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.