Low-hanging fruit

So I want to get back to writing regularly. I frequently have inspirations about things I want to write about, but it's usually when I'm in the car or the shower, or other places where I don't have a notebook or computer handy. This means that many of my ideas, some of which could probably be worthy of a Booker Prize--if I were the one deciding who gets the Booker and there were no other nominees that decade--get lost forever, either down the drain or out the tailpipe.

And then when I go to write, I blank. I want to write about the camp, about some things that are coming down the pike, and about my own continued journey to come to terms with the black belt, but I'm not inspired. I know that for me it's cyclical, and I feel like I'm moving toward the part of the cycle where I could actually be more productive and write a bunch. And some things are shifting around so that I should probably have more time to work on my book proposal, among other things, so I want to get back into writing regularly so I set the habit again.

Thus, I've decided to get the creative juices going by enlisting the help of my friends. I do my best to surround myself with hilarious people, and I do a damn good job. Well, at least, I think so. Maybe some of the laughs I share with my friends are of a "you had to be there" nature, but, true to the original purpose of this blog, I am going to amuse myself with some of my favorite text exchanges with some of my favorite people.

First, here is a brief exchange between me and my friend Natasha, who is actually coming to visit next weekend! She is a purple belt under Carlson Gracie, Jr., and when I met her 8 years ago at the gym in Chicago where we trained and where she still trains and is still a personal trainer, I hounded her until she started jiu jitsu. She probably started just to get me off her back, but since then, she has collected numerous belts, gold medals, and opponents' arms in her competition career, including a first place finish a couple weeks ago at the first IBJJF competition in Chicago.

This exchange is from the evening of UFC 118, which featured Couture vs. Toney. Natasha was out to dinner so I was keeping her apprised of results. Keep in mind that both Natasha and I are ladies:

Me: Couture arm triangled Toney.

Natasha: Good. Toney sounds like he's choking on his own nuts when he talks.

Me: He's sponsored by K-Mart.

Natasha: R u serious??

Me: I would never like about nuts-eating douchebags. Or K-Mart.

For those of you who don't know, Toney is a former boxer, a fairly successful one, from what I gather, who goaded Dana White into giving him a shot at a UFC fight. I know that many fighters, especially heavyweights, do not necessarily look ripped when they are in fighting trim, but Toney just looked out of shape. Unprepared. Over my years as a grappler, I have developed more and more respect for mixed martial artists. They work their asses off. And it just seemed that Toney underestimated how hard it is to be good at what those guys do. Couture took him down and choked him out in maybe a minute or two, without him throwing a single punch.

Anyway, moving on to my dear friend Chris. I've written about Chris too; he and I have known each other since about the 10th minute of college, so it's going on 22 years now. He is the brother I never wanted, and I am the sister he never visits, and through my blog, apparently I got him hooked on CrossFit, which he trains regularly in Washington, DC, where he lives with his family. I may even have shared my favorite exchange between him and me about CrossFit, where I proposed a workout called Fran Gone Bad, where after every round of a heinous three-round workout called Fight Gone Bad, people would do Fran, another heinous workout. I said something like, "Descriptions of Fran Gone Bad indicate that you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll cry some more, you'll throw up, you'll sweat, and you'll void your bladder AND bowels. In short, you'll be left with no bodily fluids whatsoever, because they'll all be on the floor beside you."

And Chris wrote, "Interestingly, that's also the typical description of Shrimp Gone Bad."

Anyway, here is a snippet of a text discussion I had with Chris recently:

Chris: Is the six flags mascot supposed to be an undead pedophile?

Me: The 6 flags mascot has a mini undead pedophile now too. That one can get into cramped spaces.

Chris: How did someone think that was good?

Me: When conceptualizing the commercial, they got some subject matter experts from the catholic church and the america's most wanted list?

Chris: Exactly.

Me: And the music was composed/stolen from a heavy metal/polka band by Milli. Or was it Vanilli?

More to come, from my friends and from my brain. Frightening but true.