Injured

Well, it's been a good run for me so far, but it's time I explained to everyone at the same time that it seems my stay abroad has come to a sudden and unexpected end. In my last post, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was finding ways to manage my time around the rib injury which prevented me from training, but it looks like that same injury will govern my lifestyle a great deal more than I had thought.

It has been several weeks now since I was hurt, and while I go significant periods of each day without serious discomfort, there are still no days entirely free from it, and the small amount of training in which I've engaged has been extremely unpleasant, and impossible to pursue in earnest. I have finally come to terms with what several of the staff here have been telling me, which is that with a cracked rib, any serious martial arts training is really impossible for at least a few months, and, particularly considering the nature of the training I had planned in Brazil, it has seemed most prudent to postpone the remainder of my voyage and return home at the beginning of December.

I've spoken to my parents about this a few times, perhaps unsurprisingly they support my early return, and most of the trainers here seem satisfied with the decision. Needless to say, I am disappointed, but I am continually reminded that Brazil will still be there next year, and I have already had an extraordinary experience by any standards. For now, I have been enjoying thoughts of the many wonders that await me in the furnaces and faucets of America, and of the friends and family that I'll be seeing much sooner than I had thought. I have been fortunate in easily finding a place to stay, and it seems to me now that I have had as much good luck as bad, and certainly have little cause for complaint.

For my last few weeks in Thailand, I have decided to treat myself well, and using the dwindling finances that I had reserved for my next destination, I have rented a large, air-conditioned room (technically a "villa," I'm told) at a resort down the road from camp. I now have a real mattress, hot water, and my own bathroom. I have spent several days at various markets at the towns and beaches around the island, and have found many things that I look forward to presenting to people back home, and I have hired the personal services of Prathet, one of the most able and talented trainers in camp, to give me short, private lessons in which I can learn and be somewhat challenged without risking further injury.

At this exact moment, I am sitting on a small leather couch near the bed, and I am staring out of a large double-window taller than I am. Next to the resort is someone's small house, and I can see several chickens and a rooster darting about in the open ground nearby under some palm trees. The room is filled with furniture made out of dark, beautifully stained wood; there is a wardrobe, a TV stand, and a small table against the wall with a mirror attached to it. In the evening light, the sun drenches long, diagonal lines of the room, and I can see the bits of dust and drifting lint on all the surfaces. My guitar is against the wall in a corner next to the television that has yet to be turned on, and today's clean, pressed sheets are stretched across the sprawling double bed in the center of the room.

I appreciate that here there are no ants crawling through cracks around the windows, here there is more than a lazy fan oscillating drowsily up on one wall, and even though here I am comfortable and distracted in about every way I could want to be, I must admit that it's hard not to feel as though I've somehow lost something, as though the murmuring A/C unit on the wall, or the unnervingly constant internet connection are false friends, all-too-charming acquaintances met at the funeral of a wealthy family member.

When I take a shower now, there is no intermediate walk outside, no contact with the sun and open air, and comparatively little need to shower at all now that I spend so little time sweating. Little by little I've started to see things about myself shifting back to mirror a world that I had left what seems like a very long time ago. Due to the climate control and the attitude of the staff at the resort, I have started wearing shirts every day; soon I may even recommence with shoes. I have started keeping multiple windows open simultaneously on my computer, as the internet connection can now handle that, and while I still spend a lot of time sitting still, my mind is on more tracks than it was a month ago. The scabs on my knuckles, never fully healed in the last three months, have finally hardened and fallen away, and I'm left with this soft, pink tissue that seems unprepared for its past.

As mentioned above, I've been gathering a lot of souvenirs lately, and I think that perhaps these tokens of myself will be among them. Yesterday I bought a small figurine of an elephant that had been carved by hand by an old woman who always sets up a stall at the night markets. When I go home, I will fold this up in newspaper, and put it in my suitcase next to three shirts and my habit of sticking a towel under the door to keep out insects that we don't have in North America. I will pack away my handwraps and my boxing gloves, and stick inside of them my memories of how to tie the curtains to let in the breeze and keep out the sun. I hope to keep handy my awe at air conditioning and hot water, and the guitar-string calluses on the fingers of my left hand are among the few things that show no signs of fading.

It strikes me, as I prepare to leave Thailand, that as with anything, it's the people here who have made this experience real to me. It seems hard to imagine that the tokens of this life would remain after I've left their witnesses behind, and though it may seem strange from the outside, I feel as though my body has learned as much in the past few months as my mind would in a studious year at college. My experiences here are held in such a way that I find it very hard to describe them in words, and thereby give them some form which is separate from the smiles of the trainers at camp, or the way we would stand just under the roof of the intermediate training area and watch the water come over the ridge in a solid wall during the rainy season.

I know that when I go home I won't suddenly forget all that the Thais have taught me, but for someone so used to putting things into words, it is somewhat unnerving to have the only real understanding of this time somewhere inarticulate. On Saturday night there was a party at the camp, and when I saw Nazee, I waved to him, and he walked up to me, grabbed me by the head, laughed, and kissed me on both sides of my face. When I am home, dealing with jackets, good beer, schedules, and other things unknown here, I will try to keep my souvenirs close by, and whether or not I can explain it well, in my shoulders and my neck, and in my fists, knees and elbows, I will remember these people for a very long time.

Quiet Places

For the past several days, I have been in enough physical discomfort to prohibit any significant form of training, but not so much that I am unable to get up or move about my room and the camp. I can sit up well enough, which means that I can also ride a motorbike to town, or go to the store or the movie theater if I'm so inclined. In other words, one might say that I am still invested with my usual amount of potential energy, though in practice, I rarely stir outside of the four walls that now surround me.

I think that this is a trend which actually began before I was directly prohibited from training, and comes as a result of the growing detachment I feel from many to most of my fellow students. I don't think that it would be appropriate to say that I am in any way reclusive, but rather that my status as a sort of intermediate invalid has made me somewhat eccentric and a bit more private, as if my cracked rib were a suddenly inherited family fortune of ill repute, or the overnight growth of a genius IQ which I share only with a portentously named lab rat.

Generally, when I wake up, I snack from my own food stores until just before lunchtime, when I try to beat the post-workout rush of dripping torsos which crowd the bar at the Tiger Grill. After eating, I return to my room usually until dinner, for which I generally wait until about an hour after the final training sessions have concluded, so as to again avoid the crowd. Occasionally, after lunch, instead of going back to my room, I will wander down to the office and request the use of a motorbike for the day, which provides its own series of diversions.

At mealtimes, I generally resist the temptation to order my food to go, and I sit either at the outdoor bar or in the public set of tables between the intermediate and advanced training areas. I always bring with me something to read, and for some time now I've been muddling through Moby Dick, as I've thought that it bears re-reading since the arrogant glossing I gave it in high school. There is a significant amount of foot traffic through this part of camp, particularly as the main entrance is just across the intermediate area, and I am often hailed by passing acquaintances during the meal. In all honesty, these brief exchanges and passing nods are quite likely the peak of my socialization here in recent days.

I feel that it's important for me to explain that I really don't feel any misplaced sense of superiority or even distaste toward the people around me. I admit that at other points during my stay, I have been quite frustrated with the pop-culture, fraternity-like element which infests modern combat sports and their participants, but at this point my irritation has mostly faded into rueful humor. I hear the screaming from the MMA mats though most of the day, I see the broken chain of dull sparkles as the prostitutes leave in the mornings, and I feel the weekends nights wash over my room carrying most of my neighbors away on tsunamis of cheap beer and cheaper friends. For my own part though, I have become quite content to sit alone in my room with my books and my guitar.

I think that when I arrived, my disgust for the popped-collar culture in which most of the students here participate came from some type of insecurity towards it. I recognized that my monogamy, general sobriety, and continual use of many-syllabled words marked me as an outsider of doubtful character who will bear watching. I have never been in any way hazed or ridiculed for my deviant behavior, but I understand now that many of the men here are slightly uncomfortable around me if only because they don't know how to act. I have tried to make it clear that I don't appreciate stories about prostitutes, and that I don't tolerate violence toward them, no matter how amusing the situation seemed to others. I have had a total of four beers spread across my entire stay in this country, and only two of them were on the same night, and I'm frankly just not very talented when it comes to objectifying nearby women. I know that it will seem unfortunate to most of you reading this that these characteristics in me make me comparatively unfit for the social scene here, but it is in fact the case, and for some time, though I had no desire to change, it was hard not to feel a vague sense of insecurity for no other reason than that I was so clearly not like everyone else. Here in my last month, however, I have finally and fully detached from all even fragmented desires for acceptance from this group, and I have decided to put my efforts in a different direction.

For the first two months of my time in Thailand, I was fortunate enough to find a few friends to whom I related well. Most notably Chris, about whom you have heard some scattered things before, André, a hunter from Montreal, and a young French woman named Aurora, have comprised my few genuine friendships. Unfortunately, André has returned home, Chris is rarely in his room, staying mostly with one of the American MMA trainers who smokes weed with him a few times per day, and Aurora has drifted toward more admiring eyes for the time being. In themselves, these things are somewhat lamentable, but they have happened gradually enough that I have felt them only in the way that I have felt the country shifting out of the rainy season; change has come slowly and intermittently, but there's something different in the air, and though I find myself sitting in the same places, it's just a bit quieter all around.

Since I've been reading more, I have been reminded of a sort of parable from (I believe) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which seems particularly appropriate here by both its meaning and its symbols (forgive me if I take some liberties; it has been several years). The story basically is that of a one-legged hooker who lived in a small town, and before whatever accident deprived her of one of her engines, she had apparently been well established and accomplished in her profession. Finding herself suddenly one appendage poorer, she at first was understandably discouraged, as any cosmetic abnormality can be disastrous for a lady of negotiable virtue, but after some reflection, she devised a plan. The specifics of the story (if they were ever provided) escape me, but in the end she concluded by telling some dusty Steinbeck avatar that she had done quite well for herself since the accident, and in fact, "started chargin' folks extra. It ain't every day they get a chance at a one-legged hooker."

After what I hope is a significant stretch from this quaint story of turning adversity to one's advantage, I have found some encouragement for my own situation. Since I am generally so out of sync with the social rhythms of my classmates, I have actually been fortunate enough to encounter some otherwise unnoticed occurrences on what could be considered the dark side of camp. I have realized that my own pseudo-approachable status here is in many ways quite analogous to that of the Thais from the perspective of these same westerners. As I so far have very little save affection and admiration for the trainers themselves, I have decided to put whatever time and energy I devote to socializing in the future into a more complete relation to the trainers. Like me, they generally keep within the small groups of their own kind, but they are far from xenophobic, and even in so short a time, I have found my efforts with them well rewarded.

Late on a Saturday night, from a back corner of camp past all of the rooms and behind the beginner training areas, I heard the sound of music while I was on my way to the bathroom. Outside it was mostly deserted, as the vast majority of the students were out in search of tomorrow's headaches and uncomfortable burning sensations. Returning to my room, I put on a shirt, and wandered over toward the music to find a birthday party among the Thais for one of the trainers with whom I am well acquainted. Perhaps twenty of them were gathered on the ground near a small fire, and Dang, standing on the periphery, saw me from a distance, and, calling my name, waved me over. Grinning contentedly, I sat down among them and listened to Nazee play a few Thai folk songs which were pleasant enough, though obviously I understood very little. After the third song, the musician, nodding to me and laughing, asked, "Ah, you kno...ah...Jon Denva?"

"I know of him." I answered.
"OK then. We play heem now." Nazee said with a chuckle.

(see video below.)



I apologize for the poor quality and the erratic movement of the camera. I was actually recording Nazee somewhat surreptitiously, and as he was looking at me for most of the song, I had to hold the camera down a bit and pretend to less desperate to record the moment for posterity.

For those of you who couldn't tell, that was Nazee's interpretation of Country Roads, by John Denver, though his faulty English and the excessively enthusiastic sauce-pot accompaniment from in front of me perhaps hampered the performance a bit. Just the same, needless to say, I enjoyed it immensely.

Yesterday, the head MMA trainer, and American named Ray Elbe (a contestant on the Ultimate Figher 9 reality show) gave me his business card, on which, as you'll see below, he is featured in the midst of a strategic wardrobe malfunction between a pair of scantily-clad young women (of the two-legged variety).

He handed it to me outside of the cage, saying, "Here bro, Chris says you used to do some grappling. You should come by some time, we'll show you how it's done."

I smiled and nodded. "Thanks...bro. I'm pretty much sticking to Muay Thai right now, but I'll be sure to use your...uh...contact info here if I need to get in touch with you."

"Yeah man, I don't really see you around much."

"Yeah," I said slowly, "I think we just have different friends."

A Brief Update

Several days ago, I received one of the more painful blows of my martial arts career, which is to say one of the more painful blows of my life. While in a clench (a standing grapple, for the laypeople) with a young Thai fighter, I was thrown off balance by a skillful twist from my opponent, and I flew into the ropes. With agonizingly perfect timing, as I rebounded off the ropes, this young man (maybe 14 years old) jumped in the opposite direction with both hands around my head, and pulled himself forward to deliver a knee to my ribs. The whole situation, considering that he jumped, that he moved forward, that he had the necessary hand perfectly positioned, and that I was rebounding off the ropes directly into his strike combined to lend him double to triple the amount of force which he would have otherwise delivered. It was a complicated event, but it ended with a cracked rib for me.

I'm told that as far as these things go, I've come off rather well. It has hurt to breathe for a few days, but there are less painful positions, and I've been sticking to them pretty faithfully. My entire torso was wrapped with bandages, and I've been warned by the general manager here to stay out of the ring on pain of explusion for a significant period of time. All together, I should be able to train again in just a week or two, though I will probably be staying out of clench fighting for a bit longer than that. The only significant danger, I'm told, is in a repetition of the injury in the near future; in short, if a rib is barely cracked (like it is now), I stay in my room for a while, if a rib is broken, I go home. USA home.

I apologize for the brevity of this, and for my lack of updates on any other front, but it's something of a hassle to prop myself up like this, and I'll make a point to tell some real stories tomorrow. For now, I just thought I'd let everyone know.