Life is Just a Lullaby

Today is the closest I've gotten to a "rest" day.
10AM: Grappling
12PM: MMA sparring

Stayed after for a bit to stretch and talk to my friend, Michelle.
I don't know...just wasn't feeling that edge today. Probably lack of sleep.

What I like to call the "hunger (and these days, also anger)" edge helps me keep my stamina throughout the day.

I'm following Ori Hofmekler's Warrior Diet, where you basically eat one meal a day at the end of the day. Its brutal at first, but I do pretty well with it. Until 7 pm hits. That seems to be the magic time when I get really hungry and lose energy. I'm experimenting with how this effects muscle retention and keep updates. Though I'm not convinced this is the best way to go for fighting performance. I was introduced to this first by Wolf (Jesse Anderson). I had told him about the paleo diet I was doing...and he took it one step further.

Tomorrow is going to busy day. I just got back from Al's and Vic's. It was Paul's 32nd birthday. But once again...I can't...sleep...yet.

(moonrise in Namibia, Africa 2007)

It's hard to comprehend one person's struggle with sleep when you are the type of person that drifts into the land of dreams the instant your head comes in contact with the pillow. You can never imagine how it feels to be trapped between complete awareness, an alertness so acute that no minute sound or movement goes unnoticed, and the sweet oblivion that sleep rewards, a peaceful, senseless rejuvenation of body, heart, and mind.

At night, the whole world seems to have retired and the distant revving of a car's engine and far away flicker of a lonesome light are the only races of human life left...the only evidence that people ever existed here. The streets are utterly deserted and the wind howls noisily as though reclaiming its nocturnal haunt. The hanging light glimmers powerfully like a beacon, shining more brightly than you could ever remember. Emitting a white, piercing light that encompasses you in its glow, illuminating the contours of your face and hiding the rest that lingers ever closer.

The clock chimes loudly and seems to weaken under the unremitting hum of the apartment, empty of every sign of life despite you being hunched in a shadowy corner.

Life at night for me is something extremely hard to put into words. Your senses work in overdrive as your mind attempts to organize the day's events with a tinge of naive apprehension that something would have transformed into faith and beauty; failing every time.

Depending on who you are, night can be a congruent experience of the previous day filled with noise and activity, full of action, and full of life. I consider myself a thinker so the pain becomes easier to bear as the night draws on--and the ghosts formed by the ethereal light of normality prance to shine hope into hopeless, faith into faithless, love into broken.

Nights consist of failed attempts to understand nothing and everything. With the strange, unforgiving darkness and deceiving silence, the night is unpredictable; anything could happen. You've say there night after night since you can remember and NOTHING ever changes...everything is simply the same yet unrecognizably different. The last day has stolen another part of your soul and you feel the crevice that has been left gradually become filled with the familiar unexplained mist that encircles your very being every moment of every day. You shiver as icy fingers play that haunted melody on your spine...taunted echoes of forgiveness and regret bombard your ears as you try desperately to forget past events that threaten the complete destruction of everything you once thought to be solid.

But what is it mean to be solid, anyhow? Nothing lasts forever. Everything, thus, is fluid.

"Sleep away and dream a dream, life is just a lullaby"