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.