What is it about life that just sneaks up and kicks you right square in the joint! Even when you are feel like you are winning, you are just a breath away from a scrotal kick that will send you straight to your knees. Well, here I am, on my knees again. This time it feels self inflicted though. Man life, you sure are good at this. Making me feel like I did something to deserve this pestilence. My thoughts are clouded. There is something brilliant dying to leap from my mind but it is held captive by my own... self loathing, no, that is a little harsh. It is a struggle that I face every day.
I am the main character in this play but after 30 years I have not yet figured out if I am the good guy or the bad guy.
My thoughts are scattered, you see I had this amazing concept on strength, internal versus external and how our experiences mold our perceptions on each. I composed at least a half a dozen paragraphs in my mind while sitting on that bar stool tonight. Something has me unraveled.
When I was 18, I decided to get my first tattoo. I was a senior in high school and had spent the entire summer between my junior and senior year in my best friend Mark Ziya's garage doing what we still to this day refer to as "The Program" The idea behind said program was to get so fucking huge that all the girls at school would have no choice but to notice us. That was my understanding of woman at the time. If you had muscles, they would be powerless to resist you. I have since learned that that is not exactly the case. It was phoenix in the summer time in his parents garage when we slung weight around like our hero's in those muscle magazines but it was well worth the daily heat stroke, the ladies would soon be swarming us. Mark was partial to the tricept kickback. My God if you could see how much weight that kid could extend in that movement. Personally I loved me some bicept curls and bench press. That summer I also took to wearing shirts that were a little form fitting. Can you blame me, I was HUGE! Alright, I was 155 pounds, but I was only 115 pounds when I started my junior year so I felt like a monster at 155. And what goes with super beast muscles better than a tattoo.
So there I was at some sidi establishment preparing to have myself permanently entered into a data base of people with "distinguishing features" Those who are not familiar with the process, the artist typically puts your design onto a special piece of paper where the artwork can be transferred in non permanent ink onto the skin to see how it will look before the actual needle work begins.
Like most all other occasions at this time in my life my partner in crime Mr. Ziya was in attendance. To this day I am still grateful that he was! I am going to back track a little bit here. In order for you to have an understanding why I would be permanently marking my body with anything at such a young age, it is important to have a some insight to my childhood.
When I was around five my parents separated. My mother was awarded custody of myself and my two sisters shortly after. This decision made by a total stranger would ultimately mold me into the person that I am today. A person with an amount of internal strength that is unwavering and virtually unmatched. You see, my mother didn't always make the best decisions. One Christmas eve stands out when I was a kid. I was just getting to the age where believing in that fat man in the suit was becoming difficult, but my little sisters innocence in that effect was still very much in tact.
It was half past eleven on Christmas eve. My two sisters and I sat and watched TV in our tiny two bedroom apartment awaiting the return of our mother. I could see the look of concern in my older sister's eyes. She spent so much of her early teenage years protecting the two of us from things like this and she knew that tonight was going to be tough. She convinced us that even though mom had not returned that we needed to head to bed.
Do you remember what it felt like to awake on Christmas morning, your heart beating through your chest; the culmination of so much anticipation. The covers are thrown off with zeal and you rush down the hall to find a pile of glorious wrapped treasure under a sparkling evergreen! Eyes as big as dinner plates you sprint to awake your parents so the feeding frenzy may commence. Well it was exactly like that, except there wasn't a God damn thing under that tree and good old parental was in some kind of drug induced coma. Now this is where strength part one comes in. My older sister calmly explained to my little sister and I that since we were awake so late that Santa knew and had to pass our house but would be making another pass soon. Disappointed, we returned to bed. It was at this time that I heard my older sister attempting fervently to wake our dead beat mother. What felt to a child like several days passed trying to fall back to sleep. Finally we were stirred by big sis. If I knew at the time what antipathy meant I would have describe my feelings towards my mother as such. To her credit, she did pull her shit together of a handful of minutes. She pretended that she was Santa and had us sit on her lap as she handed us unwrapped gifts that were clearly bought at a gas station just hours ago. Oh and we each got a twenty out of her wallet.
I can recant dozens of events like this throughout my adolescence.
Now some would say, "Oh no Leo, you were disappointed as a child?! So were the rest of us! suck it up!" The fact is I completely agree with that fictitious asshole. In fact, one of my favorite things to say these days is "Don't be weak." This has little inference to physical strength. The fact is sometimes in life we get shit on. Sometimes we get kicked and things suck. If you don't have patience, perseverance and strength, well... good luck. True strength has little to nothing to do with your one rep max. That brings us back to my terrible back tattoo. I have the word "Strength" inked across my broad shoulders. And if it wasn't for Mark fucking Ziya my first tattoo would have read "Stregth" Now THAT is a good friend! at 17 years old he called out that piece of shit tattoo artist and his bull shit artistic rendering of how a word should be spelled. He had my back in the most literal sense.
At this point in my journey I literally show people how to pick up heavy things for a living. Physical strength is obviously an integral part of my life. That said, the weight placed upon our shoulders by life's incessant tribulations outweighs that of the most impressive squat. I know first hand, I recently squatted well over double my body weight! Was that narcissistic? Probably.... It's my fucking blog!
