Dancing Guy

Boxing Weight Classes

Boxing Weight Classes
Pounds	Difference	Kilograms	Weight Class
200+	NA	90.7+	Heavyweight
200	25	90.7	Cruiserweight
175	7	79.4	Light heavyweight
168	8	76.2	Super middleweight
160	6	72.6	Middleweight
154	7	69.9	Super welterweight
147	7	66.7	Welterweight
140	5	63.5	Super lightweight
135	5	61.2	Lightweight
130	4	59	Super featherweight
126	4	57.2	Featherweight
122	4	55.3	Super bantamweight
118	3	53.5	Bantamweight
115	3	52.2	Super flyweight
112	4	50.8	Flyweight
108	3	49	Light flyweight
105	NA	47.6	Minimumweight

A Better Day

Today was slightly better: 3 rounds on the back, 3 rounds of jumping rope, 2 rounds of weights and abs. Worked up a sweat, though I got a mild headache. Tomorrow I'm heading to the Caribbean for some scuba diving so I will be taking a break from training. I will do some running and jump rope though. But those damn headaches. Very strange. 

First Day Back

I've been ducking for two weeks. Two weeks and my hands have almost healed but my lungs haven't. I had a terrible workout -- almost not worth it. I was barely able to jump rope and I fatigued after a few minutes. I am ashamed of myself.

Golf Summit

Dept. of bad photo ops

Another Good Year for Millionaires

In case you missed it, here's some good news: the number of millionaires grew by 12.2% in 2010. They control almost 40% of the world's wealth, 20% of which is actually controlled by the top 0.1%.

I wonder if the pharaohs made out that well. 

R.I.P. Ryan Dunn

Day Zero

This is my head

I had a scary moment today. I was sitting at my computer when, suddenly, I got the worst headache I've ever gotten in my life. It felt like four mountain climbers were jabbing pick axes into my head and neck. The pain radiated across my skull in waves with such searing intensity that I began to scream in pain. I jumped up from my chair and began running around my apartment, screaming. 


I ran cold water over my head and started tearing my hair out. I thought I was having a stroke and became terrified that I was going to turn into a vegetable. I actually scrawled out onto a piece of paper: "Don't let me stay a vegetable." I kept the paper with me so that when someone found my near-lifeless body they would know to pull the plug. 


After about 20 minutes the headache began to subside. I vowed that if I made it I would be a changed man. I mean it. I'm going to start meditating, eating fish and all of the stuff that makes you not die. You've heard about those life-changing moments? This was one of them. 

On bullfighting

Bullfighters still look like this

Went to the bullfights today.  What can be said about bullfighting that hasn't said before?  Here is something that has been said before: JFK carried a poem around in his wallet that goes like this:

Bullfight critics, ranked in rows

Crowd the enormous plaza full.

But only one is there who knows,

And he’s the man who fights the bull.

It is a testament to the fundamental conservatism of European aristocracy that the matador has not changed one bit since 1726 -- that is, while virtually every other sport has evolved its traditions to fit the scientific and stylistic modalities of the era, the matador has remained exactly the same.  And while some might consider this “a rich testament to the greatness of the tradition,” or perhaps more privately, “the ethnically-tinged tenacity of a proud people,” others might characterize it as “totally fucking stupid,” inasmuch as bloodlust has moved on to bigger and better things; see Nascar, MMA, rugby and cable news.  

But in the end, I come out more in favor of the bullfight than against it.  It is a spectacle, a Roman colisium whose people have grown uncomfortable with fighting each other to the death, and while I wish we could find a solution to this discomfort (some call it the NFL — but its just note the same thing), bulls will do (would prefer they be packs of wild gorillas, but that’s just me).  You see, the problem with the bull is that he is not capable of acting strategically, and this defect is so easily exploited by his handlers that the fight is essentially over before it begins. 

The human trick is simple: when a bull gets into a ring, he wants to kill someone — anyone.  This single-minded focus is too easily broken upon into a series of moving parts: men with moving capes, men mounted on armored horse and men sneaking through the center of the ring with short lances.  That's the bulls' problem — he's too stupid to focus, and in his lack of focus, he tires.  The bull sees only trees where the wild forest grows.  Big picture: he's going to die in a rigged fight.  The ONLY logical thing to do in this situation is to focus on the weakest link, and take him out.

It is a gory enterprise — but I have made peace with it this way: I want to go out like the bull: take it to the man in the funny pants.  Moreover, inasmuch as fighting bulls are bred for their ferocity, it stands to reason that they are slowly evolving to develop a kind of super-bovine intelligence that will, someday, make them more ferocious so that they will be able to act more efficiently.  Some bulls have already developed this talent.  You can see them here and here. 

On to last night’s bullfights. 

Don Fernando

Don Fernando enjoys his work

I will not spend much time on the first matador except to say that Don Fernando was very handsome and balletic.  He is an exceptionally flamboyant man, whose requisite bravado was often mixed in with a light step that has led some writers to conclude he is gay—a trait that doesn’t seem like it would be that big of a deal in bullfighting.  Put it this way — I don’t think the bull cares if you’re gay one way or the other.  Moreover, if you told me all matadors were gay, I would not think twice about it.  As their uniforms imply, the matador is not so much a man as he is a figment of a man, the man that a 13 year old boy might imagine a man to be, if that 13 year old boy lived in 18th Century Spain and was extremely comfortable with his sexuality.

Don Fernando was a Colombian and a very graceful matador.  He drew his bull in closer perhaps than any of the others, and he would on occasion spank its hide with a kind of boyish glee (he was, after all, 25) as he wove the animal tighter and tighter into his orbit  He was good, and the home crowd loved him. 

But when it came time to deliver the coup de grace, Don Fernando faltered.  The end of a bull fight is capped by the forceful thrust of the matador’s sword, the estocada, into the bulls back so that it punctures the heart and kills the creature almost instantly.  This is a rare feat, but the downward thrust usually injures the bull enough so that it tires quickly, falls to its knees, and yeilds to an official who comes out and severs the animal’s brain stem. 

Don Fernando tried the estocada not once, not twice, but three times, and so the line between art and cruelty became uncomfortably blurry. The matador beat his chest and pulled at his beautiful hair—a rather public display of humiliation for a man who had until then cativated the crowd.  Don Fernando gathered his hat and cape and trapsed across the ring, head bowed, seemingly oblivious to the flowers and hats that the Colombians had thrown into the ring out of respect for their countryman. 

Pedro Rodriguez

Pedro, all puffed up

Pedro was a handsome Spanaird whose simian features were a good approximation for the manner with which he conducted his fight.  much more handsome and,I think, to every one's great satisfaction, chose to develop such an intimacy with the bull that he would stop its charge with a single, outstretched had. He also had the habit of brushing his well-coiffed hair our of his eyes which made it look as if he were tyring to make himself pretty, which, for reasons difficult to explain, was strangely endearing.

Also, Pedro has a serious Tom Jones thing going on in his pants.  I'm not going to go into specifics but, let's just stay that it was anatomically distinct enough for the old lady in front of me to say something about it, comparing it to a "pickle," but quote: "a really big pickle."

Nor did it lay there, inert and unmindful of its largeness; rather, as the fight wore on, Pedro's manhood acted like a barometer, reflecting his feelings at any given moment.  At one point, Pedro's member shrank back to its original Diggler-like proportions, leading many to wonder whether he had lost his confidence.  This was not to be, however, for Pedro soon thereafter kicked off his shoes so that his feet could feel the warm sand, mixed with snot and sweat and blood, and this seemed to help him recenter his mo-jo.  The crowd grew silent. Don Pedro unsheathed his sword.

The matator approached the bull—slowly, for he had swollen yet again, and on the second charge, Pedro killed the bull. Or maybe not.  No soon had the doctor cut the cranial nerve but the bull was up again—and he was pissed.  He trotted around for a while, looking for a matador to kill—and when he couldn't get a bead on one, the other luchdors closed in an finished the job.

Pablo Hermoso

Pablo occasionally kissed the bulls before he killed them

Finally, the greatest matador of the night, the aptly named "Pablo Hermoso" came into the ring. I gotta tell you, there are bullfights and then there are bullfights.  Pablo's deal was that he did it all from a horse—a very brave horse that didn't mind getting chased all over the ring by a pissed off bull that would, and did, on several occasions, hit the horse with its horns.  How they trained these horses to stay so game is beyond me, but Don Pablo was an expert rider, and shoved lance after lance into this thing, even at one point reaching down and kissing the bull on the face as the animal was rushing after them to kill them.

Then when it came time to kill the bull, El Hermoso rode right up to it and delivered a killing blow—the kind that kills almost instantly.  This is rare in bullfighting, requiring equal parts strength, balls, and luck.  Within seconds the bull was dead, and the crowd went nuts.

A good performance (as determined by the president of the Bolivarian Bullfighting Assoc.) results on one of the bull's ears being removed and tossed into the crowd.  An excellent performance results in two ears being removed.  A transcendent performance removes the ears and the tail, and that is what was removed last night.  A tail had not been removed in that colesim for more than 60 years.

So that was the bullfight.  Ole!

In Utica, Part I

Dear Marla:

Credit: Leonid Afremov

Today I arrived in Utica, a land of surly-looking men, rusted over pawn shops and liquor stores sprouting along cobblestone streets. 

I'd called ahead to reserve a hotel room downtown. I had to park my car a ways away, and as I walked towards the hotel I spotted a man peering out of an alleyway, and his eyes were yellow against his black skin. He was rocking silently back and forth, like a pendulum. I wrapped my coat around tighter and nodded. I suppose one should always be polite to men in dark alleys.

By the time I entered the lobby of the hotel my mind, having been deprived of sleep and other modern inventions, was reduced to a series of staccato thoughts, some of which I remember, all of which seemed rather dramatic, and yet they moved so quickly that they never took hold, darting madly back and forth like a school of barracuda. 

The lobby of the hotel was a grand affair with a magnificent chandelier and a rising staircase that led up to the second floor. Half of the chandelier bulbs were gone, and the staircase runners were stained and threadbare.

I decided to skip reception and head straight to the bar. I noted rather dimly that, perhaps owing to the bitter chill of night, or perhaps for other reasons entirely, by the time I pulled up a seat, I was shaking like an old box of bones.

***

The bar sat in the corner of a converted ballroom. Most of the chairs had been upturned and placed upon the tables that were covered in white linens, and the quiet of the place allowed enough room for the voices of those ghosts who had sat there the night before to trickle through the ether, the ghostly smoke of cigarettes and the high-pitched sound of laughter wafting over a brass band warming up for a long night. Somewhere in that bar, reaching out from nights long past, I could hear the sound of a man weeping, and the sound of a woman's voice, gently coaxing him home.

I climbed miserably atop an empty stool and smelled the sour smell of bleach and puke. A dim light filled the gloom and cast shadows upon the hidden spaces, the phantoms of last night's crowd who came here to drink and die a little. There was a half empty beer sitting on the bar and so I took it and toasted to the ghosts that had come before me.

The bartender appeared. She was young, with light brown hair and finely manicured eyebrows, young but worn – worn fingers, worn skin – though she could not have been more than 25. I would later learn her name was Lydia, though for now she was just a bartender who looked irritated that I'd just drank her beer.

“You okay?” she said.

"Sorry?"

“You need a towel or something?” she said, “you look, you know, wet.”

I pressed my hand to my forehead. I was sweating profusely.

Lydia offered my a towel, which I took.

“Its been a strange day,” I said.

“I bet,” she said.

I noticed for the first time that she was pretty. I smiled.

“So,” she said, “are you like, schizo or something?”

“Sorry?”

“You know,” she said, “schizophrenic. Like mental.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I only ask because you were, like, having a whole conversation with yourself when you came in here.”

I wiped my forehead again.

“Do you ever hear voices?” she went on, “That's a pretty good sign. They call it 'auditory hallucinations.' That's when you should get your head examined. You know, a lot of people who got it don’t even know it.”

“Know what?”

“That they’re schizo.”

"I'm not schizophrenic," I said.

Lydia dug into her pants pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit it. She stared at the ceiling and exhaled.

“Its cool,” she said, “I’m not judging you or anything.”

“Judging me?”

“You know, because you’re like, mentally ill.”

I began to feel as if I was stuck behind an inch of tempered glass at the Monkey House.

"You get a lot of mentally ill people here?" I said.

“Sure," said Lydia. "I had a guy come in here two nights ago. Old guy, like 40, one of those guys with floppy tits – you know the type?"

"Yes."

"It starts off normal. He's an insurance man from Hartford, says his job is to figure out when people die. So I'm just tending bar like normal since one of the things you get used to is people telling you all about their boring lives."

"Right."

"But all of a sudden this guy gets to talking about how his wife likes to tie him up, which is when I start paying a bit more attention – I mean I just met this guy and within two minutes he's telling me this! Then he goes on about how the only way he can get aroused is if someone ties him up, and his face gets kind of twisty like he's getting all emotional, and he starts saying that he doesn't want to be tied up anymore, or have hot wax dripped on his nipples, which apparently is what his wife was doing, and so then sure enough, he takes out one of his floppy man-breasts and shows me this cauterized teat."

"Wow."

"Tell me about it. Now, up until then I hadn't felt the least bit sorry for him, but right about the time he put his floppy man-breast back into his shirt he started to cry. It was a soft cry, not much in the way of sound, and I guess I started to feel sorry for him."

"So what did you do?"

"Well, I bought him a round, on the house. Then, when it came time to close up, I asked him whether he would like to be tied up."

"What?"

"Yeah. I did. And you know what, he started crying again. He said, yes, he would like to be tied up, and then he started thanking me. And I told him to shut the fuck up and take off his clothes, which he did. And so he was standing there, right about where you are, wearing only tighty-whities and black pull-up socks, like a manatee with man-boobs.

"And so I led him around to the back of the bar where no one would see him, and I tied each of his arms to the ring in the trap door that leads to the basement, and I tied his legs to two of the struts behind the bar."

"And then?"

"Well, then I left him there. All night."

"Wasn't he angry?"

"Not in the least – he was overjoyed."

"Men are strange beasts."

"Indeed they are," said Lydia. "Well, they're beasts, anyway. Oh, and if you believe the story I just told you then maybe you really do need to get your head examined."

Trials of Socrates

E-mail

To: marla.jenkins@csm.com

From: Frank Flounder

Date: January 12, 2011

Subject: Trials of Socrates

Greetings from the Catskills!

I've been driving all night.  I have been told that this is where Rip van Winkle fell asleep for twenty years, and I can see why — there is something a tad hypnotic about this place, a wilderness upon wilderness, such that one can easily imagine having been here ten thousand years ago, sailing north in a wooden ship decorated with the fresh bones of mastodons.

At about five o'clock in the morning there appeared a most magnificent fog, such that by daybreak my car was nothing but two pricks of light in a vast, gray down. Then, when the fog lifted, I found myself in a most splendid arcade of red and yellow, a storm of bright, smashing leaves that would, now and again, float gently towards the ground, so that the ground was as if raked over with so many embers, and as I drove the embers caught the wake of my fully-loaded sport utility vehicle and fluttered behind me like the last sparks of an evening fire.

Marla, I take you at your word that I do not pay you enough to afford a car. Perhaps it is for the best – to be so tethered to a single place, to watch dim shadows cast upon the concrete, to know nothing of a fog rolling over an empty parkway at dawn. Is it such a difficult question, whether to be a dissatisfied Socrates or a satisfied pig?  The pigs look rather happy to me.

It was not long before I reached a settlement that looked like it had been burned out from the inside so that all that was left were the gray skeletons of some forgotten ruin. Soon I came upon a convenience store — a slanted shack, really, set a small distance back from the road. In the parking lot, an old pickup truck lay rotting in the weeds, and the trees leaned over it as if angling to dismember its corpse.

I pulled into the parking lot. I hadn't slept in over 24 hours – not since the encounter with my ex-lover – and I was in desperate in need of bitter swill.

Inside the convenience store it smelled of stale hot dogs and funky coffee. There were animal heads hanging from the walls and bones suspended from the ceiling like childrens' mobiles.  I began tallying the health code violations but soon lost count: there are no health code violations on the frontier. The hardy stock of white men whose ancestors came here stinking of smallpox do not suffer such luxuries. Dear Marla, the land of Rip Van Winkle is a hypnotic place indeed.

The cashier was an ancient man whose skin hung upon his bones like wet newspaper after a long rain. He was a man who had undoubtedly seen his fair share of hurricanes, the tattoo on his forearm suggested he'd seen action in Vietnam, and so surely his memories piled up like yellow photographs in the ether, the arc of an everyman's life, and surely these memories fed the boiler beneath his skin, so that that one day, long ago, they ruptured the nest of veins buried beneath his sallow cheeks. Yes, here was a man who'd been through The Shit and lived. I shot him a knowing glance as I rummaged through an open box of Slim Jims.

I opted for a coffee and a copy of the New York Post. Thus armed with the proper dosage of caffeine and schadenfreude, I approached the cashier without the slightest clue as to what I was going to do with my life. Behind him I spied a shiny roll of scratch and win lottery tickets, and though I have never believed in luck, I decided to try mine in a strange convenience store rotting somewhere along the frontier.

"I'll take one of those," I said, pointing to the lottery tickets. The cashier tore one off and gave it to me.

I pulled out a nickel and began to scratch.

"Not too busy in here," I said.

"Nope," said the cashier. I noticed that he was looking at me with one eye while the other was looking at something beneath the register. I have read somewhere that chameleons can do this, but I had never before met a member of our species possessed of such talent.

"You sell a lot of these things?" I said, referring to the lottery ticket.

The cashier pulled out a tin of tobacco and stuffed a wad beneath his lip.

"I suppose," said the cashier. He pulled out a bottle from behind the counter. It was half-filled with tobacco juice. "Pretty much our best seller."

I continued to scratch but I was not looking at the lottery ticket. As I said, luck has never interested me much, but I am interested in people, and the cashier had my full attention. I leaned in so that I could speak to him in confidence.

"I don't play the lottery much," I said.

"No shit," said the cashier.

"In fact, this is my first time." I winked, whereupon the cashier refocused his other eye upon some unseen object beneath the register.

I glanced down at my ticket. I'd left my glasses in the car and so was unable to divine my fortune. I slid the ticket across the counter.

"Can you tell me if I won anything?"

The cashier picked up the card and whistled. "Son of a bitch," he said, "you just won fifty dollars." He sniffed and opened the register.

While the cashier was counting my money I glanced around the store. Everything seemed to be coated in a fine layer of dust, as if someone had gathered these things in final preparation for the apocalypse.

"Business a bit slow?" I said.

"Pakis done moved in down the road," said the cashier.

Ah," I said, "the people of the subcontinent."

"Yup."

"Their gift for convenience store management truly knows no bounds."

"Fuckin' A."

"Listen," I said, leaning in closer still, "I'm thinking about getting away for a while."

The cashier stopped counting and re-trained his chameleon eye upon my unshaven and slightly rumpled figure. I caught my reflection in a security mirror and noted that my hair was sticking up in places.

"I was thinking about heading out into the woods," I said, "you know, like Thoreau?"

The cashier picked up his bottle and spit. "Go on," he said.

"I'm going to need some supplies," I said. "I don't need much, just the essentials. Maybe a spear or something. Do you sell those?"

The cashier's eye narrowed.

"We don't got no spears," he said.

"I'm having a nervous breakdown," I said.

"Okay."

"Do you sell bug spray?"

"Yeah."

"Okay," I said, "I'll take some of that."

The cashier reached behind him and pulled out a bottle of bug spray. "On the house," he said.

"Thanks," I said. "Hey, you can keep the money. I won't need it."

"No," said the cashier, "I suppose you won't."

I took a deep breath and caught the strong scent of nitrogen-preserved meats. To my left was a glass display case with several glistening hot dogs spinning on rollers. I excused myself, removed one of the hot dogs and returned to the counter.

"You mind if I get one of these for the road?" I said.

"Not at all," said the cashier.

"Alright," I said, "well I guess I'll be going."

"Okay," said the cashier.

I was halfway out the door when he called after me.

"Wait!" he said, "I just thought of something."

"Yes?"

"Lot of wild animals in them woods."

"Yes."

"Bears and shit. You'll need something for that, I think."

"Such as?" I said.

The cashier reached beneath the counter and pulled out a silver revolver. He placed it onto the countertop.

"You're gonna need a gun," he said.