Intro/ a little about me

      As an aging punk in San Francisco, I think I recently had the mid-life crisis that I swore my whole life that I was above.  After almost two solid decades of nightly drinking as much whiskey as was humanly possible, and practically never ever sleeping, I decided to slowly (so slowly) wake up from my self induced funk and have a little more control of my life.

     I was fortunate enough to meet, fall in love with and marry, a fantastic sober woman, who, I honestly have no idea why, was able to put up with me, and offer constant encouragement, no matter what wild shit I threw her way.  About four years into our relationship, I decided to quit drinking, cold turkey.  I'll tell you right now, the first six months were pretty brutal, but not because of me missing booze.  That was surprisingly easy this time around.  What sucked was the sugar cravings and the endless nights of no sleep.  Being pretty damned irritable from lack of sleep, and being fairly foggy-brained throughout the day, and miserable at night, knowing sleep was just not going to come.

     After 6 months, though, things started to pick up. (That may sound terrible, but it's a small price to pay for twenty years of misuse!)  I was healing from adhesive capsulitis (frozen shoulder, you should look it up.  It's FUUUUCKEN brutal) which affected one shoulder for about two years, and then attacked my other shoulder shortly after that.  I won't bore you with the details, but after almost five years of not being able to move my shoulders, whatever mediocre grade of good shape I was previously in, was now piss poor at best.  As a non-athletic, skinny, middle aged musician, I was never concerned with my health, my shape, physique, or even my well being.  Fortunately, for whatever reason, I was obsessed with doing push-ups.  No matter that my injury had prevented me from doing this simple exercise for nearly half a decade, my new dream was to be able to hit my old number of 50 pushups again.  Me trying to get back on that horse was not a pretty sight.

     For starters, now that I am microscopically vaguely a little more internet savvy, I found out that the pushups I used to do were completely wrong.  My form was bad, my style was just stupid, and as you already know, I was always drunk.  Doing ten pushups was probably my biggest accomplishment during that first week.  But this isn't a blog about my fitness, or even completely about me.  I just wanted you to know where I was in my life when I started Muay Thai, for your own self-comparison: forty-nine years old, not athletic, skinny, recovering from two separate shoulder injuries, as well as twenty years of serious boozing, and I was someone who's only exercise in life was bad-form-pushups and riding my bicycle to work.

     Fast forward to the (almost) present.  My fiftieth birthday was scheduled to happen in the middle of the Covid pandemic.  That meant no big parties, no wild ass bands to have play a secret spot, no flying to exotic wastelands, no gatherings of friends of any kind, and just in general, nothing anything like the fun-ass time I had always planned on having for this special day.  A present I could give myself, however for my big five-oh, could be getting into shape! I had already quit drinking, and during the onset of the pandemic, had taken the first few months to learn scales and a little theory on guitar (despite playing for thirty years, I'm pretty terrible), taught myself some basic editing skills and conducted some interviews of musicians I adore, so why not have the mid-century mark be something pretty damn big, and pretty damn physical?  I had been running a little with my wife recently, and although I enjoyed it this time around, I felt my form was pretty gawdawful and my knees suffered as a result.  I wanted something a little more than cardio and pushups.  Something utilitarian, fun, and really out of my comfort zone.  I found it just two months shy of my fiftieth birthday:  a Muay Thai gym literally just a few blocks where I work