Well, the end of October turned out to be a difficult and disappointing time. I was so looking forward to wrestling on the 29th in Indianapolis and the 30th in St. Louis, but then on the 24th, I came down with the flu. As much as I tried to get better to make the matches I had scheduled, it didn't work out. I made my trip as planned, but I had to cancel the wrestling I'd set up. I was disappointed; my "opponents" were disappointed, although they showed me great support and understanding.

Not only was I sick, but I lost the desire to wrestle. This happens to me now and then. I just don't feel like wrestling, and so I don't want to wrestle. Makes sense, right? The same happens when I get busy at work and life like I have been lately. I don't think about wrestling, and as a result, the facts that I've actually wrestled and actually liked wrestling seem foreign to me.

This morning, a little of the old desire began to creep back into my mind and body. More than likely, I'll be ready to hit the mats again soon.

I think life is like this too. When we're sick--it's not that we don't want to live (generally). We lose a sense of how enjoyable life is when we're burned up with fever or weak and aching or shaken hard by coughs. Living takes a back seat to surviving. And then we get too busy, and life takes a back seat to workworkwork and runrunrun. We're wrestling with life and losing. I guess that's the thing. We have to keep wrestling to keep our heads clear, to keep our bodies in shape.

It's all about the contact. We have to make contact with life and each other, whether we're wrestling or just living. So, regardless of sickness and overwork, stay in touch. Keep a good hold on your opponent, friend or foe, and always be thinking about your next move toward winning or at least enjoying yourself.

Indianapolis & St. Louis

In a few days, I'm driving to Denver. Along the way, I'm going through Indianapolis, where I'll wrestle my good friends Larry and Ed, although not at the same time. This should be a great stop along the way, and I'm looking forward to it.

Larry and I first wrestled in Atlanta in November 2001. Since then we've wrestled once in Nashville and twice in Indianapolis, and we've always had a good time. I'm especially looking forward to this upcoming time. Larry has recently been recovering from some physical difficulties, but being now well along on his road to recovery, he's excited about the wrestling he's able to do. And when Larry's excited and able, he's great fun to wrestle--actually he's great fun to wrestle even when he's not as able as he'd like to be.

I've wrestled Ed only once, and we had a great time. But we were cut short because of his dog's being terribly ill. We expect to be clear of complications this time. Ed is a powerful wrestler, and favorite hold is the head scissors, which is my favorite also. I expect my head and jaws to be sore after this match, which will likely go well into the night.

The next morning I leave Indianapolis to continue on my way, but I'll be stopping in St. Louis for a lunchtime match with a new friend named Mike. We're looking forward to a good wrestling lunch and then lunch afterward.

Then it's on to Denver, where I hope to hook up with Matt, a man I've talked to off and on for years. We had a match scheduled a couple of years ago, but I had to cancel. Hopefully I can make it up to him.

"Get a Room"

One recent morning I stood in a field with a small group of male friends, some younger and some older, and a pretty young woman I had only just met. (The reason we were there is neither important nor interesting.) Somehow the conversation got 'round to a recent mass arrest of men meeting in local public parks for homosexual activities. These men were apparently coupling in the men's restroom or in places in the woods like one called "The Man Cave."

Aside: Although I saw nothing of this on television or in the newspaper, my friends in the field expressed concern that of the 40 men, two were particularly focused on--a pastor from a nearby town and a teacher in the local city school system. Certainly these two--and those married among the 40--play best in the media, fair or not. Too bad for them. They shouldn't have been doing what they were doing; at least they shouldn't have been doing what they were doing where they were doing it. But I feel sorry for them and their families. One man, sadly, has already committed suicide.

My friends in the field seemed relatively unconcerned about these acts themselves. If these men want to do "whatever they do," the suggestion was that they confine themselves to private space. In other words, "get a room."

I stood there listening, knowing that in a couple of hours I would be meeting a man in a motel room. We weren't planning to have properly private sex but to wrestle. I wondered how my friends in the field would receive and interpret this news if they know what I knew.

Anyway, the hours passed, and that afternoon in a little motel room off the interstate, wrestle we did. M had wanted to wrestle all his life--47 years--but never had. I've wrestled several times in the last 11 years, but I'm not really that good at it. M was strong and aggressive and enthusiastic, as might be expected from a 260-pound man who works out at least five times a week and is excited about wrestling. I don't know how many falls we wrestled over the three hours we were together, but I know for certain that I won only three of them--one with a reverse chinlock, one with a body scissors and one with a head scissors. I'm guessing M won 10 or more falls, and I was happy for him.

We did a lot of talking. We're interested in lots of the same things, and our conversation--strange only because we were both sitting there mostly naked in our black briefs, sweating (then drying)--was rich and deep. We have the potential to become great friends, I think.

I left there and drove home--tired and a little achy and sure that I would be crazy sore the next morning. But when I got out of bed, I thought, 'Hey, this ain't so bad!' I had a little pain in my neck and pecs and shoulders, but other than that I seemed fine. Then I got in the shower! As I began to lather up and scrub down with a wash cloth, I realized that I hurt all over. Everywhere I pressed to scrub turned out to be another painful place, especially my areas around my neck and across my chest. My temples hurt. Even my left ear hurt. Much of this was probably pain brought on by M's crushing headlocks, a hold with which he won almost all of his falls. I just couldn't stay out of it. I started to laugh there in the shower, thinking, 'Oh yeah, yesterday didn't hurt me at all!'

That's life! The wrestling life!

What follows is an excerpt from an email I wrote to a new wrestling friend--

If we found the opportunity and gathered the nerve to wrestle on the mats where I work out, I'm sure we would dress in more than just the briefs there as well: t-shirts and shorts? full sweats? or maybe singlets? Again, I despair of this ever happening. I doubt we could pass ourselves off as wrestling coaches or even former high school or college wrestlers, not without a good bit of work beforehand. I'm right there with you, Mark: "Why is this such a freaking stigmatic sport?!? Why can't guys our age and size just drop down in the gym and go at it without being judged and questioned?" Again, no valid reason exists to differentiate a friendly wrestling match from a pick-up game of basketball.

Last year, I was riding a bike down the Virginia Creeper Trail, and when I was stopped in Taylor's Valley for one of their wonderful hamburgers and their fabulous chocolate cake, I overheard a conversation some of the locals were having in front of the cafe. They were talking about wrestling at the factory or garage or someplace where they worked. They talked about these two guys in particular who seemed to be the featured match during every lunch break. They laughed at one's dirty tactics such as pulling his opponents shirt up over his head and trapping his arms, leaving him open of a working over.

That brought up another idea. Is wrestling more stigmatized in the white collar world than in the blue? Does the proverbial white collar demand that its wearer remain cool and remote from something as earthy as wrestling? What about education? Does that remove us from that cultural zone in which me might freely enjoy a good wrestle without fearing condemnation or ridicule? I think of being in country stores or even some suburban stores--convenience stores, I mean--and seeing men, mostly young but some older, come in only their jeans and shoes. I laugh to myself, trying to picture me standing in line with my bottle of water or my honey bun and wearing no shirt. But these guys have no problem with it. Not that I want to go into a store without a shirt, but I seem to see some connection between the mindset that could allow a man to do that and the mindset (and culture) that would allow a man to wrestle without social consequence.

A couple of final notes and I'll stop: Also connected to these ideas are the current cultural stigmatizing of the overweight and the untanned. Have you seen the Subway commercials that show people ordering non-Subway meals like this: "Uh, I'll have an order of spare tire and a side of big butt"? These obviously slam the eating habits of the overweight, but they also further ingrain the prejudice against big bodies. Well, to connect this to what I said above, one recent commercial has a guy asking for an order of "Don't take your shirt off." So, big men get the message that they shouldn't take their shirts off in public, not unless it's at the swimming pool. The guys in line at the convenience store haven't gotten that message. As for the untanned, a group of which I definitely am part, I wonder if I could more easily think about being shirtless in public if my big belly and love-handles were tanned to a socially acceptable level. I doubt I could be the fish-belly white big man on the wrestling mat any more readily than I could be the same standing in line at the Circle K.

Wrestling in the Spirit

I always thought of myself as a spiritual person. I could feel that so strong in nature and with friends (although, sadly, not so often in church) and when I was playing or listening to music. Part of this feeling of spirituality was a decent prayer life. I was consistent and serious in my prayers, and I tried to keep them alive by not praying by rote or habit.

But more than a decade of education that took much of my non-physical energy (and much physical energy as well) wore away my sense of spirituality. I don't know if it did so by not leaving enough energy to focus on the spiritual or by leading me into spirit-numbing doubt. Possibly it did both. And my prayer life suffered as my connection to my spiritual being weakened. I found myself slipping into prayer as mindless repetition performed as a duty. Such prayer was so ineffective that I woke and worked and played and slept without any conscious prayer at all.

I'm beginning to recover my spirituality to some degree, but my prayer life has yet to be much affected by this recovery. But something happened this morning that might, if I can hold on to it, reawaken me to the efficacy of prayer.

I was up early and in my favorite local park walking and running before sunrise. About halfway through my workout, the sun cleared the mountains to the east. I had a little less than two laps to go when I noticed a young man on the park's grassy knoll. He wore a dark red short-sleeved shirt and blue jeans that had not faded. His brown hair was down over his ears and a fashion that struck me as very 1970. He stood with his shoes in his hand and stared at the sunrise. He moved forward toward the edge of the hill and stared at the sunrise. He crouched on his calves and stared at the sunrise. All the while moving forward until he was at the point where the knoll turns downward and falls away in a hill toward a small pond and the lower parking lot. Here he sat down. He sat there with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

I'm not good at intruding on people's solitude. Even though I felt this young man was in some kind of distress, I didn't make any special effort to come nearer to him, letting myself fade downward along the paths to the parking lot. I got in my car, started the engine and swung around toward the exit.

But I stopped at a point where I could see this young man through the trees, see him where he sat there facing the sunrise. I could think of all sorts of things that might be troubling him--a death in the family, a great decision to be made, the loss of a girlfriend or boy friend. It could be anything.

And then I started to pray, and I tried to do so in earnest, with an open spirit that would allow my prayer to go outward instead of just circling around inside my skull or remaining squeezed inside my heart. I prayed for this young man's comfort, for God or an angel to be close to him, close enough that he could feel the presence.

Just then, as I was praying, a woman walking her dog--she could've been in her 20s or her 40s--left the path and approached the young man dog first. The young man reached out and appeared to put his hand on the dog's head, and the woman stood there a leash apart from the the two of them. She seemed to be talking to the young man, but I was too far away to say for sure.

I thought this was good. A dog to break through to a troubled heart. I wondered if the young man and woman knew each other. I wondered if they were strangers. I thought her much braver than I, especially if she didn't know him. I thought her smart to lead with the dog.

I thought her an answer to prayer. And maybe an answer--or the beginning of one--to my prayer problems.

Next Wrestling Events

After a summer without wrestling (my last match was in May), I've made a couple of good new contacts. One fellow is from St. Louis, and we've been communicating on and off for a couple of months now. I'm hoping to meet him in his town toward the end of October. More on that later.

I've met another online wrestler just in the last few days, and we've already struck up an interesting acquaintance. And we have a match scheduled--Friday, 5 October--in his town, about an hour-and-a-half drive from me. Our interests in wrestling are similar, but we have one big difference: although I haven't wrestled all that much, I've been wrestling for over 10 years now; he's a novice, as far as the physical act goes, but if he's anything like I was, he's experienced in his mind. I'm going to try and keep aware of his newness, helping him into this great experience.

Next: More of Antaeus

Despite the facts that I have this strange obsession with wrestling and that this seems--from time to time, at least--to suggest my having a different sexuality than any that would be strictly or loosely called "normal," I'm a relatively regular 48-year-old man. I have family--immediate and extended. I have an extensive but not a fancy education. I have a career I love and in which I struggle to go through the normal steps of progressing "up the ladder." I generally like people, and they seem, generally, to like me.

This week I'm losing a friend. Actually, I think I lost him a long time ago, but this week he's moving away. Having lost him before really losing him doesn't mean, however, that we've not been friendly. We have. It's just that the depth of friendship we might have had never developed, and when it didn't, it stopped growing and progressing altogether. So, we've been friends but more of the acquaintance side of this reality than on the intimate side.

Sure, I always wanted to wrestle him. He's thick and strong--at least 275 pounds, I'd say--and his coloring is such that he'd look beautiful in a pair of red wrestling trunks. And it's true that I've met few men in my life that I just feel like pouncing on and holding (wrestling or otherwise). I've always suspected that he would be interested in me this way too, if certain restrictions and taboos were done away with.

That aside, I always thought that we were kindred in a lot of other ways. We have similar educational experiences in our fields. We have philosophical and spiritual similarities. We have families.

Not long after we met, we spent a year having lunch together almost every Wednesday. These lunches ran long, as we ate (something we both love to do) and talked about this and that and everything else. (We even talked about wrestling on more than one occasion.) I had him on my calendar for infinity, and I thought he had me on his.

But then the lunches stopped. He couldn't make it one week. He couldn't make it the next week. Gradually I came to the realization that he couldn't--wouldn't--have lunch with me again. I took him off my calendar and told him, jokingly, that I was doing so. He said, jokingly, that he didn't want to "break up." But the lunches never resumed on a regular basis, and now, although we've seen each other at least once a week, it's been well over a year since we at lunch together and really talked.

He and his wife blame his background. As a child, he lived in a situation in which he moved ever three or four years and never formed deep friendships. Maybe that's the case. And yet he can talk a good game of friendship and make a good sermon about loving and caring for one another. So, I've never trusted this explanation.

But without accepting that that is the case, how am I to explain why "[w]e keep the wall between us as we go"? I have wanted to blame his wife, to believe that she was jealous of our friendship. Even though she and I have a friendship of our own, I don't completely discount the possibility of her being behind all this. I have wanted not to believe that he simply went far enough with me to discover that he didn't really like me or that he didn't really want to spend any more time with me. But without an explanation as to why everything stopped--more or less--what else am I to believe?

So, he's loading the truck today. I offered my help, but he never responded. Maybe he has professional help, maybe not. I'll see him one last time tomorrow, and then I expect that to be it unless, as he's not moving that far away, we meet by chance at some place or other. He says we'll keep in touch, say a lot of good places for lunch are along the way between where I live and where he's going. Past experience and my need to protect myself emotionally won't allow me to believe him.

I try to rationalize all this by telling myself that married adults, men who have wives and children, can't have the kinds of friendships we did when we were young or when we were not so young but still unmarried. Maybe that's the case. But it seems to me that I see friendships like this might have been--friendships between men in full-blown adulthood--among others with whom I'm acquainted. So that rationalization provides little comfort. And so ultimately, I think, the failure of this friendship to become what it might have been lies with the two of us as individuals. Maybe both didn't want it to an equal degree. Maybe neither was capable to an equal degree. We've come to lump-in-the-throat time--for the past we've had, for the past we didn't have, for the future we might have had, for the future we won't have.

Who was it who said--is it somewhere in Lewis Carroll?--something to the effect that it's a poor memory that works only backwards?

So, goodbye. Goodbye, friend.