The new year always gets busier than I want it to be. The coming of 2008 is certainly no exception. And the busier I am, the less I think about wrestling. And that's a good thing for me, at least from time to time. I have a tendency to obsess about it--as this blog proves. When I have time away from thinking about wrestling, I find it refreshing. Such times clear my head just as a good wrestling experience does.

Near the end of last year, I became somewhat discouraged about myself as a wrestler. I didn't want to see that I wasn't very good. I didn't want to see that perhaps I was more into the eroticism of it than I was the competitive parts. But those feelings have faded a bit. I don't know if they've faded because of distance from the event or because of some rethinking a good friend and I have done. All I know is that I have another match coming up on 30 January and that I'm looking forward to it. In part this anticipation must have to do with the fact that I'm wrestling my good friend that day. Also in part, the anticipation has to do with some ideas we've discussed for the match. For example, I'll wear a mask, which I haven't done before. My main reason for doing this is to protect the long and thinning hair that becomes a handicap to my concentration whenever I'm wrestling seriously. The mask might also give my attitude an edge that might in turn raise my level of aggression a notch to match somewhat better with that of my friendly opponent. We have a couple of other "match" changes under discussion, and I'll write about those soon.

As for life, it's pretty good right now. The world confuses to the point of frightening, but I'm balancing it fairly well. I live in one of the 5 February primary states, so I'm starting to think some about voting. I've refused to think of it much before this, in personal protest against the sudden extension of the campaign season. How long has this election been going on? How long does it have left to go? The answer to both questions is too long. I believe it's criminal the amount of money the candidates are spending to be elected. I believe it's criminal the amount of money required to be elected. I believe it's criminal that those candidates currently serving in another capacity--as a U.S. Senator, say--are spending so much time away from the jobs they were elected to do and are currently being paid to do. Those people and places who elected these candidates as their representatives ought to be pissed off.

Personally, I'm still wrestling with the angel or wrestling with God. Our pastor at church recently included in the service a renewal covenant that John Wesley used to do with the early Methodists. It called for absolute honesty and had a place for a signature at the end. I couldn't sign it--at least I was that honest. Sneaking around to wrestle when I'm supposed to be doing something else--whether or not anything illicit is going on--is dishonest. But still I do it, all the while hoping that one of these days I'll either stop wrestling or figure out how to do it without half truths and misdirection. I rarely tell outright lies, but I'm not sure a difference really exists between lies and half truths.

If I had many millions of dollars and a desire to be president of the United States of America, I wonder what would happen when somebody discovered--and somebody would--that I've wrestled men in homes and hotel rooms across the country. What would happen to my campaign when somebody discovered that I like being caught in a good figure-4 head scissors. What might these truths reveal about me, and how would a public dazzled by the strange react?

19th-century French artist Gustave Dore depicted the forgers in Dante's Inferno. This looks like a tough wrestling match and not one that I would want to be involved in for an eternity, even if I were the man on top.

A few nights ago, I settled down to watch an episode of South Park. This installment on the DVR was called "Butters' Very Own Episode."

It begins with Butters at home with his mother and father, and they're making family plans for the parents' upcoming wedding anniversary. Mom already has her husband's gift, and Dad takes his leave to shop for her present. At Mom's request, "Inspector Butters" follows to see what he buys so that she can know how her present for him competes.

Butters follows his dad, not to the mall or Walmart, but to the gay porn theater called "The Studcat" where Fisting Firemen 9 is playing and then to "the gym," to the White Swallow Bath House, where, according to Butters in his innocent report to his mom, Dad "wrestled with all kinds o' guys. He wasn't too good, though. This one black guy had him pinned down for fifteen minutes straight." Butters doesn't know what all this means: "The only thing I can't figure out is why dad told you he was goin' shoppin' for your present when he was goin' out to see the movies and wrestlin'."

His mom faints. In her next appearance, her hair and face are a mess and she's obsessively painting the house. And when Dad says he still hasn't found an anniversary present and must go out shopping again, Mom says to Butters, "I don't think Daddy's shopping. I think Daddy's going out wrestling again."

Butters follows once more, on his own this time, to tell his dad that a great anniversary present for Mom might be a new paint brush. He goes in the White Swallow Bath House this time and finds his dad masturbating (inspired by something not shown) in a private room.

Caught, Dad later explains to Mom, "It just . . . it started as some curiosity on the Internet. I would chat with some other married guys in the chat rooms and . . . Well the things they would talk about, Linda, I, I don't know why I found it exciting. I just did, and it, and it grew from there and it spun out of control, and--eh, ugh, DAMN YOU, INTERNET!"

The show is about white lies (big ones) and deception and the catastrophic events that can follow their discovery.

This gives me pause . . . to say the least.

Butters Episode

Script

What follows is an email written to the good friend who holds me in this powerful bear hug. We wrestled on Wednesday, 12 December, and what I write here is in response to that match.

Now, as for Wednesday, I've been thinking about it a lot, and I've come to this sad realization: I'm not a wrestler. Not a real wrestler anyway. I play. I pretend. I don't wrestle. I'm not aggressive or competitive enough to enjoy the kind of wrestling we've done in our two sessions. Don't get me wrong--I like wrestling you. But that's because I like you, not so much because I like the wrestling. Our sessions are great exercise (like you, I'm sore), but like exercise sessions, I find them physically rewarding and beneficial in the results while not all that enjoyable in the process.

So, I must admit to myself that my interest in wrestling has more to do with the erotic than I have wanted to believe. I came to this realization after puzzling over why our--your--pushing the limits didn't have the same effect it did in my match with T***. First, wrestling with you is much more intense; while the wrestling is friendly, it's never easy. The hair-pulling is a good example. T*** had his hands in my hair, and he pretended to use it to slam my head into the pillow turnbuckle or pull me back into a head scissors. Some pulling naturally came along with this play, but when all was said and done only a few stray strands were loosed in the combing. When you and I were in that standing position near the end of our session and you pulled my hair, I thought my scalp was going to pull free. And when I combed out after the shower, a great clump of hair choked up the comb. Who knows how much went down the drain before that!?!

Second, the notion of multiple submissions to a single hold. Again, near the end of our session, why didn't your not letting me up immediately after tapout or "I give" play out the same way it did with T***? I must admit that it's because I didn't enjoy the holds you had me in. T*** wouldn't let me out of my favorite holds. And with him, I was actually able to get him in some of my favorite holds and keep him under control after tapout. You said that you thought your chin bruise might have come from some vicious head scissors. Well, there were no vicious head scissors holds in our match; there was not a single head scissors at all this time except for the ones we posed for the camera. Again, this points to my being nothing more than a pretend wrestler. A selfish one at that. If I don't get my favorite holds, I don't enjoy the wrestling as much (or at all)--I hate that realization.

I don't want to dampen your enthusiasm for wrestling--that "smile." More importantly, I don't want to dampen our growing friendship. But I'm going to have to try to change my understanding of myself as a wrestler--or change my reasons for wrestling--if I'm going to continue to wrestle you. I don't want to get together and dread the wrestling just to get to the good conversation or the breaking bread together. I want the wrestling to continue to be good and enjoyable part of the friendship developing between us. Maybe we can find common ground, alternating approaches or styles with each fall. But as you say, you have no "easy" button, so I don't really think that would work.

I'm saddened and confused here, and I don't know what to do. I still want to think of myself as a real wrestler, as somebody who is into wrestling. And as somebody who is fun to wrestle. But the evidence points to my not being either of the first two, and because of that, I don't see how I can be the other.

It's now 5:00 in the morning, and I'm going back to bed. I think the need to write this note woke me up for the past couple of nights. I'm both glad and sorry to have written it.

This picture is of me working a friend over with my head scissors as we wrestle in a Motel 6. Today, however, I wrestle in another man's home. I'm trying to remember how often I've done that, and I'm thinking that it might be just one other time--an interesting situation, which I'll blog about when I get the time to continue going through my matches over the years.

Wrestling in a motel is always uncomfortable for me at some level. Usually the space isn't very good. I'm always conscious of the noise my opponent is making. (I'm a quiet wrestler.) And of course, two wrestlers meeting for a motel match seems so much akin to illicit lovers meeting for sex.

The man whose home I'll enter in a few hours is a good friend. We've been corresponding for several months now, and we've shared a great deal with each other. We've met to wrestle once--a Motel 6 match, which was fun but not an easy wrestling experience given the space we were in. So I'll go into his place and wrestle him there. He'll have the furniture moved to the walls to clear a space in the middle of the floor. He'll probably have a Christmas tree set up. We're likely to be harrassed by his dog. But most of the uncomfortable connotations of motel matches will be avoided, and both of us are looking forward to that. Although I'm worried about his daughter dropping by, I'm glad to know that his wife, who will be at work, is aware of what we're doing.

We'll wrestle for awhile to work up a sweat and to take off the edge of anticipation. Then we'll stop and, if I can get away from the house with the camera, take a few pictures, action shots that he needs for his Globalfight profile. Then we'll wrestle till we can't wrestle any more. After a shower and a bite to eat, we'll hug and part ways till the next time.

Such a wrestler as my friend is I would like to see every day instead of once every several weeks. We email often, but it would be so enriching for both of us to be able to be in each other's presence on a daily basis--to stop and talk by the water fountain, to take lunches together on the spur of the moment, to shake hands when that need for physical contact with another human being builds to a critical level.

But I don't have a friend like that in my life--except my wife and son, which is a different thing. And because I don't have this friend close, I live with an ever-present edge of tension that is only rarely relieved. This tension doesn't disrupt my life, but it ebbs and flows like the tide, sometimes just a faraway echo in my mind and body and sometimes an overpowering obsession. I've learned to live with it . . . because I must.

Life has been busy of late, and I haven't had much time to think about wrestling. I've been wrestling life in other ways. But this Wednesday, I'll travel an hour and a half (or so) to the house of a friend, and we'll wrestle around the Christmas tree. I'm looking forward to it. This friend and I have wrestled once before, and it was a hard-fought match of several falls in a space that was too little for two big men like us. We're over 500 pounds of man when tangled up together in some hold. I'm looking forward to it.

I've been please that a handful of fellows have stumbled across this blog and commented about it. Other than one comment from a person who found it to be not what he was expecting--I think he intended to post an advertisment for something, but I didn't go back and look--comments have been positive. Men have written that they can relate to my experiences, and I think that's really rewarding. I keep waiting for the man or woman who comments that I'm obviously some sick freak, but he or she hasn't arrived yet--or at least hasn't left a comment yet.

Thanks to everybody who reads these musings and struggles, especially those who leave a note behind.

I guess my life is normal-normal-normal-normal-weird-normal normal. What I mean is that I do normal stuff day by day and night by night, and then there's the wrestling. Take today for example. I spent most of it on a work-related project. When that was finished, I went to the office and emailed what I was working on. That was a little before 4:00.

By 5:00 I was in this man's room at the Comfort Inn—no, he wasn't wearing the mask, just his speedos. The room wasn't large, but the bed was and so we wrestled on it. Seeing as how we didn't have a lot of time, I stripped down and put on my trunks, and we got down to wrestling fairly quickly. It was a pleasant give-and-take light submission style, with basic pro holds—head scissors, headlock, bear hug, body scissors. I didn't keep track of how many submissions each of us squeezed out of the other, and I don't know if he did. After a long stretch of playful but intense falls in which submissions didn't necessarily guarantee release, so we had a nice continuity until we had a good sweat worked up. Then we stretched out on the bed together and talked—always one of my favorite things to do with my "opponents." When we had about 15 minutes before I had to leave, we wrestled that out. During the second series of falls, he got a little playful with me, getting me in holds like a head scissors (my favorite) and working me up toward and erection. I might have let him work it all the way to ejaculation—I had that kind of experience with boyhood friends—but I stopped him. Gently, of course.

By 6: 45 I was eating supper with my son and by 7:10 I dropped him off at a birthday party. Then I went to the grocery store and bought a pint of Ben & Jerry's "Chubby Hubby." (Already eaten.) And now I'm sitting and watching some TV and writing my blog.

I have that pleasant soreness that comes after some fun wrestling. My neck's a little sore after being cranked by a good head scissors and a good full nelson. And my left arm is sore—my friend was fond of, and good at, the chicken-wing hammerlock. He worked it on me almost every time he got me in a head scissors.

So, now another wrestling match is over, and I'm happy and comfortable.