Written from memory on 6/15/2022

Feeling poorly, I went down to the gym to sleep on the wrestling mat in the afternoon. The sun beat on the building and warmed it up, waking me with sweat, the pressure from the eye relieved. The mat was dirty, the ring canvas worse.

A heavy push broom and a sanitizing mat push mop were at hand. In an hour, the gym was clean and I was getting thirsty. After sorting the gloves by weight, up to the house I went.

Standing next to another man was a shaven-headed man of, 5’ 11’ I think, about 170 pounds, with a lean to muscular hiker’s build. Most fit men in his age group, mid forties I’d say, have that lesbian bicycle build. With a tight close beard and mustache of light brown with some gray coming in, I figured this was Andy, and he said it was so, shaking my hand, “I heard you weren’t feeling well.”

“The neap of the decrepit is all, nice to meet you.”

He does not care if you address him as Andy or Andrew, a common thing among writers who are not commercially bent to the brand, as we end up meeting people under a more formal version of the name we lived with when young and invalidated. Andrew—I’ll call him that because I have another Andy in my training circle—has a high Arуan forehead and a very Cromagnon high rounding at the back of the head, making fencing headgear a little hard to tighten. He does not suffer from that Western European narrowing and sloping of the skull among the upper classes that informed the design of these masks.

Andrew is soft-spoken and considerate, always taking his time to make an address and being certain to give those with whom he speaks the space to finish their statement. Please, Andrew, do not debate Vox Day. I wish I were as reserved as Andrew, but tend to run off at the mouth on tangents of dark fancy.

Of all of the 14 men present, Andrew treated this get together in survivalist fashion, by taking the best position in case we got hit by BruisedLickTunckle or AuntQueefa or the SPEDZ for the crime of beating each other up, an unlikley event. However, Banjo and I had the cops called on us for training 7 days earlier in a lesser and more pestered state.

I am a passenger, and Andrew has my favorite vehicle, a Fuck-you-350 4-door pickup with an extra gas tank in the bed, and a socket for hauling the Arуan nomads of a future dystopia. We both had gifts for each other. I had a tire thumper for Andrew, that weighs too much for my pack. Andrew had a fine tomahawk handle for me, a handy club I really wanted to take, but I had to lighten my pack again. I suggested he use the old handle of his very nice tomahawk for forearm conditioning. Cory and I went over the exercises with him the next day in the morning during the developmental segment.

Andrew has two sons now, both named after famous mountain men. He honored me with two podcast sessions in the cab of his Warhorse truck, which is aptly named. He has his smartphone set up on the dash in a GPS mount and simply begins to speak. He has an interview style that draws you out and departs from his written outline at ease.

It was quite an honor that he brought a copy of The Violence Project and Blue-Eyed Daughter of Zeus. I signed these, and encourage Andrew to take him to the nearest pharmacy to decipher the message.

In our first discussion, tribalism and neo-tribalism were a healthy portion of our subject. With Andrew, this was a much easier discussion than with others, as he seems to have dropped out of the civilized hierarchy a while ago and I had no need to battle the white picket fence 1950s fantasy that so many men younger than he harbor. As an 8th generation Portlander, who grew up in a town when it was going from tough to sloth, colonized by homos from San Francisco and Freeattle, he knows that we were born with the muzzle of globo-homo pressed between our eyes.

In our second recording, Andrew focused on the day’s event, and entertained Black Metal, who walked up to the truck exhausted and ready to bed down on the wrestling mat, as an interlude in the conversation. The rest of the discussion was on The Violence Project and my fiction, which was quite nice, to speak to a fellow novelist about such work. Andrew told me, “I was due for a punch in the face,” grinning and glad that he had made some new connections with men in an unraveling world.

I felt like I blew a couple for questions and my host did not mind, as we sat in his strategically parked tactical vehicle. Mister Gray of InTheseGoingsDown was impressed with Andrew’s stealth camping set up and impressed with Andrew’s stoic demeanor. On the way back to Pennsylvania he would say, “We have to listen to Andy’s podcast, that dude is centered and he’s not all about the cop and military bullshit.”

Andrew did not bring a detectable ego to the knucklehead event, which reminded me, that we have not had a self-defense-survivalist competition set in Modern Agonistics for 20 years now. So, Andrew and I did an asymmetrical boxing round, in which he boxed and I tried to advance and clinch open handed, and a baton round after the same fashion. I would like to formalize these drills at the next event.

One reason why I am really glad that Andrew came, is that he lives within two hours of our host, Sean, who is an Alpha Male stud, which matches up good with we capable but not dominant Omega Males. It has become my policy to introduce men who live near to each other when I am in the region as we never know when life will sift sideways.

At one point I went looking for Andrew just before sunset—as sundown seemed the perfect time for our discussions—and found him sitting cross-legged under the rising moon in the small hillside clearing next to his hide-like shelter. It occurred to me then, that this fellow seems to have spent as much time alone and separated from other humans in love with the natural world as I have spent alone among subhumans at war with man’s unnatural world. I think that many of my readers would do better following Andrew’s path than that of this urban ghast.

Thank you for the counter culture art stickers, Andrew, and the conversation. If you would like to do a written collaboration at some point, in fiction or nonfiction, I’m game and its your book if we do it.