Open

The XF Opens are ongoing, 5, one each week. I tweaked my shoulder Saturday letting a white belt get a sense of a shoulder lock from side mount. The price of taking on a teaching role. I was going to do the workout afterwards, but I tried to be cautious and did it today instead. Snatches, ground to overhead, ten minutes, 30@ 75lbs, which is nothing, just toss it up, 30@ 135, which takes either a fair bit of strength, or skill ... and I have no skill, then 30@ 165, and then as many as possible in the remaining time of 210. So I got sixty, and my shoulder is sort of throbbing. We'll see. I was sorely tempted to p-factor out, but ya gotta represent. I am not proud, at all, of the score. But it's not a disgrace. I muscled it up for all of the 135s, maybe a little, or a lot, of actual screaming going on. The old guys, 55 and over, only have to do a max of 120lbs. I would have dominated. Blast my youth. Ah well, three years to practice.

Arnold got a statue in Ohio, and some radio guy yesterday was saying if it were at Venice Beach, and when he was governor, he may have been bribed to resign, and maybe this formerly great state would be less-badly off. The interesting thing was the observation that Arnold had chosen to excel at the very most narcissistic endeavor possible, bodybuilding, which makes you less athletic, less useful, less of everything except big. He apparently had a father who refused to acknowledge him, and it sort of messed him up.

And it just clicked, as it never had before, even though I had always been well-aware of it, that my own father had been a bodybuilder, and up until his latest health issue, had continued to "pump iron." It was the secret of his health, along with his diet of fish sticks and cranberry sauce. Sarcasm is not appropriate, given his gangrenous gallbladder, but I remain frustrated by his ignorance, arrogance, manipulations and need to dominate and suppress.

I have not seen him since his operation. I was told he did not want visitors in the hospital, and I'm too cowardly to just call him up and invite myself over.

I had been wondering and disturbed about how depressed I've been in the past few days. Then I remembered the Feb 29/Mar 1 constellation, a sort of coincidental anniversary, the anode of which was March 1, lo those many years ago now. It used to be a clockwork event, twice a year, in October and now, when an unspeakable blackness would overtake me. But it's passed a few times now unmarked. I had thought I was good. Seems not. There are circannual as well as circadian rhythms, and sometime they leap.

I know that time is limited. My father is highly mortal, and loneliness crushes him. One day it will be too late, and I will be surprised by the rage of my grief. Apparently my mother actually visited him in the hospital -- they have not met for 35 years -- I have not spoken to her about it, but she said that he was so grateful, so very lonely. Indeed, to this has his course brought him. I myself expect to die a very old man, alone, in the desert. One must prepare for one's old age. But of course we do that every day.


J