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.

After my wrestling match with Tom in that cold Midwestern city, I believe that I went through my longest period without an opportunity to wrestle. If I'm not forgetting somebody, this dry spell lasted almost two years. But when I finally did get back to it in November 2001, I went into the match with an opponent I was thrilled to be wrestling and came out of it with friend for life.

Where to begin? Long before November 2001, I came across a site called Rec Pro Wrestling (or something close to that). The site offered lots of pictures and several videos, and I spent a lot of time exploring it. I think I discovered Bill Hughes there. And the site was where I first learned about other wrestlers that I've been in contact with since—some I've wrestled and some I haven't.

My favorite on Rec Pro was a big fellow named Larry. He was everywhere there, wrestling a lot of guys and, I imagined, having a blast doing it. But he was so omnipresent and advanced, I thought I was in no way ever going to get my hands on that man. I thought many times about trying to find an email address for him so that I could send him some fan mail.

Then one day in 2001 the unthinkable happened. I don't remember now what wrestling directory I was part of at that point—maybe something connected with Rec Pro, but that doesn't seem right. Anyway, I got into my email that day and found a message . . . from Larry! I wish I still had that email, but I'm sure I've lost it somewhere along the line. The bottom line was that he'd seen my profile and was interested in getting together for some wrestling. I remember writing back—Larry still laughs about this—and opening my email with something like, "This is the Larry?"

Larry was living in Atlanta at the time, and as it turned out, I had to go there on business that November of 2001. We made a date and got together in my hotel room for some wrestling. I was giddy to be wrestling with him. He was patient with me, teaching me all sorts of fun stuff about pro wrestling and exchanging holds with me. We had a great time then and have wrestled three other times since—once in Nashville and twice in the Midwestern city where he lives now. He's always been a great teacher and a generous wrestler, allowing and encouraging my penchant for the head scissors. When we talk on the telephone, which we do every few months, he's always kind enough to tell me he'd like to be in that head scissors at that moment. Needless to say, the feeling is always mutual.

Larry has had some health issues over the years that I've known him, but he's nearly recovered from it all now. I recently saw some pictures of him in action again, and I was thrilled to see him—and only a little jealous that another man was on the mat with him and not I.

After my match with R, I think I went more than a year without wrestling. I traveled to a large Midwestern city in December 1999, and there I wrestled a fellow named Tom. Probably I ran across him online sometime that autumn and convinced him to meet me for a match. Not that I recall his being reluctant to meet.

He arrived at my hotel room door at the appointed time. I remember that he was a handsome man about the same age as I was then—right around 40. If I remember correctly, his hair was kind of a light brown, but he was dark of skin and eye. Again, I'm stretching my memory here, but I think that he was around 5'10" and in the neighborhood of 210-220. When he took off his shirt to wrestle, he was broad in the chest, maybe medium hairy and had great pecs. He didn't talk much, and we had a good quiet wrestling match there on the bedspread in the space between the bed and the wall, just beneath a window looking out on the city.

The one thing I remember is that I used a lot of head scissors variations on Tom, and he indulged me and remained patient. I seem to recall working him over with a figure-4 head scissors, sitting there leaning back on my hands and just being able to look over the windowsill at the city. After such a long break from wrestling, I enjoyed having my hands on Tom and my legs wrapped around his head in various ways. I don't remember any particular holds that he used. Maybe he was a jobber. But I kept him in a head scissors for so long that when we were finished wrestling I thanked him for being so patient with my special interest.

I've had very few matches that I didn't enjoy. And I haven't often gotten the impression that when a wrestler and I parted ways he was disappointed for having wasted time on me. But I think that Tom must've been disappointed in our match. He didn't talk much, as I said, but I don't remember any great enthusiasm from him for the experience we'd just shared. I might be remembering this all wrong, but I generally can recall those impressions that have been part of my matches and their aftermath.

I lost touch with Tom pretty quickly after we wrestled—another reason that I think he probably didn't enjoy the experience much. But I've always wished we could get together again and maybe make it more about him this time.

Life is hectic at the moment, but I still found time to discover this great little match. As usual, the head scissors caught me. Check it out at around 3:20.