But when I got off the mat, a wave of euphoria washed over me.
For me, as in all areas of life, Jiu Jitsu wasn't about winning or losing. It's about the fight itself. If it's about winning or losing, I'm fucked, because in all honesty, I tend to lose. I'm simply cut from that cloth. I've long accepted that having a name that spells “Get Hard” brings with it a certain loserish air.
But as long as I keep fighting, I'll be okay.
I thought about the book I'd published and how its completion had sent me into a tailspin. It didn't have anything to do
with how the book turned out; it was that I no longer had deadlines I might miss. I no longer had to scramble to get photos taken. I no longer had the long arduous drives to find some remote haunted castle. For me, in the end it wasn't so much the outcome of the project as it was the fight to get it done.
With Jiu Jitsu, it was the same thing. But with a difference: it wasn't a onetime project. It was more like a continuous work in progress. Even if it was something I could never ultimately win, what's important is that it was a fight that I could keep going. No one likes losing. But as I've gotten older, I've figured out that winning brings with it its own baggage. Like a chicken sitting on a rock and hoping it will hatch, I think I'd rather fight forever.
Cross-Country
D
riving, alone and unbothered, is the only way I can really slow down, stop, and think.
This was a realization burned into me during my days at
Weird NJ
. We had a big cargo van the company bought cheap that we used to deliver boxes of magazines all over the tri-state area. The air conditioning didn't work, it only had a radio, and it broke down often. I once single-handedly caused a traffic jam on Route 1 when the van broke down and I walked down the highway to get gasâand then back to the vanâinstead of calling a tow truck. The gas gauge was broken, so one never could tell. It turned out I wasn't out of gas, and while I sat in the driver's seat waiting for the tow truck I should have called in the first place, many drivers wished death upon me as they inched past my disabled vehicle.
But despite the headaches it caused me, during my most troubled days driving around in that van was my time to think, my time to process, my time to heal. Sitting in traffic on the Garden State Parkway, the hot summer sun beating down on the asphalt,
the sweat from my back clinging to the dirty vinyl seat behind meâthese were some of the best days of my life.
It sounds hellish, and it was, but there was something beautiful about it, too. Crisscrossing the highways of my home state gave me so much alone time. From mornings spent in the swamps of the Meadowlands, to afternoons spent driving through the farmlands off of Route 202, to late-day deliveries down the Jersey Shore followed by a scramble back north on the Turnpike to avoid getting stuck in traffic, being by myself, seeing things no one else was seeing, meeting people I might never meet againâsomething about this lifestyle helped me process my thoughts and get in touch with myself. While working at
Weird NJ
was often bizarre, the nonroutine of the place was the only thing that could make me feel normal.
Those were times of adventure that are pretty much long gone. I'm boring these days. Lately, a big accomplishment for me is getting my tax documents to my accountant. I can't think of the last time I missed an appointment, and I really haven't gotten into any trouble. I play basketball once a week with a bunch of professional tutors who vent about the kids they help. Worst of all, I find these stories about
tutoring
funny and exciting. When I recently discovered a restaurant in my neighborhood with six different soups on the menu I got real excited and texted my girlfriend. There's no question that the me from ten years ago would think of the me of today as a dreadfully boring dude. Soup would be the fifteenth most exciting thing on his agenda, at best.
I'm thirty years old and I'm starting to feel like it. Both physically, in that I can't play basketball without my knees hurting, and mentally, in that I'm starting to view the world through a less frantic, more sedate lens. I've come to accept that life is what it is. Anything I could have changed I changed long ago. The rest
of it I'm stuck with. Not that I've given up or become complacent. I haven't and I'm not. It's just that I've begun to accept all the things I don't have any control over and it's made life easier.
Another sign of getting old: whereas a few years ago I equated the idea of getting married and having kids with a terrifying death sentence that would kill all of my fun activities and dreams, I'm now starting to see those things as
noble pursuits
that will kill all of my fun activities and dreams. The fact that my friends are all married doesn't bother me anymore. They're all popping kids out and I've gone from being scared by that to being jealous of it. It's all added up to the realization that while technically I'm still not old yet, I'm actually looking forward to getting there.
Still, there are definitely times when I feel pent up, boxed in, and worn out. The difference between now and my younger days is that my reactions to those feelings are a lot less dangerous now. My manic episodes are fewer and farther between, my anxiety isn't triggered as easily anymore, and I can see my depression coming a mile away and get prepared for it. As a result, I'm happy a lot of the time now, and even when I'm not I tend to be content.
Even so, there are stretches when I just can't figure life out. And when things get overwhelming, they hit hard and fast. More often than not, I only have one solution. My therapist and I even have a joke about it: shit is truly fucked up when I start threatening to take a road trip.
It must be something about all that soul-searching I did while driving in my twenties, because now driving long distances always feels like the thing I need to do when I have to sort through something. If I really can't figure out an issue in my life, my initial urge is to
drive cross-country by myself
. In fact, I have figured out major life decisions this way. I am such a fucking weirdo that the only way I can sort out the big problems in my life seems to
be by driving 3,000 miles, hoping I enter a Zenlike trance at some point along the way, and praying that the answers come to me if and when that happens. I'm sure there are cheaper ways to handle problems, ones that require less of a time commitment and allow you to stay in your home state; those methods just aren't for me.
Luckily, taking random road trips around the country has allowed me to see and experience the same sort of fucked-up shit I used to see and experience all the time when I was young. Maybe that's part of the catharsis. If anything, driving around America as much as I have has reassured me that I'm far from alone in my sad weirdness.
The first time I drove cross-country, my friend Nick and I wound up in Las Vegas. There, we met a man I know only as “Tumbleweed.” He'd lived a few years in Queens as a kid, and had been friends with Nick during their middle school years. Now we were all adults, and even though Nick hadn't seen Tumbleweed in a long time, we decided to meet up with him. He showed us all over the non-Strip portions of town.
“Nicky, don't push your seat back,” he said as soon as we got into his car. “There's a gun under there.”
Things only got more intense from there. We saw all sorts of locals-only Vegas spots that night, but the real moments of beauty kept coming in the car. While driving us from one cocaine-addled off-Strip casino to another, Tumbleweed managed to say the worst thing I've ever heard another human being say. He was explaining to us that one of the perks of living in Vegas is that you get to date the strippers who pass through seasonally.
“I was fucking this one girl,” he told me, barely keeping his eyes on the road. “She was like, âCum on my face, cum in my hair, cum on my tits.' I finally had to stop and be like, âBitch, I only got so much cum!'”
Tumbleweed was a sweaty, adrenaline-fueled madman. He said awful things about women, about life, about everything. Late that night, we headed to his car, which was on the top of a parking garage. Before we got out of the vehicle, Tumbleweed held his hand up to stop us. His voice dropped an octave. He stared wistfully through the windshield, where from the top of the garage we could see the desert unfold before us.
“What do you guys think would happen if I stepped on the gas right now?” Tumbleweed sadly said.
“We'd probably die, Tumbleweed,” Nick answered.
“Yeah, Tumbleweed,” I said. “Don't do that, Tumbleweed.”
He didn't. Instead, we sat for ninety of the most uncomfortable seconds of my life staring out at the desert and the open sky. Tumbleweed threw the car into drive and took us back to our hotel. I've never spoken to him since, though we are Facebook friends. So far as I can tell via many pictures of him with overtanned ladies, things seem to be just about the same.
In 2009, I drove cross-country by myself, following the highways that replaced Route 66. Wherever remnants of the old road remained, I got off the interstate and followed those instead. There were pockets of dying roadside culture everywhere.
In the heart of Missouri, I passed what seemed to be an average house when I saw a sign posted out front reading “Live alligators, two dollars.” I screeched to a halt and pulled into the gravel driveway.
Inside were endless jars of taxidermied creatures. Scorpions, lizards, spiders, and more floated in empty pickle jars, all up for sale. The place was dim and dusty. A heavyset woman leered at me from behind a counter as I perused the dead critters.
“Wanna see the alligators?” she smiled as I approached.
“I sure do,” I said.
“JIM!” she shouted. “CUSTOMER!”
A rail-thin, strikingly tan man with a mullet unlike anything I'd ever seen in person emerged from the back room, wiping sleep from his eyes. He looked remarkably like a less tall and more meth-addled version of former major league pitcher Randy Johnson. Jim didn't say a word as I handed my two dollars over to the woman. He waved me toward him.
“Right this way,” he said. I followed him.
“Wait,” the woman said. “We got a few more.”
A family entered the dead-animal shack. A short squat man with a shaved head and a goatee led the charge. His son sprinted off toward the dead-scorpion section despite the protests of his mother, an exhausted-looking woman who carried a screaming baby in her arms.
“Shiiiiit,” the dad said as he handed over his money. “Two dollars? This shit better be good.”
With that we were led to the backyard, where we passed a number of birds and a sleeping lynx in a tiny chicken-wire pen.
That doesn't seem like it should be legal
, I thought to myself, before looking back toward our mullet-headed guide and remembering that laws might not be so strict in this part of Missouri.
As soon as we were outdoors, the dad from the unruly clan who joined me took off his shirt, revealing both a beer belly and a number of tribal tattoos that wrapped around his sizable biceps. He walked straight toward me.
“What's your name?” he asked.
“Chris,” I replied.
“I'm Mike,” he spat out. “This is my wife Donna. That's my son Blue and my daughter Indigo.”
“Hi, Donna,” I smiled. “Hi, Blue.”
Blue ignored me. I waved at baby Indigo. We turned a corner and there in front of us was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence. It was all that stood between us and four fully grown crocodiles.
They snorted and huffed, their eyes and snouts the only parts of them visible in the shallow muddy water they called home.
Mike grabbed the fence and shook it.
“Shit, this is a rip-off,” he said. “For two dollars, I should be able to feed these motherfuckers.”
The mullet head quietly nodded, then went back inside. Moments later, he emerged with a bag full of bloody meat. He unlocked the fence's gate and motioned toward all of us. Mike grabbed his preteen son's hand and dragged him away.
“Shit, you coming, Donna? What about you, Chris?” he bellowed as he ducked into the crocodile pen.
“I'm good,” Donna said. “You go ahead, baby.”
“I'm good too, Mike,” I said. “You guys have fun.”
“Huh,” Mike snorted, looking me up and down condescendingly. “Okay.” He rolled his eyes at my lack of bravery.
For the next three minutes, I assumed I was going to witness the death of Blue. His dad taunted the crocodiles, yelling at them, throwing meat at their heads. Blue sprinted around with all the fervor and enthusiasm of an ADD-stricken child who has never been disciplined while his dad did everything he could to enrage crocodiles purely for the fun of it.
Somehow, the animals restrained themselves and chose not to eat this antagonistic man or his troubled son. Mike and Blue emerged from the cage.
“Shit,” Mike said. “I feel like a fucking man right now, dog.”
We continued through the backyard, where we next came upon two full-grown tigers standing on a hill enclosed by more chain-link fencing. Mike sprinted ahead, screaming, then grabbed the fence and shook it.
“What the fuck?” he screamed a few feet away from a bored-looking tiger. “Try something, bitch! Come and get me!”
The mullet head grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away.
“Bullshit,” Mike mumbled before spitting on the ground.
Last but not least was a full-grown male lion, tucked away in a corner of the yard. He sat lazily in a corner of the too-small concrete pen he lived in.
“You gotta let me play with it, bro,” Mike begged the mullet head. “You gotta.”
“Can't do it,” the mullet head drawled. “We used to play with him when he was a kid. He thinks he can still do it. Fucker doesn't know his own strength. Now he plays with people, he just fucking kills them. It sucks.”