Rain at 2AM and one big thunderclap. Brain damaged from sparring. Brain and face damaged. My instructor whose day job is at an elementary school, who cheers you hitting pads like a kindly dolphin trainer– he wore shorts for the first time. Calves like cinderblocks. Veins thick as gas hoses snaking over them. He has 15 lbs on me and was a professional kickboxer. He went easy. I’m brain damaged. Driving home. Each stoplight had to relearn I was sitting in a car I needed to operate. Thinking ten times did I miss my turn. Is that McDonald’s supposed to be there.
It didn’t feel bad. “The Happy Organ” by Dave “Baby“ Cortez came on the radio. Good tune to be retarded to. Got home got in the bath and watched UFC videos which are suddenly painful. When a guy gets hit it’s me getting hit. Watching the clock tick down. A minute lasts weeks. Post fight interviews. Wanting to know: are they retarded. Does it go away. How are they standing, speaking. Forming sentences. They don’t have a 15 inch swan neck. I could get a job as one of those little bags on the end of a spring that you jab and it flails around. Light whiff in the face whipsaws my head 9 feet at high speed. Permanently retarded. Taking one in the jaw, grinding on that boil ‘n’ bite mouthpiece. Teeth won’t fit together. Tried to bite a carrot and gave up. Jagged red lines on my nose swelling up the ugly broken hump then after I do squats, push the sled, situps making waves of cramps ripple through me and I’m a 45 year old pussy. The guy who picked a fight in the park would kick my ass. Nothing I can do. Next week I’ll get beat in front of the women’s Fight for Fitness class as they tap standing bags to Katy Perry. Watch my balloon head whacked around, shorts fall down, shrunken acorn cock exposed et cetera.
The guy’s built like the Frazetta Death Dealer reflected in a tinted car window. His job was murdering people with his knees. Gotta keep my guard up. Chin down. Gotta keep him at the end of my jab. It occurs to me that Bob Marley didn’t steal “Buffalo Soldier” from the Banana Splits theme. He stole it from Dave “Baby” Cortez. No one retarded would know this.
I watch YouTube videos of UFC’s Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson. He doesn’t sound retarded. 20 years kickboxing, cage fighting. But he’s not doing calculus either. He sounds like he’s helping June Cleaver with a pie after school, while his 70’s kumite fighter dad walks by in the background chugging a cup of hot drywall screws to condition his throat. Joe Rogan doesn’t sound… wait does he? Sometimes he talks like I think now. Like he’s grasping with a mental hand at numbers and words, but they’re behind a thick rubber sheet.
**
I could calculate the weight of a fish tank. In the shower, pretending to be on Joe Rogan. Telling Joe about prepping. My stockpile of fish tank antibiotics. Dose of amoxicillin for your fish the same as a person. 150 mg. Because your average fish tank weighs as much as a person. I start calculating the weights of various water volumes. I’m getting behind the decimal point, not half assing it with round numbers. Leaning hard into my swollen brain pushing it at the third grade arithmetic. Snatching at the digits as they flutter up into blackness to prove I’m not dumb. That I can go back and fight. Because it’s fucking fun. Beating on a guy. Having him beat on you. You think you’re gonna go in like “Wonderboy” skipping away from blows. But you catch one in the face and get pissed. Charge the guy swinging. You didn’t know you had it in you.
Quod erat demonstrandum, I tell Joe about something. No one retarded would know this. That’s wild, he says. I cracked my head on concrete once. Lost hours just laying there. Dropped a barbell on my skull once. Thought I was better, back to the gym, got on the back extender and forgot what up and down were. Pitched forward slamming my face hard into the floor. I got better those times.
At the tanning place I saw my naked old man body in the mirror. Sickly ginger hair over legs with no muscles. Knees with no cartilage. Shins bald from kicking the bag, thinking of the 20 year old guy in the park. It can’t be time yet. I’m not ready.
delicioustacos 
You think the guy in the park’s going to adhere to Queensbury rules, help you up when you fall and return your rapier?
Remember where you are. He’s going to pull a knife or a gun or call a bunch of his cousins or all three.
New rules these days. If you want security, have many sons.
good o’ deltacos has been setting us up for this as the punchline…he’ll train rigorously for 6-12 months…sparring, getting kicked in the head, MMA, BJJ, muy-thai, spend $2k/month learning krav maga from an ex-Mossad…the whole shebang….his body will be an efficient fighting machine, every muscle programmed to defend and physically DOMINATE any opponent. then he’ll return to that park, wearing his checkered shirt, with his nerd laptop ready to write some prose…and the 20 year old punk will be there, doing some fentanyl drug deal with his two hot b*tches, and he’ll be armed with a hi-point.
p.s. tacos doesn’t want “many sons”. he has said many times he wants a daughter. don’t you follow him on the twitters?
Amazing detail. Had similar fears after the first two attempts at boxing sparring. A movie could show you the match and recovery, but only writing can communicate the things like trying to identify brain damage in Joe Rogan. Love it.
The fish in the aquarium tank swam slowly around. One by one, they went belly up, drifting to the top, where a harsh actinic blue light highlighted them in a mass of nuclear chrome blue. A voice out of nowhere boomed: “THIS IS YOUR LIFE, DELICIOUS TACOS.”
tacos fancies himself such a Genius he has to pay someone to roundhouse kick him in the head to become more retarded. also listens to mexican polka music to reduce IQ points. such measures taken to achieve equality with the darker and less privileged classes. much liberal, very progressive, wow. a true man of the People.
found you a brown gf who loves books:
decent taste in music too.
that will be $5k if it works out haha
i only accept XRP
man, this blog has nothing to offer me. i can’t relate to the author or his protagonist at all.
Lol, that’s how I feel after sparring, even two years later. Good job, keep training, don’t get hurt. Permanently.
Everything you do is either just retarded, or the hard way.
You’re old, dude. Go learn Jiu-Jitsu. You can do that till you’re 90, you’re far more likely to get good at that than striking, and you’re already secretly so much of a giant homo that you’ll just looooove all that sweaty man attention.
You’ll thank me later.
Oh, please give us more Joe Rogan references. Please. There just aren’t enough of them. Once you average more than 3 Joe Rogan mentions per update, then you can totally market this site to the Castro District crowd as a gay blog.
After that, you can monetize with ads for astroglide and other tools for raw buttfucking. AKA your usual Saturday night on the street corner with your faggoty buttpirate friends.