Size Doesn't Matter/A Little Unconfident

I'm trying to crank out at least one post a week related to fitness to track my progress as I make my journey into the thousand pound club. I missed last week because of life and stuff, so you're getting last week's and this week's progress reports today.

Last week I wrapped up week three on the Candito program, which has me doing the "Linear Max OT Phase", which basically means, "just a tad more than what you were lifting doing the Starting Strength thing". Real easy stuff compared to the previous week. I wrapped it up with no issues.

At the end of that week, I was noticing that I have packed on some crazy muscle mass over the past month. I keep telling myself that I don't do this to look buff, and that size doesn't matter. But when I look at my body and I can see massive amounts of gain in lean muscle mass, I can't help but to feel good about it. It's hard to not let that go to your head, and it can also lead to thinking some bad thoughts.

I don't want to be the guy that thinks, "Hey, I should do this exercise, because it'll make my (fill in body part here) look massive!" I am not a bodybuilder. I don't do this for looks. Yet there were a few times where I was tempted to do all of my accessory exercises around what would help make me look good. Those are bad thoughts. "We don't train for looks", I have to remind myself. "We train for battle."

So that wraps up last week's thoughts. This week deals with my disturbing lack of confidence.

This week is the "Heavy Weight Acclimation" phase. Heavy lifts with low reps, getting me ready for next week when I prepare to smash previous personal records. And with every session, I find myself questioning whether or not I'm strong enough to do my sets.

Let's get this out of the way: I am strong enough to finish these sets. I knock them out of the park every time. Hell, I could easily do a couple extra reps each time. Yet I keep entering my workout with a sense of insecurity.

I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because I'm really, for the first time in my life, pushing myself past the point that I ever thought I was capable. Maybe it's because I was struggling toward the end of Phase One of my training, and even though struggling was in the plan, it just has my confidence shot. Or maybe it's because I'm doing all of this shit with a cold and just feel under the weather. I don't know.

What I do know is, I shouldn't be so insecure about this shit. I'm more than strong enough. The Candito plan works. I'm stronger now than I've ever been in my life. I'm stronger than most people. I need to trust in the process, and trust in myself. I am a warrior. I need to be confident that I can do this. Because I can do this. I am strong enough. Not just strong enough, but stronger.

I guess I need to attach a photo or video so this will get someone's attention when I post this on Facebook, so here's a song I heard recently that reminds me of my wife and me. Love ya, babe!

None of Us are Without Sin

I've been trying to write this piece for weeks, and it's been really hard to do.

It was originally going to be titled, "#IBelieveYou, Because I was an Asshole". In the wake of the sexual harassment scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, I wanted to step up and tell women, "Yeah, I believe your #MeToo stories, because I used to be the prick that you're talking about."

How do you go about writing that you used to be a misogynistic piece of shit that sexually harassed women? Hell, with the left's desire to make anyone who has ever done it in their life persona non grata, should I even make that kind of a confession? How many friends would I lose by admitting the horrible things I've done? Would they even want to know why I did them?

Yet the story of Al Franken groping a woman over a decade ago came up, and the ability to write this all fell into place, because these sins aren't just my sins. They're the sins of every man. There is no one righteous, not even one, and there's a reason for that.

We're living in a new age of civil rights, and with that society is teaching new rules on how to treat women. We're being taught things about consent that we literally have never been taught before.

I didn't know about the concept of affirmative consent until long after I got married. And it's not a concept that has been taught well until recently, as this Cracked article can tell you. The article was written in 2015 by a guy that wasn't taught the concept of affirmative consent. He committed rape because instead of his victim saying no, the woman froze in fear. He didn't know that he committed rape until the next day.

Some reading this might want to stand up and say, "Surely you were taught -"

No, we weren't. Seriously, we weren't. We were taught that no means no, but anything less than that is consent.

And there's not going to be a guy with a sexual history of a number of partners that reads that Cracked article without feeling mortified and wondering if he might have been that guy. Every time I see that story I go through my entire history of sexual partners and wonder what if. Because while I may have never forced myself on a woman who said no, I often interpreted body language to mean yes. I'm confident that they all did want to have sex, but what if I'm wrong? I've always been a giant. I really hope I'm not wrong, because it disgusts me to think of the alternative.

That's an extreme example. Let's look at a few others.

George Takei was recently accused of groping a man back in the early 1980s. Not rape, but touching another man's genitals without his consent. You want to see what consent looked like in the 1980s?

I present, the "love scene" of Blade Runner:

Fast forward to around the 3:25 mark.

I've only seen that movie twice in my life. Once when I was thirteen, and earlier last year when I wanted to be caught up to see the sequel. When I was thirteen, I didn't think much of the scene. When I saw it in 2016, I was like, "Um...dude, that's fucking rape. What the fuck."

That was the "love scene" of the movie. That was what society taught was consent in 1982.

A year later, this catchy little tune started playing on radio stations across the country:

The Police's "Every Breath You Take". A song about a guy that's so fixated on a woman that he's literally watching her with every breath...well, it's in the title.

It wasn't until the late aughts that people on the internet began to point out that Sting's lyrics sound less like a love song and more like the rantings of a deranged stalker. I don't need to post the lyrics. We all know the lyrics (even the kids know the lyrics, thanks to Stranger Things).

One of the top love songs of the 1980s was literally a song about stalking someone. Back then, stalking wasn't even a crime. California passed the first anti-stalking law in 1990, nearly a decade after a song came out glorifying it.

Combine all that with the shitty idea that still persists in society's mind-that men ALWAYS want sex and couldn't possibly say no-and I'd be more surprised if a closeted gay celebrity in the extremely homophobic 1980s didn't grab another gay man's genitals in his apartment without affirmed consent. Ideas on consent in the 1980s were extremely fucked up.

That brings me to my own sins.

In my early 20s, I was lonely and angry at the world. I learned from my friends in the military and the internet that the secret to not being lonely anymore was to be an asshole to women. So I was. Like, all the time. A complete and total asshole.

I can share numerous horror stories about how I was a major prick to the women that shot me down. You know all those stories you read now about the women who saved their conversations on Facebook messenger about the guy that flipped out once the woman said she wasn't interested? That was me. Except it was 2003 and I was on Yahoo and AOL Instant Messenger. I sexually harassed many of the female soldiers I worked with in the military. When one female soldier reported a male soldier for sexual harassment, I joined with the male soldiers in freezing her out. She learned her lesson. Can't say the same for the guy she reported. Even when I didn't think I was being sexist, I was subconsciously being condescending as fuck to all of the women I knew. There's times that my wife will mention how I talked to her while we were dating and I wonder why she didn't just dump my ass. I was a jerk, even to her. I've smacked more than a couple of women on the ass despite barely even knowing them. And all the time I did it with the belief that women liked being treated this way.

I don't have any excuses for my actions. I was young, dumb, angry, and wrong. And I'm sorry.

And before anyone says I'm trying to make all of what we did okay, I'm not.

All of this isn't made to excuse any of the actions that we men did when we were young and stupid. What we did was wrong. The thing is that we weren't taught that any of this was wrong. We live in a new age of feminist ideas on consent and equality, and that's a good thing. We men need to change. We need to be better.

There are most definitely exceptions to what we were taught, though. Harvey Weinstein forced women by threat of ruining their careers to have sex with him. He whipped his dick out and jerked off to female reporters. Even if you could pull the "other time" defense here (you really can't), after the first lawsuit got settled he should have known then what he was doing was most definitely not okay. It was criminal, and he knew it.

Donald Trump walked in on teenagers changing during beauty pageants. He may have even raped a thirteen year old girl. Fuck that piece of shit.

Same thing with Roy Moore. That shitbag tried to have sex with teenagers. There's been so many women that have come out accusing him, and even men that have said that they knew what he was doing at the time, that I can't even link to every story. Fuck that fucking fuck child molesting piece of shit.

And just as a side note, I'm getting tired of hearing talk about, "Well, why are they coming out NOW?" Look at how they're being treated now and you have your answer. They're being treated like this NOW, when they're finally in a position to talk about this without having society completely destroy them for coming out. Imagine how fucked their lives would have been if they reported this stuff THEN, when Harrison Ford could rape Sean Penn on screen and it was considered romantic.

So yeah, there are some men that were so fucking horrible, that there isn't a defense. We know not to go messing with teenage girls. We know not to use our job to force women to have sex with us. Those guys have no excuse. Fuckem.

And yet that doesn't change the fact that there is no man without sin. No one. Not even a senator with a proven record of fighting for the rights of women like Al Franken. We men have all done bad things to women. For my female readers, this includes your husbands, your brothers, and your adult sons. It includes the men that were joining you in solidarity at the march back in January. We have all sinned, and fallen short of society's new rules and expectations.

So if every man that has ever done something inappropriate toward women (or in George Takei's case, to men) is going to become persona non grata, every man is going to get tossed into the wilderness eventually. That includes we men that have learned from our mistakes and are now trying to be good allies and create a better world. We were born in a worse age and are living in the new one, and we're hoping to leave the world better than when we joined it. I'm not saying that nothing should be done to make us pay for our actions, yet there has to be a way to make things right without completely ruining people that are now better men. If not, the only men that will come out on the other side are going to be those that were very, very good at hiding their actions, and those that want to turn us backward on the rights of women. Guys like Trump and Moore.

And to the men, we now live in this new age. We have no excuse now. We know what's right and wrong. It's up to us to tell women #IBelieveYou when they say #MeToo, because we all did something inappropriate to women at some point. We know women who tried to report sexual harassment and were punished. We now know about affirmative consent. We know now that there's going to be times when a woman will be too scared to say no, and that's why we need to be sure that they want sex just as much as we do. We know not to go grabbing on random women, and to just suck it up and try your luck with another woman if you get shot down, and to not even try when it's a woman you work with. We live in a new age with new rules, and we don't get to plead ignorance from here on out. We know we need to be better, so let's be better.

Because if you don't want to be better, you will get tossed into the wilderness. Society is moving forward whether you want it to or not. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.

Not the Strongest, but Stronger Than Most

This was going to be a Facebook rant, but I decided it was best to put it here on my blog instead.

I'm on week two of the Candito Intermediate Program. Week two is the hardest week, as it's the hypertrophy week. For those that don't know, hypertrophy is when you work your muscles out until you have no gas left in your tank, yet you push yourself beyond that point. You've pushed, you've benched, you've squatted and deadlifted until you're basically just a giant mess of yourself left in the fetal position, and even then you push on.

Week two makes sense when you're pushing yourself to new limits. It's required if you want to reach new limits. You handle yourself at a weight just lower than what you're accustomed to, with a rep max far more than what you thought you were capable of.

In week two, I have two sessions of an upper body workout that have me doing a 200 pound bench press for eight reps. After tonight, I just smoked both of those workouts like a cheap cigar. I could easily do ten reps at that weight if my workout plan required it. Bench pressing two hundred pounds is nothing to me. It's easy!

It wasn't always easy for me. When I was in my early 20s, I couldn't do a set of a bench press past 185 pounds. I always hit my limit at that point.

At my job (where I work in private security, a profession that requires us to have great physical strength), most of the people I work with can't break that 185 bench press. They told me so. They struggle to break that 200 pound barrier.

And yet I've now reached the point where I can not only bench press more than 200 pounds, but it ain't shit. Bench pressing 200 pounds is easy. It's 250 pounds that's hard. And it's only hard now. In six months, it might be my warmup weight.

I'm fairly certain that for most men, breaking that 185 pound barrier is something that eludes them. They won't get past it, because they aren't willing to work hard enough. They're that "casual gym member" that I spoke about in the past. The type that joins a gym in January but quits that same gym in March. That's most men. I am not most men. I have worked very hard to get where I am now. I've reached the point where I can bench press far more than 185 pounds. I'm much stronger than most men, and far stronger than I have ever been.

There's a lot of men that can bench press more than me. But not many. They are but the few, greater gods than I,

I'm not the strongest, but I am stronger than most. And that is enough for now.

Starting Phase Two

Like I said a few posts ago, I started a new goal of reaching the Thousand Pound Club. The Thousand Pound Club is when your combined one rep max of your deadlift, bench press, and squat exceed one thousand pounds.

And unlike a lot of my fitness goals, I gave myself a very reasonable time frame to reach it. Fifteen months to add forty pounds to each of my maximum lifts. Nothing I can't handle.

Last week, I ended phase one of my plan. That plan was simple enough. Use the Starting Strength routine until I've reached my limit on it.

The good news is that I reached my limit slightly further than I expected on two of my lifts. I did a set of five reps of squats at 260 pounds (I was planning on maxing out at 255), and did the same at 215 pounds on my bench press.

The bad news is that my deadlift has waned somewhat (I lifted 305x4 on my best day) at 285x5. I'm also still angry that my squat hasn't reached 300 pounds yet. Sweet Jesus, what is the holdup?! I feel like Happy Gilmore screaming at the golf ball.

THAT'S YOUR GOAL! ARE YOU TOO GOOD FOR YOUR GOAL!? ANSWER ME!

Sigh...anyway...

I was planning on maxing out on phase one after I had three failed lift attempts at one of those three lifts. I didn't do that. It was after I failed on two squat attempts and one deadlift attempt that I decided to call it quits. It was because when I didn't finish the squats on day two of this week's plan, I told myself:

Look, other, much more motivated voice in my head-you gotta face reality. I don't care if you deadlifted 305x4 on your best day, you gotta accept that if you keep on this path, you're gonna end up injured. Yeah, you deadlifted more than 300 pounds that day, but you just squatted 260 pounds, deadlifted 285, and you feel like you're about to die. Face fucking reality!

Yep, I faced reality at 36 years old. I might be stronger than ever, but I gotta face the truth that my goal had a long date set for a reason. I gotta train smarter, not harder. I might be stronger than I ever was, but it also takes me a lot longer to heal from injuries.

So here I am, at the end of Day 1 of Phase two of my goal.

Phase two has me using the Candito Intermediate Program.

As I told you at the link above, the program is great. My day one workout had me squatting 240 pounds for 4x6, and deadlifting 260 pounds 2x6.

But I had also been struggling with my deadlifts lately. After trying constantly and failing to meet that one day where I deadlifted 305 pounds, my confidence had waned.

After doing my easy sets of 240 squats, I set up to deadlift the easy weight of 260 pounds, and I couldn't lift it off the ground.

I rested for two minutes after that, and did everything I could to psych myself up to lift it.

Look, other less motivated voice in my head. You once lifted 305 pounds on this exercise. You just lifted 285x5 on Wednesday. You have this. You want some music in your head to motivate you? How about some Fall Out Boy? She's an American Beauty YOU'RE AN AMERICAN PSYCHO! I'M AN AMERICAN! I'M AN AMERICAN! I'M AN AMERICAN PSYCHO!

YOU ARE A SUPERHERO! YOU ARE THE GRASSHOPPER! NOW LIFT, GODDAMN IT! LIFT!

My confidence on doing the deadlift had been shot after failing for the past few days, and that's why I couldn't lift the weight at first. But I psyched myself up enough to finish that first set. The last two reps had me screaming, doing a battle cry that I'm sure everyone in my house heard as I wrapped it up.

The second set was easy. I had my confidence back. Deadlifting 260 pounds ain't shit.

So wraps up day one of phase two.

I will get stronger.

Achieving Greatness (on a Budget)

Since I've started this blog, I have friends on Facebook asking me for fitness advice. What to do if I'm a beginner, which exercise is best for weight loss, etc. I also have friends that tell me that they want to be stronger, faster, and better than they were before, but they have either financial issues, or time constraints that cause them to be unable to join a gym. This post is for you guys.

It's harder to have fitness goals when you don't have a lot of money. Even if you can scrape together a few dollars on a gym membership every month, life and work commitments can make it hard to get to that gym. So this is my post on how to improve yourself physically at home without spending a shit ton of money that you don't have. I've broken this down into three parts: The people that are really flat-ass broke, the people that are pretty broke but have a little bit of cash, and cheap nutritious food. Here we go!

1. For the people that are flat-ass broke.

You're flat ass broke. You don't have enough money to join a gym, but you want to be more physically fit. That's where calisthenics come in.

The literal, dictionary definition of calisthenics is, "gymnastic exercises to achieve bodily fitness and grace of movement". In layman's terms, it means body weight exercises.

Thankfully, the internet (and for all intents and purposes, I'm assuming that you have enough money for an internet connection, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) has a shitload of body weight workouts that you can find just by hitting the Google and typing in "body weight workout".

You'll find a whole slew of images, articles, and such showing you how you can do strength training without leaving your home.

But let's say that you've done those. You're no longer a beginner, but you're still flat ass broke and needing a challenge.

This is where HIIT comes in.

HIIT is High Intensity Interval Training, and it's the fucking Beast Mode of body weight exercise training.

If I had to sum up HIIT in a sentence, it would be, "Do fifty pushups; take a break for ten seconds, then do fifty more."

Fortunately, the internet gods have blessed us in 2017 with YouTube videos. YouTube has an INSANE amount of HIIT workout plans that you can do in the comfort of your living room. Just as an example, the following video is the first one of many that I found just by going to YouTube, and typing "HIIT workout" into the search engine. I didn't view this video, but it's the first of 1,700,000 results:

The pros of HIIT training:

It greatly improves your "mental toughness". In the military, they called mental toughness "muscular strength endurance". It's the ability to drive on even when you're completely maxed both mentally and physically. When we know that we've been several days awake on limited rations and water, but still have to charge a machine gun. For my Facebook friends that read this (you know who you are), it's the ability to stand at the ready against a fascist when you're armed with nothing more than a baseball bat even when some white supremacist shitbag tries to do harm to you and your child. Doing HIIT training makes you mentally tough enough to clock that son of a bitch and still have enough breath in your lungs to fuck up any of his friends that show up.

The cons of HIIT training:

Body weight exercises, no matter how hard trained, have their limits. While you will gain muscular strength endurance, you need actual weights to increase your strength in the long run.

That brings me to the importance of parks.

There's some parks out there that have exercise stations. There's a trail around my township hall that does that. You go to one station, do the exercise that their sign says to do at that station, then run your ass off to the next one until you reach the end. Even if your nearby park doesn't have that, they probably have some pull up bars. Pull ups and chin ups are the be all, end all, of upper back exercises.

If you're like me and still have yet to be able to do a single chin up, do what's called a "reverse chin up".

A reverse chin up is where you go to a pull-up bar and grip it underhand, jump up so that you're at the end of a chin up position, and lower yourself down slowly. It's the best exercise for the upper back that you can do when you're flat ass broke and can't do a chin up. Eventually, you should be able to become strong enough to do chin ups, and after that, pull ups. When you can get to where you can do a bunch of pull ups, it's safe to say that your upper back and bicep muscles are in full-on beast mode. No other equipment for that muscle group is needed.

2. For the people that are pretty broke but have a little bit of cash

So you're pretty broke. You want to improve on your fitness, but you work a lot of hours and have responsibilities with the family that keep you from being able to join a gym. You have a little bit of cash to spare, but not much.

For you, you need to build a home gym so you can work out on your off time. You also need to do this cheaply.

You might need some new home workout equipment. If that's the case, it's important to know which brands you can buy on the cheap, as opposed to the brands that are insanely expensive.

I'm not kidding when I say this. Plenty of home gym equipment is the same, but the brand of said equipment can be the difference between spending a couple of hundred dollars on equipment, and spending nearly a thousand on building your home gym. For example, Weider makes great home gym machines for a few hundred dollars, while Marcy sells similar equipment for more than double or triple the price.

But if you're pretty broke but have a few dollars to spare AND you've been following my blog for any decent amount of time, you don't want one of those fancy machines that they call "home gyms". You want to start off with a weight set.

Weider is great for new weights, but so is CAP.

My first olympic weight set was a CAP 300 pound set. I bought it when I was 20 years old, having no other gym equipment. One 45 pound barbell, a set of 45s, 35s, 25s, 10s, 2 pairs of-5s, and 2.5s, I bought it at a local Dunhams for $200.

I still use it to this day, sixteen years later. They have more than showed that they can go the distance. These weights are built to last. The best part is, the price on those brand of weights hasn't changed much. A CAP barbell and weight set are still $200 retail price.

But maybe you're still pretty broke and need to buy a bench or some other equipment on the cheap. For this, Craigslist and the Facebook marketplace are your best friends.

Weight equipment, regardless of the brand, is really built to last. That's why second hand gear is the best way to build your home gym slowly on the cheap.

To paraphrase Henry Rollins, prices come and go, but 400 pounds is 400 pounds.

I spent years building my workout room on the cheap. I started out by buying my CAP barbell set. I bought a heavyweight bag on Craigslist so I could practice karate on it. I bought my bench on overstock.com. I bought my squat rack on WalMart's website. My mom (god bless her) bought my extra weights secondhand on the Facebook marketplace.

Yeah, prices may come and go, but 400 pounds is 400 pounds.

The pros of developing your home gym on the cheap:

You have plenty of time to lift.
You save a shitload of money on gym memberships.

The cons:
It takes a very long time to build your gym cheaply.
You probably won't have enough space for any cardio machines.

3. FOOD!

Regardless of whether you're flat ass broke, or kinda broke but can afford a few extra dollars towards fitness, you need food to fuel the machine that is your fitness craving body, and you need to do it for as little dollars as possible at the grocery store. For this section, I've broken it down into two sections: Protein and carbs. I won't discuss fats here (as much as they are needed in any diet), because it's inevitable that you're going to eat fat one war or another.

For protein, chicken breast is the champion food of broke people. At one of the stores in my hometown, boneless skinless chicken breast runs at $1.99 per pound. You can buy it in the tens of pounds for dirt cheap prices.

But maybe you're not a fan of eating meat. Maybe you're a vegetarian or vegan. For that, I offer lentils. They're pound for pound, cheaper than chicken breast and one of the best protein sources for those that don't eat meat. As a meat eater, I don't know of all the recipes you can create with lentils, but I'm sure that you do, and you can use them to build muscle while not having to eat anything that has a face.

For cheap but healthy carbs, rice and noodles are the way to go. One of my favorite meal prep recipes uses both chicken breast and rice. There's also a meal prep recipe that uses really lean hamburger and spaghetti noodles. Go nuts with it if you're tired of eating chicken breasts. Those are just two examples of how you can meal prep cheaply, but keep your diet healthy at the same time. There's multitudes more than this. You just gotta use your good friend, the Google.

So that's all my advice for achieving fitness greatness on a budget. I still have to provide some sort of image here so I can post this on my Facebook feed and attract attention, so here you go:

I'm Not Cut Out For This

Well, after a few political posts, we're going back to fitness. I've been wanting to write this one for a while, but I've been busy with work, taking care of the kids, and life in general.

I also have a few other posts in my head ready to get typed up. Hopefully I'll have them up in a few days. Stay tuned for them, because they're some good ones. :)

A few months ago, I decided to take up distance running again to help to cut weight. I knocked the dust off of the old Hal Higdon Novice 1 Half Marathon plan and set a goal to work myself up to running ten miles. The plan was to literally run my ass off until I dropped about twenty pounds or so.

All was going fine until I ran seven miles. For a week after that, I felt a sharp pain in my hip.

I know I'm getting old, but I am not so old as to be getting hip injuries. That's just some bullshit.

The pain was so bad that I was walking bow legged and limping all over the place. Running was out of the question. I could barely even walk.

While I was injured, I remembered back to when I was training to run a half marathon and I got injured right around the same time. Right around when I worked my way towards mile eight. That was a nasty sprain to my lower abdominal muscle that kept me out of running for two weeks. I still managed to run the half marathon in Detroit a few months later, but the injury really hurt my progress. Instead of running confidently across the finish line, I was dragging ass and praying for a merciful death.

I'm just not cut out for distance running. It sucks to admit that, but that's just the way it is. My body type just isn't made for that.

I was never much of a runner. In the Army, my best run time for a two mile run was 14:57. While that's fast by civilian standards, in the Army, it's less than one minute above passing time.

But in between the half marathon and now, I took up powerlifting, and that's where the new phase of my fitness journey comes in.

I have never injured myself lifting weights. I've never injured myself at all during any type of strength training. Ever. That's my body type. That's what I'm cut out for, and it's where I set my new fitness goal.

There's this thing called the Thousand Pound Club. For those of you that don't want to click the link, it's where your combined lifting weights of the squat, bench press, and deadlift all exceed one thousand pounds.

I crunched the numbers into this fitness calculator of each of those lifts that I have used at peak strength to determine my one rep max. At my absolute best so far, my squat is 295 pounds. My bench press is 240 pounds. My deadlift is 340 pounds.

When you add them all together, my combined peak strength is 875 pounds.

I only need to add 125 pounds to each of those three lifts to join that prestige club.  That's only about forty pounds per lift and some change!

This is very much attainable. It's very much attainable given the time frame that I'm setting for myself.

I will obtain this goal by the end of next year. December 31st, 2018. I have 14 months to achieve it. And I will!

I have to add a photo at this point for my Facebook friends (as they are the majority of the readers of this blog) so here you go:

The Best and Worst Advice I got as a Child

I wrote in past posts about this story, but in light of current events, it bares repeating.

I am a warrior, and not by choice.

When I was seven, I started getting bullied by older kids. Being that I was tall for my age, bullies saw me as a soft target. They would beat me up and call me names.

I didn't fight back because I was told through teachers, numerous PSA commercials, and a whole slew of school materials that fighting was wrong, and I should always avoid it. I was told to tell a teacher, or an adult, about a bully so that they could deal with the bully themselves.

Boy, was I naïve.

There were a few times I didn't listen to all of the adults, because they had refused to control the bullies. Of all those times, I can tell you about a bully named Dan. He was my babysitter's kid.

Dan would beat me up all the time because he knew I wouldn't fight back. His parents knew about it, but they didn't do anything to him. He would call me names and I'd tell on him, only to be told, "Don't be a tattle tale". Yet if he told his parents on me for saying something back, I'd be scolded. Dan was probably aware that the double standard existed, because before long, words turned into physical violence.

Dan beat me up all the time, and his parents did nothing. I would constantly be crying over the abuse he gave me and they didn't say anything. So finally, I had enough.

One day, I got into an argument with Dan and I knew he was going to come at me, like he always does. Except this time, I wasn't going to let him beat me. I was ready.

Sure enough, after the argument got heated, he came charging at me, ready for battle. I put my right foot back, and hit him in the face with a hard right fist in the mouth.

That son of a bitch dropped like a sack of potatoes. One fucking punch to the face, and he was screaming, crying to his mom.

I chipped the shitbag's tooth, or so his mom told me.

The mom, who had long allowed for her kid to bully me, went apeshit on me. It didn't matter that for well over a year, he had bullied me. He beat me into dust. She did nothing then. Now, she was yelling and spanking (yes, spanking) me.

If I had known then what I know now as an adult, I would have called her out on her bullshit and hypocrisy. I would have told her that she deserved an ass beating too, and I was ready to deliver. Yet as an eight year old child, all I knew was that I was in trouble.

I stood up to my bully, and I was paying the price.

In my subconscious mind, I learned that you will be punished for defending yourself. People are coming to hurt you, nobody is going to help you, and you will be punished for defending yourself. That was just one of many bullies that I had similar experiences with until I was twelve.

Another one was with a different Dan. That Dan would beat me up after school in the sixth grade routinely. After I finally took enough abuse from him, I went to the assistant principal.

I told her the whole story about how Dan would bully me as soon as I got off the bus. That he would hit me. That he would hurt me and knock the wind out of my stomach for no reason. When I asked her what she would do about it, she very pointedly told me that she would do nothing.

Why? Because Dan worked in the school office. He was the "teacher's pet". Aside from whooping my ass on a daily basis, he was a model student. Because of that, the assistant principal didn't give a shit that he was a bully. He had a free license to beat me up, and there was nothing that the authority figures would do about it.

In those years, I had many bullies. Adults did nothing to defend me from them, but they always told me the same lie: If you fight the bully, you're just as bad as they are.

I was stupid enough to believe it.

"Don't fight the bully, or you're as bad as he is", is the worst fucking piece of advice I had ever received as a child.

Then seventh grade happened.

I was in an office meeting with my school counselor for the third time, dealing with bullies. I don't remember the name of my counselor, but he was a good man. The past two times, he pulled the bullies into his office and scared them enough to not physically bully me anymore (emotionally, he had no control over). But by the third time, he was exasperated.

It was at that moment, he gave me the best advice I had ever received from an adult:

"You're going to get in trouble for it, but you have to HIT BACK."

That was his advice. I might get in trouble for it. The adults won't protect me from the bullies when they try to beat me, but I have to fight, and be ready for the punishment that comes from defending myself.

As an adult now, I really, really wish that it hadn't taken me his permission to do so, but as a kid, it was all it took to truly wake my ass up. He put a real truth in my brain that has always been in my mind since:

People are coming to hurt you. Nobody is going to help you, and you will be punished for defending yourself. Fight anyway.

I had a strange confidence after that. If anyone had decided to talk shit to me, I'd tell them to fight me. Most refused because I was a giant. No longer a gentle, pacifist giant. A giant ready to tear their limbs off.

Eighth grade was another story. I spent half of my time in In School Suspension because I was taking shit from nobody. Bullies didn't touch me because I was ready to fight. Most of my time in In School Suspension was because some bully decided to verbally abuse me, and I responded by knocking his head off.

In high school, I started doing karate. I was no longer just the guy you didn't want to fuck with, but I was protecting other bullied kids. Sure, there were some bullies that tried to mess with me emotionally, but once I said, "YOU WANT TO SING IT, OR BRING IT?!", they would back down real quick. Real fucking quick.

To this day, I remember the worst advice that was given to me by adults: Don't fight the bullies, or you're as bad as they are.

I always keep in the back of my mind the best advice that I got from my seventh grade counselor:

People are coming to hurt you. Nobody is going to help you, and you'll be punished for defending yourself. Fight anyway.

Yeah, I became a warrior. Not by choice, but because my options were either to fight, or be crushed.

I kept that advice from the counselor in the back of my mind long after high school, when I joined the Army as a result of another group of bullies attacking us on 9/11.

That bring us to today.

Last week, there were bullies gathered by the hundreds that marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Those disgusting bullies, that screamed evil things like, "Jews will not replace us", "Blood and soil", and eventually rammed a car into a crowd of people that were protesting such bullying.

As it was in my childhood, the "authority figure" that was supposed to denounce such bullying instead blamed "many sides", except there isn't many sides. There's only three sides; the bullies, those that they're bulling, and those that aren't bullied but fight on behalf of the bullied. I've been on the both of the latter parts. The "adult" that's supposed to condemn the bullies instead enabled them.

He gave the same bullshit speech that I heard many times in my youth. That speech is a lie.

"If you fight the bully, you're as bad as he is."

"If you fight the Nazi, you're the real Nazi."

Yeah, I've heard that speech before. That same, lying speech that adults told me to keep me from defending myself as a kid is now being spewed forth by the supposed president of the United States. The same bullshit that I was told by adults when I was defending my friends from bullies.

If politics is like high school, our "president" is the new assistant principal. The one that won't attack the real bullies because they're the teacher's pet. They're the ones that got him elected. He doesn't want to punish them.

"If you fight the bully, you're as bad as he is" is a lie. Bullies don't respond to kind pleas for you to stop hurting them. They don't respond to reason. They don't respond to acts of kindness. They only will stop bullying you when punch them into the face so hard that they have a chipped tooth and go crying to their mom. And then, and only then, they'll stop when you tell their mom, "WHAT?! YOU WANT SOME OF THIS? COME AT ME! I'LL BREAK YOUR TOOTH, TOO!"

So as it went then, so it goes now. The fascists are coming to hurt America, nobody is coming to protect us, and we will be punished for defending ourselves. Fight anyway.