As the only heathen to make it to Out Of Service, Pennsylvania to fight in a well-watered hollow of a mountain, I had a few consolation prizes for letting down our Christian allies by not fielding an effective opposition:

For the second year in a row I brought the thunder of the old gods to their sunny day as we fought and sparred in the drenching rain.

I came out on top of a truly sick knife duel with Nero the Pict, with whom I spent three nights drinking and exchanging experiences had among the ruins of Baltimore.

Dennis the jock beat me thrice with the stick and shield, which I used to be the best practitioner of. This means that I’m not the end of a line but a progress marker.

Their chief, Sean beat me decisively in our every engagement, including a long round of boxing sparring. I did my faded best, but as a coach, the worst outcome would have been to beat him and he proved to have learned every lesson he should have extracted from our fight 14 months ago.

Ulric Kerensky boxed competitively for almost three full rounds against the squatish, heavy-footed Pict, marking a huge stride for the young genius into the world of physical aggression. Ulric also informed me that “your reader from Syracuse sends his regards,” a compliment which felt all the better for being anonymous.

Keith, a young Christian who survived the Detroit race wars of the 1990s without succumbing to hate, put on the gloves and fought until his body cramped up, and fought again, more positive about becoming a more muscular Christian after his bouts than before.

Most of all, for me, for my shade, the one thing I created with another gone man, Chuck Goetz, Modern Agonistics, a blatantly pagan slobber-knocker ritual, is being kept alive in a better place than Baltimore, where it has died along with most good things. All who participated kept the contact level at a mutually accessible place on the learning curve, so no man got reduced, but they all gained. In the future, contact will amp up as the skill and experience level rises. For now the goals of masculine elevation were all met.

Combat arts are about nurturing a masculine rite that might keep souls from falling into dust even when the body lives, in those inevitably emasculating future times, and, like the art of boxing being passed from race to race and back again, being preserved by ancients in stone and script to be resurrected by men of another bloodline, marks, in my heathen heart, the true universalist value, combativeness, without which we are all the sheep of cruel, earthly shepherds.

Thank you men, all five of you, for injecting some meaning into this weary year.

I would also like to thank Lili Hun for keeping the site going while I was away, Lynn Lockhart for generating extra blogspot posts and the Australian writing group working with Lili to compensate for the low output running up to the third Annual Man Weekend.

James, Monday, July 24 2017

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival