Thread bumped and is dope, let's see...
How have I changed in the last 10 years for better or worse? That's a big question. Right about 10 years ago I was living in a city filled with industrial waste in the worst ghetto in town with a wife and a 3 year old, poor as shit.
Working a tech job from home for peanuts cause that was the great recession, nobody was making money.
The city was an industrial wasteland, as it remains to this day. National Geographic did a show about how terrible the water is from all the chemical dumping. I knew more people with cancer than without and still do. I have seen more babies with birth defects than I can count on two hands. I knew I would get cancer if I lived past 45 and I still know this. I knew wife would get cancer one day. One day my son would get cancer. It was stupid to have a child anyway, we were lucky he looked normal. My grandfather was a lion of a man who lied about his age so he could kick nazi ass in WW2 at 16, a boxing and wrestling champion who would back down from nothing, who walked around with a broken hand for a month because he did not want to go to the doctor and the poison water cancer broke him into a sobbing child at the end. So it goes.
The only escape came at $5 a hit. Everyone I knew were junkies, people with great needs, small dreams, and no hope to achieve them. This was my home. I was one of them. Prepared to haze away in my little pattern until I died, a shitty father and a shitty person leaving no mark on the world and just trying to dull the ache of living long enough to die without making too much of a fuss. One night about that time we woke up in the wee hours of the morning to a loud bump downstairs.
I went down to check it out and found the front door hanging open. A dude lumbered down the dark hallway toward me. A big dude who I did not know. I talked with him a bit, he acted confused, said he thought it was his uncles house. I realized he had broken in, saw he had been rooting through the living room for valuables. Based on my experience around junkies I concluded this guy is most likely on a big dose of xanex, approximately 15 bars. But he was standing and not nodding off, he could still fight if he wanted to and this dude outweighed me by 100 lbs easy. There was a wooden railing on the staircase that I could pop out about that was about the size and weight of a baseball bat. I inched my way toward it, hoping my 3 year old would not wake up and blunder into this interaction. I would probably still lose a fight but it would buy time. I was keeping out of arms reach, if he got ahold of me it was all over. Had my hand on the railings but could not seem to find the loose one as I talked. Kept him focused on me, kept eye contact so he wouldn't notice the other people in the house, so they wouldn't notice him. Eventually my wife appeared at the top of the stairs and asked if we could call anyone for him, and I think he decided he could not get through me in time to stop her call, and big dude asked for a blanket so he could go sleep it off. We gave him a blanket, sighed with relief as the front door close but we found the lock broken.
Big dude went next door and kicked in the door of the gas station there. We called the police. Big dude left about 60 seconds before they got there with the blanket tied around his neck like a superman cape. The police arrived, we told them which way he went and that he had a damn green blanket tied around him like a superman cape. They caught him. We went to court, he took a plea deal for drug treatment, and I got 10 bucks for appearing as a witness.
But that seemed to change me a bit. We got lucky. It is not a good feeling, the feeling you couldn't protect your family in a situation if things turned violent. You watch your door locks more closely from then on, you investigate sounds more. I had watched a lot of boxing and wrestling before that, but that is what got me to look into MMA. What works in unarmed combat? What works in armed? What hope does a skinny guy like me have? We got a gun, I studied and prepared to not be in that situation again. I watched UFC 1 and fell in love with the sport.
From then on things turned around a bit. In a way it was a wakeup call. Noone is going to do shit for you. Noone is going to protect you. Through most of your life you can rely on noone but yourself, so you had better be sure of who you are.
Of who you are going to be. You don't have to give up. If you are determined enough you can do god damn anything. Studied, got a better job. Now I have moved out of the poison city and am making more money. Now I am always looking for what I can improve about myself, about the world around me. I have a long way to go, but now I am motivated to try and get there, to no longer be a victim of my surroundings and myself.
So....on a lighter note, who is your favorite mmarmy fighter, your own or someone elses and why?
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