Time clouds the memory. I'm trying to reach back and pick up this blog's early thread about the matches I've had over the past 12+ years. I know which match I wrote about last, but now I'm having difficulty coming up with who and what came next. That match with K in Ohio took place, I believe, in March 1997. I wrestled him again in the summer, although I'm having trouble remembering if it was summer of 1997 or 1998. Rather than let this freeze me up, I'm going to say that it was only a few months between the two matches with K.

I wrestled K again at a different motel near Kent, OH, in the summer of 1997. This time Dr. J, the AOL friend who introduced me to K, was in town, so I got together with him too. I met one on the first day of my stay and one on the second. Seems as if we were trying to get all three of us together for a third day of wrestling, but that didn't work out.

After I'd met him in real life, I always felt bad about Dr. J. Not that our online friendship didn't translate to the real world. That wasn't it. We got along just fine, I think. But I have my particulars about the kind of man I like to wrestle, which to some extent makes my matches too much about me. Dr. J was a really fine wrestler with a head scissors that felt as if it could pop the top of my head off. But just as K, a big and burly bear, was just the kind of wrestler I like to get my hands on, Dr. J weighed only 175 or so--the lightest man I've ever wrestled. While K had the kind of body you could easily roll around on the mat with, Dr. J was all hard muscles and sharp points. If I were deeply into wrestling in and of itself, I should've enjoyed this. But with Dr. J the erotic component was missing. I tried not to hurt his feelings, but I'm afraid I did. For that I'm sorry.

My second match with K went much like the first one, except that he didn't have a headcold this time. From time to time I got him in a good hold, but it wasn't good enough. As much as he enjoyed the punishment of a head scissors or an arm stretch, he always escaped and in a little while, I'd be submitting to some head scissors variation he'd worked me into.

The clearest memory of this encounter with K is a bit of conversation we had either before or after the match. We were talking about wrestling and sexuality, and he made the comment that it was through wrestling that he learned--or recognized--that he was gay. He told me a little story about the last--perhaps one of the last--girlfriends he had. He was going through the motions with her without realizing it. But she had a couple of brothers. And apparently during his visits to his girlfriend he became friends with her brothers. This friendship led to some friendly wrestling matches in the back yard at her house. K told me that these matches with her brothers really got him hot and bothered in more ways than one, and the contrast between those feelings and those he felt for their sister was a stark one. He loved the wrestling and the feeling of wrestling, and in this he realized that his passions and emotions were clearly more invested in the homoerotic and homosexual than in the opposite of these, the hetero versions.

This time we met, K was in a relationship, and when we wrestled, he didn't wear the no-fly briefs of our first encounter but a pair of shorts. I was disappointed in that look but not in the wrestling.

K is a man I'd like to wrestle again someday. Dr. J is a man I'd like to be friends with some day. Doesn't that sound like the selections some of us make for our lovers. One man is thrilled with the friendship of this one "other," perhaps even more so than with the friendship of this other "other." But the physical relationship with the other "other" is more to his liking and so he commits to the structure of that desire and lives with the loss of the better friend.