Testing

I still do BJJ.  Got curious and searched -- it's been over ten years since I wrote about it here.  Looked at some of what I was writing when I first got my pain condition, my bewilderment.  It's effectively cured, now, but I'm ten years older.  My lower back is good, but always stiff and that makes me slow.  The last thing that became painful was my left shoulder, probably 7 or so years ago -- could hardly move it.  It's the only problem left, and I finally found some ways to rehab it -- at some point the problem will have stopped, but the pain continued -- needed rehab and stretching, but painful.  

One reason I pulled back from writing here was the physical pain was so bad, and I didn't want to complain all the time.  There's some number of saved drafts, all about pain.  And BO, just nothing good to say -- and the nail in the coffin for america -- finding new ways to say ugly truths, well, it's easy but I didn't like it, so I wrote less and less.  

I've started to age, finally.  You can never be sure if I'm kidding.  I mean you.  It's been years since I talked about nutrition and exercise -- a little re berries a while back I recall, oh yeah, April First Day.  Well, that was true, and you should have benefited from it, peanuts aside.  Point is, there's a reason for health, even if a catastrophic chronic pain autoimmune disease steals your joy.  

The other day a scale gave me 13% body fat.  I hadn't tested that for months and months, so I rationalized a reason -- but then I saw I hadn't deselected female.  As a man, I'm 8% body fat.  I tend to be something over fifty percent muscle.  So I'm lean-muscular -- tall enough to make it lanky.  That's fine.  I don't really know what I look like, the impression I make.  I try to seem pleasant.  But I don't belong anywhere, and that's really not going to change.  

So I'm physically unusual.  I've relocated some of my activity, and people don't know how old I am.  I've had it as a joke for, well, 20 years, because I wasn't aging, and I have unusual fitness.  Which is my point.  Sensible nutrition and sensible exercise.  I've done it since the '70s.  Of course my definition of sensible is correct, but not common.  I won't go into it.  Ask if you're too lazy to look.  I am kind and generous, and will share.  But it's a self-selecting thing, or self-excluding.  Like me, socially.  Eating differently is too hard.  Etc.

When I last wrote about bjj here, I noted I was a brown belt.  It's been precisely ten years.  I could have written it yesterday, or this ten years ago.  The physical pain was fresh then, and now it is scars.  The mid-fifties guy then is darker now, worse, somehow -- probably in the lack of growth.  Not decaying is not the purpose of life. 

Every 10 or 12 years I get a TMJ thing.  I always suppose I slept wrong, and twisted myself.  It lasts a few days.  Have it again today.  And I notice it under my jaw, like a gland.  So I thought, is it an infection? or a tumor, maybe cancer.  And I thought, what would I do.  There was a part of me that said, good, finally, I can die.  But it would be painful, so that won't do.  

We'll see.  Each day brings its own answers.  I've never taken advantage of the fact that it's multiple-choice.  

J