch high jump.

oron comes to get me and we start. every time i throw a kick my left hip feels like it's grinding in a socket of broken glass. we clinch and my biceps hurt where he grabs them to the point where i flinch. i don't even realize places hurt until they come in contact with this tiny smirking monster and then they feel like they're clamped in a vice.

i don't remember how the hour passes; i remember blocking some kicks and eating some kicks and then clinching and oron being satisfied with me throwing him around more than i usually do (which is to say he only threw me down on the mat a few dozen times). a few minutes before 2pm another guy dislocates his elbow clinching in the ring with pot. it's a grim reminder that no matter how much fun this game is in the gym, we're not playing video games here. oron has me work some more on the straight push kick into flying knee combo but i'm not even heartened by oron's occasional exclamations of approval. when 2pm finally hits i'm thankful and collapse. oron makes a noise of disapproval but it's far away.

i get back to my place and go through waves of shivering and sweat. i turn the air conditioner off and the place stifles; i turn it back on and try to set it to 25 celsius but even the sound of it gives me chills. i feel tired and sick and the aches throb with my heartbeat. i'm finally convinced this isn't from overtraining when i consider eating and my stomach rolls instead of rumbles-- the ultimate litmus test. i briefly remember telling oron i would see him tomorrow which has become a standard parting but now i have my doubts and a dark green cloud of guilt washes in over the right hand side of my head behind the ear. i note it without feeling the emotion or experiencing it; it simply hangs there. i touch my palm to my temple and the skin feels like it's molten but a living, squirming thing that shrinks from my touch like an insect trying to escape notice. i rub my joints; knees ankles elbows all tell the same tale of inhuman heat radiating from inhuman flesh but it's totally surface; i've turned the air conditioner off and still i'm shivering under blankets in a hoodie and sweatpants. i hear oron singing somewhere over my shoulder and try to steal a reassuring glance at his smirk but the strange cloud of guilt blocks him out.

i get up to run at 6.20 but the aches and pains are amplified well beyond anything so far. i run about three minutes before my ankle ceases to flex normally and i stumble.

'glad that wasn't for a gym audience on a treadmill,' i think to myself, forever the optimist.

i limp back to my room and stretch my ankles and shins as best i can before class, then go and do my best skipping impression-- it's not a very good one and i know it. i stop to stretch a lot, drawing disapproving looks from pot and X. "heeey, skipping, skipping," pot yells, mimes skipping and points at everybody skipping. i go back to skipping but hit my ankles with the rope more times than i clear it. sweat eventually comes in a thick, belligerent ooze. "heeey, lead stretch lead stretch," pot says to me. i go through the group stretch as best as i remember, sweat now running in rivers off me. i can't catch my breath until finally i get something resembling a second wind even though i never have a first. i ride it as long as i can, through the bag and pad work, going something like quarter speed. my joints rattle even at this pace and my pulse feels like it's pushing sluggishly through veins three sizes too small. i finish the workout. i go back to my room and throw up, thankful this wasn't for an audience either.

oron gives me a ride with my bags around the corner to my new place. i have two giant bags and he has a basket on the front of his scooter that looks like he peeled it off of a two year old girl's tricycle, smirking and singing the whole time.

for the last week at 5.30am i've been waking up to someone singing loudly, walking around the courtyard of sinbi muay thai.

"wha fugg" i'd mumble with righteous indignation and turn back over for the precious last hour of sleep.

so a couple days ago i'm working the bag with VICIOUS COMBOS, probably well on my way to breaking my previous high score of at least a billion, when i hear the same "hunnnn dada nunda ho nun nunna nun..."

my brows wrinkle with the unquenchably vengeful fury of vaguely remembered interrupted sleep, and i wheel to glare at the ring. oron, of course, sees me eyeing him like a hungry dog in a cage while someone shakes bacon just beyond the bars. he shoots up his eyebrows as his face breaks into that tormentor's smirk and sings a little louder.

"oron ! that's YOU singing at 5 in the ay-em ?!" i yell. i shoot for cimmerian menace but probably land somewhere around whiny teenager.

"yes," he smiles, then blushes a little bit.

unprecedented ! i think to myself, then look at wang who is grinning at us.

"he good singer !" says wang. "he champion !"

i naturally assume i'm being put on with the ol' leg-tug but oron's deepening blush tells me this supposed gag might actually be for real. not of course that i know thing one about thai singing but oron does hold his notes very well and he doesn't smear across the scale, he jumps cleanly the way he throws flying knees. confidently.

of course if i tell him this he will be positively insufferable.

"noooo," i say crossly and hold my gloves to my ears, "no champion. torture champion maybe..."

they both laugh and wang points at oron. oron answers by grabbing wang's ass.

so i daydream of oron singing and smiling while stripping some infant's bike for parts as he takes one of my bags and puts it at his feet. "ah ?" he gestures at the back of the bike.

"sure ok what the hell. today's as good a day to die as any," the cimmerian answers for me, but he doesn't control my strong reservations. oron sings as he delivers me uneventfully to my destination. "tomorrow !" oron says as i get off his bike.

"tomorrow," i say back, "as long as there's no singing." he hands me my bag with one hand and with the other he pinches my ass.

walking back from breakfast with a stormcloud circling my head despite the blue skies. i'm both shocked to be fighting a black mood while on vacation and surprised it took this long to catch up to me.

it was cloudy again during run/training this morning. pot yells at me and looks at me like i'm a barely functioning retard when i don't understand his piece-mail english. oron shows me a variation of the question mark kick and i have him screaming "NOT BOOTIFOE !" in no time. i practice it a bunch and there's a couple of times where oron's eyebrows shoot up in mock-revalation and exclaims "aahaaaaa !" with an open-mouthed smile but it's more me leaning on the likelihoods of statistical chance that i'll get it right a couple times out of a hundred than it is me understanding what the fuck i'm doing.

it's so odd how technique works. when you do something right you absolutely know it; it feels smooth and controlled and bootifoe and like you're following a natural arc of bodily movement. every limb works together seamlessly to create the whole.

when you fuck it up you usually know it too. whether from the sound of the bag, or the discomfort in your body, (or the endless groaning of your trainer) it feels wrong.

that's why these last two days have been so frustrating-- things feel smooth and correct when i do them but trainers groan, or my body aches unnaturally but my trainer announces "BANG, UP-AYE !" which is a good thing although i have no clue what it means.

i think about this as the sun beats on my head, the heat almost overwhelming. i struggle with the doubt of this strange, stupid path i've taken. "i coulda been an engineeah !" i mentally sob in my best imagination inverted-brando but although the bad joke makes my lips twist briefly it doesn't alter my mood.

the prostitutes holler at me from massage parlours and bars as i woke by, and in the heat and frustration i disgust myself with a wolfish, humourless grin as i briefly contemplate my animal desires. their voices carry a jeering quality i haven't heard before as i force myself to walk by and return to camp, preparing instead for further frustrations.

it's cloudy for the first time since i got here. i miss home a little bit today, and realize it's actually the first time i've even thought about home since getting here nearly a week ago. i miss the way deep bruisy clouds ominously roll in heavy and low and rain lasts for days. i miss riding the train. i miss a few people. more than anything i miss rolling.

certainly no brutal case of homesickness though. i am still in training paradise and it's impossible to overlook that fact. plus i move into the resort with the pool tomorrow.

yeah, maybe it's not so bad...

i'm struggling with the language here and going from the very detailed, very technical style of training i'm used to. today's drill of the ridiculous: catch front kick, swing to the side, kick opponent. man that sounds simple, no problem ! i do it. pot says "no no. you switch." and does a quick switch step. i do it again. pot says "no you SWITCH."

"i'm supposed to switch." i confirm, and do a quick switch step to demonstrate. "yeah yeah switch okay !"

okay i thought that's what i was doing. i do it again, making sure it runs with the switch.

"NO ! you SWITCH !"

ok WHAT. i look to the guy i'm working with like maybe he's soaking something in that i'm not and he says "maybe he wants it faster." i sort of doubt that; one thing i really like here is that they do prefer you go slower and get technique right. but okay, i try it faster.

"switch ! switch !" pot throws up his hands in disbelief and stalks away.

"alright." i say, frustrated but moreso confused.

i'm trying not to let impatience get the better of me while i'm here. i hate my stupid temper and it does me no favours so i try to keep the reigns on it.

my stomach is impatient with me trying to figure this shit out right now. run, eat, train, eat, read, sleep, eat, train, eat, read, sleep. like a good boxing combination. 1, 2, 3, 2, 4 SLIP 2, 3, 2, 4 SLIP out.

i intended to skip the afternoon class tonight and just go in and do some bag work on my own. "strictly technique." i promised myself.

so i ran, did the morning class, then went for breakfast. over the course of my meal i became utterly engrossed in a gripping tale of conan and his adventures on the high seas with belit, then upon meditating for a moment on how that most glorious cimmerian would spend his day, found myself in a beach chair watching the waves break on the sand. what a sight of natural beauty these white sand beaches are; that wondrous display was however counterbalanced and then some by the sweating horrors of european men in speedos and middle-aged women with their leathery tits out for crom. far be it for me to speak for one of the old gods but somehow i have my crawling doubts that crom is pleased by this sort of display...

nonetheless the hours slipped by as conan hacked his way through ancient and sinister beasts in search of treasures always just out of reach and the sun continued its inexorable path until finally my stomach roared a savage battle cry and my spirits rose to meet it on the field of burritos. i assure you i was definitely wary of having a burrito in thailand but holy gods it was fantastic. i haven't had bad food here yet.

i returned to camp around 3.30, not long after eating. the first afternoon class started at three so i figured to slip in around four, do some light work on the bags and slip back out after five when the second afternoon class starts. i get changed, hide in the lengthening shadows, and creep slowly towards the bags...

"heeeeyyy ! riree !"

"hey oron, just going to do a bit of bag work."

"hey ok no problem."

i hit the bag for half a round and oron comes back with pads.

"hey you work with me ok !"

"oh, i was just going to do a bit of bag--"

"yab !" he yells. i jab. "1-2 !" i do, lightly. the ghost of burritos past squirm about in my stomach in spite of having been bested in one on one combat. they whistle in low ominous notes; portents of a future they somehow know.

"1-2 ! hard !" i do. we run through countless boxing combinations with tons of movement; up and down, slipping, breaking, twisting and turning back and forth through the midsection like a washing machine set to vomit. he has me running 20 punch combinations, yelling "faster riree !" all the time. i'm shouting with the punches "ha ha ha ha !" and oron is shouting back "hey hey hey hey !" we do seven rounds of this and i'm fucking dying. sweat pouring off in buckets, shoulders aching, calves cramped viciously, stomach haunted by burrito ghosts.

"back to bag !" oron announces. fuck. finally ! just gonna tap away at the bag with some quarter speed jabs and elbows while oron goes SOMEWHERE FUCKING ELSE.

except he doesn't. he stands there with his watch and whistle and barks "faster riree !" every time i slow down from top speed. "now squats !" he counts them off. "back to bag !" he says, smirking and holding back laughter. he knows what he's putting me through and he can see me suffering and he's loving it.

"why you motherfuck--" i think to myself, yet i can't help but smile.

"ok riree, goooood." he says after another round. i start to relax but-- that fucking smirking. "now." he points to the ring. "crinching !" he announces. grueling fucking clinching. my stomach cowers in terror as the burrito hauntings continue.

but what luck is this ? i'm paired with a chubby redhead who meekly mumbles, "i've only done a couple days of this so..."

"hey man, noooo problem. we'll go up real light and feel it out." my muscles finally start to relax as a third of the round slips by and the timekeeper says "one minute goooone !".

oron finally at his wits end has seen enough of this disgusting display and says, "no. you-" he grabs pasty red and pairs him up with a guy sitting on the ring apron, "and you. crinch. riree, other ring."

finally just accepting this is the way it's going to be, i fall into clinching with oron. he's relatively gentle in his clinchwork with his arms, but he drives hard knees into my body and the burrito hauntings reach a feverish pitch, howling and wailing and such as you would expect from food in a belly getting kneed by a guy who has focused his entire life's energy into learning to knee things REALLY FUCKING HARD.

we clinch for a few rounds, and then i actually think we're done when the rest of the class is done for some bizarre reason. i really have no explanation for what was going through my head there and fully accept my shortcomings in the field of the brainiac.

"riree, you good boxer. you get," oron points to his teeth, opens and closes his jaw, "get mouth, mouth..."

"mouthguard !" i offer helpfully, then wince as if his smirk carried the weight of one of his vicious legs.

"yes ! mouthguard. we spar."

okay are you fucking KIDDING me ?! you just put me through a grueling workout and watched and laughed and now you're going to spar with me. dear PROFESSIONAL THAI FIGHTER, FUCK YOU.

but i still laugh and smile because he IS fucking kidding me, despite being serious. this is his idea of a fun time and in sickly it is also my idea of a fun time (okay the ghosts of burritos lunch'd maybe not so much, but otherwise).

i put in my mouthguard and the first round goes surprisingly well for me, but i'm not so stupid as all that. i know he's reading my movement, my timing, my style and is planning the counters in his head. in response i try not to show too much beyond a stiff jab and lots of movement, which normally, no problem but in this instance wears me out quickly after the preceding workout and the waves of undigested burritoghoul induced nausea.

"round two !" announces some fucking DUDE i've never even seen before and i realize he's watching and smirking that same fucking smirk as oron.

we move to the center of the ring and oron reaches out to touch gloves (a sign of sportsmanship that's traditional when sparring). i reach mine out and he breaks left and launches an uppercut into my guts.

the burrito ghosts howl their approval as their corpses fills my mouth and i drop to a knee. i swallow it like a classy motherfucking gangster of love and look up to see oron parading around the ring like it's the fucking main event at lumphini stadium and the DUDE watching has put a count on me !

"two ! three !"

i flop to my side for comedic effect but holy fuck my guts are trembling and miserable and i probably would have fallen over even if i hadn't intended it. the ghosts are positively shaking with ecstasy at their victory.

"five ! six !"

i get up to one knee. oron taunts me by holding his stomach and shaking his knees. the ghosts are suddenly concerned and voice their disapproval.

"seven ! eight !"

i get up. the ghosts swim about in a blind fury but i'm determined-- i'm sure i won't beat this thai man but victory over my digestive system is something i believe in.

"okay oron. that's war just so you kn--" he blasts me with a straight right to the stomach. it hurts but i at least am expecting the punch and can flex my KILLER ABS to absorb some of the sting.

he attacks my stomach relentlessly. i try to counter but he's very fast and his defense is excellent. i land very few shots on him except to the body, which he responds to with an angelic smile and return fire. he comes forward relentlessly, forcing me to move. i'm totally exhausted, waiting for a round-break that doesn't come. we go for ten straight minutes until finally oron says "okay, good yob." without even a suggestion of fatigue. i would hate him for it if i had the energy but instead i just crumple in a heap and give silent thanks to crom for putting war in a man's soul, and for the burrito ghosts who couldn't chase me out of my home, a curious smirk crept across my lips.

run this morning was rough; cramps all through my calves and ankles. then skipping to start the class again. i feel like i have some mild heat stroke from walking around looking for places to live yesterday, and so i try to take it as easy as possible today but that option really only goes so far. i experience the same waves of fatigue i did yesterday; second wind, third wind, fourth wind but the entire time a suggestion of nausea. haha. a whisper of nausea.

i sparred with a kid today who was long and lanky and had really good front kicks. i accidentally clipped him pretty good with a hook that made him turn his back and the trainer stopped the spar and declared us both winners. it's so fucking weird here.

i finished the class somewhere in a haze and head over to one of the many breakfast buffet places. they're all five or six dollars and have giant bowls of salad and fruit. the sausages are like mini hot dogs so, you know, laugh but don't consume.

i booked a room at a ridiculous resort for the next month for $800 and i move in on wednesday. it's decadent, definitely but fuck the haters as the old saying goes. i already can't fucking wait to abuse my pool privileges.

took a nap and felt pretty okay waking up so i went to do a private with one of the trainers and he had me working front push kicks into jumping double knees. needless to say it was fucking totally badass. at the end of the session when i was finally starting to get it (oron went from "nooooOOOOO !!" and "NOT beautiful !" to "aaaah ! tony jaaaaaa !") i felt like a million bucks and flattered (if not totally fooled) by oron's positivity. cooling down though, oh fuck. cramps and fatigue like holy oh brother. i've been here for 48 hours and i've done five classes.

SHED. woke up at 5.30, read conan stories for a while, then ran at 6.30. the streets are full of women power-walking and men in fight shorts running. i'm drenched with sweat within seconds, and the heavy heat is weighing on my lungs. i begin to wonder about the wisdom of an hour long run before a two hour class, but just i'm sinking into a "fuck. this is so fucking stupid." mindset, day breaks over a mountain and a smile washes over my face at the same time as the sunlight. the rays flicker through giant palm trees and the smile takes its time fading. the breeze off the lake cools my overheating engine and my stride begins to come more naturally.

class at 7.30. i don't know how many of these classes i'll be able to do on an empty stomach; probably going to want to pick up some fruit and hopefully protein powder somewhere eventually (ie. immediately). it's now 10am and i'm already 2.5L deep in water; i knew it would be hot but i start literally dripping sweat within a few minutes of being outside.

X growled and grunted at me every time i did something right, and when i fucked up he growled and grunted at me. i figured out his growl tones within a few mistakes (ie. during the first minute). by the end of the fifth round i'm growling back at him when i do something right and groaning at his growls when i fuck up. i like this dude a lot.

kicking your trainer in the face on your first day: bad.

kicking your trainer in the face on your first day twice: worse.

i got off the plane at 12.30 local time. i locate my bag and go to meet my ride.

"hey ! hey !" i hear as soon as i'm out the door.

easier than i thought i immediately think smugly, then disappointedly wonder at my stupidity. yeah dude, your ride in thailand knows what you look like somehow.

i turn around to a guy waving a taxi rate sheet in my face.

"taxeeyee !!" he accuses me.

"nah, nah i'm good i have a ride." i explain. he probably doesn't understand and if he does, he doesn't care.

"taxeeyeeee !!" he demands more pointedly and i almost begin to suspect he wants me to take him somewhere.

"no ! no thanks !" i say, and step out of the building. i'm assaulted by the ridiculous heat, which up until now has been totally hidden by the overworked air conditioners. i'm immediately after assaulted by an onslaught of taxi drivers ALL insisting "taxeeyeeee !" at me. i'm reminded of night of the living dead, briefly fantasize about shotguns and then decide that's the wrong attitude to carry around on my first visit in the land of smiles.

"no thank you," i smile back as serenely as is possible through gritted teeth and look for someone with a sign with my name on it. the taxi drivers smirk at each other as time passes and i continue looking for the ride i'm convinced will show up. i give it a good half hour of "...maybe traffic ?" before i finally call.

"oh, did nobody show up ?" the lady asks.

by the time the cab i take arrives at the gym it's 2.30. i pay, get my room squared away, sign some forms, and the lady says, "there's a class at 3.00 if you like." ten minutes from now, after being in planes and airports for 40 hours. the hauntings of some of the food i've eaten in the last two days circles my face like the memory of the most regrettable person you've ever taken to bed, snickering cruelly at your terrible decision making abilities.

"what the fuck did you bother coming to thailand for ?" i wonder all the same. i go to my room, put my mouth and cup in/on and go kick the face the poor guy holding pads for me. his humour over the issue doesn't seem to carry forth past the first time.

rough start.