After the match with Pup, I know I did a handful of repeat matches with friends. I met Larry in Nashville at some point between 2003 and 2005, and I wrestled Chris when I was in his city in October 2004 and April 2005. In July 2005, I went on a little wrestling tour and had three matches within the space of a few days.

The first was in a motel room in Lexington, Kentucky. I wrestled a man named C----. At roughly 270 pounds, he was difficult to move around, and I either strained or pinched something in my right shoulder. (As I write this, I have the same feeling in my left shoulder from a great match I had yesterday.) C---- really looked like an oldtime wrestler--broad shoulders chest, big belly, blue speedos. He was strong too, especially in his legs. But he wasn't very experienced or very creative in his wrestling, and I think I could have taken every fall from him if I'd wanted to. Although seemingly in trouble early on in the first two falls, I ended up winning both by submission. C---- wasn't in very good shape and became winded easily, so we spent a lot of time between falls just sitting on opposite sides of our "mat" and talking about wrestling, family, life in general. We traded some holds, and I showed him some head scissors variations I like. After a long talk-break, we did two more falls before he had to leave. In the first of these, I let him get me in a head scissors to see what he would do with it. He gave good squeeze, added an arm bar, stretched me out pretty well and got my submission. The final fall I won with a similar combination.

We are torn between flesh and spirit, between desires for dominance and submission, between fears of intimacy and fears of distance . . .

I recently learned something that might be a fun explanation of my obsession with the scissors hold. Apparently our Zodiac signs have bodily parts associated with them, just like they supposedly have certain personality characteristics attached. What's the bodily part associated with my sign? Thighs!

Here's the brief story of an odd little match I had a few years back. I can't remember exactly when it took place, but I'm guessing that it was sometime between 2002 and 2004.

I was in contact with this fellow from Atlanta, Georgia. Although I don't remember who first contacted whom, we chatted back and forth via email for a bit and then scheduled a match. We were to meet in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was coming up from Atlanta to Nashville for work and then he was going to drive from Nashville to Knoxville for our match.

The day was beautiful--early spring, I'm thinking--when we met at a truckstop on the east side of Knoxville. Once we made contact, we went straight to a motel at that same exit. He checked in, and I assumed he intended to stay the night there after we wrestled. Once he was in the room, I came in, and we decided rather than move stuff around to use the tiny floor space available we would just wrestle on the king-sized bed. Not my favorite thing to do, but we do what we gotta do.

Once we had talked for a few minutes, we changed and started to wrestle. We probably hadn't been at it for more than five minutes when I got him in a head scissors. He submitted too quickly. Then he got up and said he had to go back to Nashville. I guess I could've argued, but that's not my style. In addition to that, I think I was just stunned.

So, he drove the three hours from Nashville to spend x-amount of dollars on a motel room and wrestle for five minutes. So, probably within 30 minutes of meeting him at the truckstop, he was gone and I was on my way to see another friend in Knoxville--who wasn't expecting me until two or three hours later.

I never heard from that guy again, and I came close to developing a complex from that meeting. It was a heck of a thing.

Although I'm finding it more difficult to keep up with my wrestling matches, I think I have my next experience pegged—14 August 2003, some eight months after my late December match on the way to New York City. I can identify the specific date of this match because it was the same day as the great northeast blackout. I was traveling up through the Midwest for a family reunion in one of the Great Lakes states. I'd been communicating with my opponent, Pup, for a few months, as is my standard MO, and I stopped in his town for an overnight stay to break up the trip. But I didn't stay with Pup, having booked a motel room instead.

At Pup's house, I found him to be a heavy fellow, easily 250 to 260 of rather soft wrestler. But he'd had some good experience, had wrestled some good wrestlers, and so I believed we'd have a good match.

It was pretty good. Pup could put on a good hold when he wanted to—or when I asked him to. But his wrestling was often too akin to cuddling for me. He would get me in some hold and play with my hair or gently rub my belly or back. We went a few falls, and I mostly had a good time wrestling and talking with him. One fall in particular I remember because we wrestled naked and filmed it (the film now lost or destroyed). I'd wrestled naked before, so it was no big deal—nothing got out of hand (or in hand, as the case may be). In fact, I probably enjoyed that fall more than any of the others. It allowed me to see myself caught in or using a head scissors, and that was a thrill. It also allowed me to see what how much my scrotum looked like that of a bull. Interesting.

After the wrestling, Pup and I went out to dinner, and then I went back to my motel for the night.

In the morning, when I was checking out, the desk clerk asked me if I had plenty of gasoline. The town where Pup lived wasn't affected by the outage that hit that afternoon, probably while we were wrestling, and, given that even then I despised the 24-hour news cycle and refused to watch it, I didn't know anything about the event. Later that day, as I drove into a larger city—accidentally, having missed an exit on the Interstate—and saw that nobody was around on the downtown streets, I had my first inkling that something strange was going on. When I arrived in the town where the family reunion was to take place, cars were lined up around the block at each gas station that somehow had power when most didn't.

So, Pup was my only match in 2003, and it would be October 2004 before I had another.

I can feel it. The time to wrestle again has come. When I've had matches like I did in May, I'm fine for a while without wrestling. Then I can feel the desire to wrestle getting stronger. Usually, little can be done about this because I have to wait until I travel again to have any hope of working up a match. But here I am planning another road trip, and a couple of nights along the way offer the good potential for wrestling. So I might have a match on Wednesday, and I might have a match on Sunday. We'll see how it works out.

Back to a little more of my wrestling history, my next match came just a little less than two months after the one in early November 2002, and it was again with Chris. At the end of December 2002, I had to make a trip back into Chris's area. Here's what I wrote in a journal entry dated Monday, 30 December 2002:

On Friday the 27th I drove on into -----, arriving there around 1:00. I went to Chris's place, where he has a little room set up with mats. I'd never wrestled on mats before so I was looking forward to it (especially because I'd missed making it to his place back in November). Since we'd last met, he'd bought a pair of wrestling boots off Ebay, and he was anxious for me to try them--supposedly they were originally made for Bobo Brazil. We dressed out and wrestled for about an hour, a light-play mix of submission and pro styles. He'd had knee surgery at the end of November, and this was his first return to the mats. He seemed to get around pretty well.

Although I don't remember exactly, my guess is that after the bad experience of February 2002 I was gunshy of wrestling for a time. I'm not a great wrestler--that's easy to see and fairly easy to admit. At the same time, I enjoy wrestling and like doing it when I can find somebody who is interested in (and able to) back off his intensity and skill levels to match my own. By the time a trip to a mid-Atlantic state in November came up, I was ready to try some more wrestling.

November 2002 found me on the road again and anticipating a wrestling match. Traffic was bad around the major southern cities along the I-95 corridor, and I was running late to get to the hotel, where I was to meet my "opponent"--call him "Chris"--later that evening. When I finally arrived and checked in, I was afraid the evening had grown too late for him to leave his home several miles away and meet me.

But I called, and he came. I've been in the congested area through which he drove several times, and I'm pleased that he agreed to get out of the house and come meet me. We've been good friends ever since. He's the only wrestler I've ever visited overnight, and I always feel welcome in his spare room. When I'm in his city, which is at least once a year, we rarely fail to get together. Half the time we don't even wrestle, just get together for dinner and conversation. Over the years since November 2002, I've spent more time with him than with any other wrestler.

When we wrestle, we have a great time. Chris is a skilled and tough wrestler. I outweigh him by 50 pounds, but if he wanted to wreck me in a match, he could. But he also has great fun wrestling, so we have a great time. That first night in my hotel room, we wrestled fairly easily due to a lack of space. Still, we got our good holds in. He was more than patient with my head scissors passion, and he indulged me by submitting to my various versions of the hold and by applying a series of good strong head scissors to me. I can tell when wrestling Chris that he can get intense, and sometimes we've ventured into that area. But he's always in control and willing to engage in the play of wrestling as well as the competition of it.

Since that evening in the hotel, we've wrestled several times in his wrestling space at home. We've watched wrestling videos together. One of my favorite things that go along with wrestling Chris is that he always lets me wear a pair of pro wrestling boots that he has. They're plain black and made of great leather. He bought them off of eBay, where they were advertised as being once the boots of the great Bobo Brazil. Regardless of my wrestling skill, I feel like a real old-time wrestler in my black trunks, black mask and Chris's black boots. One of these days, I'll try to talk him into selling the pair to me.

Today I have my first wrestling match since this past November, and I'm so distracted with anticipation that I can't get anything done at work. So I thought I would just write a long overdue blog entry (and imply a promise that during the summer I'll be more faithful with this).

A couple of months after my great meeting with Larry, I had one of the worst wrestling experiences of my life. If you remember, I wrote recently about this really tough guy that I had no business wrestling. He was far too big and far too good for me to be able to do anything with. But he was a generous fellow. He taught me some stuff, and although he allowed for little give and take in our match, he at least encouraged me and showed me some tricks.

My match in February 2002 was with another bruiser of a fellow. We'd had a fairly good planning session online prior to my arriving in his town. I knew that our styles and interests didn't match up exactly, but I'd grown accustomed to these things working out fairly well once my friendly opponent and I were in the same room together. Maybe I'd grown overconfident in the way my matches had generally worked out for the best. Maybe I'd simply grown complacent.

This bruiser's name was Steve, and he lived in a relatively small college town in the South. I can't remember if he taught at the college, but I think that he did. He was, like me, married, and so I felt comfortable that wrestling's potential for eroticism wouldn't get out of hand--or maybe "in hand" would be more to the point. I'd picked up on no particular erotic subtext during my conversations with Steve, and that held true.

Let me be as brief as our wrestling was that day. This guy was big and powerful and plowed me under for three short falls in a row. When we weren't wrestling--if you can call what I did that day by that name--he was enjoyable enough to talk to. But when we locked up he took me down for three quick falls in a row. To my memory, it seems that all three falls lasted less than 30 seconds each before he was sitting on my chest, almost in a schoolgirl pin position, and I was helpless to do anything but submit.

Man, it's embarrassing just to think about. I was absolutely no challenge to him, even in those brief moments when I tried to be. He remained mostly friendly throughout, but I could tell that I'd disappointed him. My screen name at that point had included the word "moose," and after he had destroyed me, he suggested, with a little laugh, that I change the "moose" part to "wuss."

So, ultimately, this was a match in which my opponent sought no common ground with me but instead followed his own agenda to win by complete domination. What he did that day I don't think of as wrestling, but I'm certain that he thought the same about what I did.

More than any other encounter I've had, this one showed me the threat inherent in what we do when wrestling in some motel room or in some strange home (or church or school). If we meet somebody with an unknown or inflexible agenda, if we meet that somebody unprepared to respond to that agenda's being forced upon us by superior skills or strength, we put ourselves at significant risk. I was confident that Steve was a good guy, and in this, fortunately, I wasn't disappointed. But what if he hadn't been a good guy? What if he'd brought all that firepower against me with a serious intention to do me some physical or psychological harm?

I've kept this in mind and been more careful in making my matches since then, so much so that I sometimes have gone the other way and wrestled guys that even I could call "wuss" (but I don't). Whenever I sense that a man wants to get really rough with me, I back away completely or, more often, push him gently to reveal how much he's willing to compromise his style to accomodate mine. I try to make it clear that our match doesn't have to be just about me, that I'll try to meet him somewhere in the middle, but that I'm not an aggressive man and can't match his intensity. This has worked out well so far.

This afternoon I wrestle a man almost my exact match in age and weight, but as usual he has more experience than I. His profile says that he likes to wrestle submission and freestyle, and I sense that he'll be competitive. But we talked on the telephone last night, and I feel like we're going to get along just fine. We're wrestling "semi-competitive" and "3/4 speed," all with good strength to the holds. Now I just have to hope that "semi" and "3/4" aren't terms too relative.