The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment Page 12

  My reputation was ruined and the whole ordeal was absolutely humiliating. But the truth of the matter is that if I don’t stick a needle in my thigh twice a week, my health will deteriorate. So I am not going to quit doing it, and I am not going to apologize for doing it. Being unjustly labeled a cheater hurts, but when the only way to eliminate that buzz word is to sacrifice your health, it makes your decision a no-brainer.

  Epilogue

  I did my time and I am done. Don’t ask me what happened, or when, or really how. I truly don’t know, and can’t tell you. I’m fighting again. I haven’t fought in California. I don’t know if I even can, or would want to. I don’t want to even ask, because I am certain that the “answer” will be a jumble of confusion-producing legalese, with no real answer, and I worry that diving into that rabbit hole again might leave me stark, staring MAD.

  I can tell you this—the last time I breezed through the ol’ Golden State, one of the commission big wigs who made my life a living hell was standing at a red light, looking a bit worse for wear, holding up a cardboard sign that said, “Will Suspend Innocent Fighters Indefinitely for Food (Junk Science = Evidence).” I owed him a stern lecture, and maybe a slapping around, but instead, I just rolled down the window of the limo my sponsor had picked me up in, handed the worn-out old codger a five-spot, and told the driver to lead-foot me and my babe to the House of Blues for the Gospel Brunch.

  NEW DOES NOT ALWAYS MEAN BETTER

  When did new become synonymous with better?

  f you read this book from the beginning, as opposed to flipping randomly around every time you sat on the toilet, then you probably remember reading my chapter on ancient knowledge and are probably thinking, “There goes ChaCha, contradicting himself. He just got finished telling me old things suck, and now he is telling me old is better.” Let me explain. I’m not talking about old forms of martial arts or old styles of dressing. In those cases, new is clearly better. But America clearly has an obsession for new. Just look at our desire (no, our need) to upgrade our iPhones almost as quickly as we upgrade our spouses (Siri-ously, you don’t need to replace your iPhone every two weeks.) But just because something is new does not necessarily make it better. To ensure we are heading in the right direction, we need to compare and contrast. This is especially true in politics. Let’s look at the progressive ideology of “change.” People on the left immediately view “change” as being better than what came before it, simply by virtue of being different—that is, not the same.

  No one has been a more vocal advocate of change than President Barack Obama. The man stole the hearts and minds of disenfranchised Americans with that single word. It was the greatest act of mass-hypnotism in the history of the world. With a snap of his fingers, a wave of his hand, and by uttering the word “change” seven hundred million times, the nation became transfixed, as if merely listening to the word would alter the world for the better.

  Nothing really changed, but at least the promise of the rhetoric was fulfilled. Out with the old, in with the new: the progressive agenda is advanced, while the old conservative docket is put on the backburner. But how often does anyone stop to think, “Is the new thing really going to be better than the old one?” Traditional ideas, values, systems, principles, and even people get cast aside as the new wave of righteousness rolls ashore. The waves crest higher and higher with the shrieks and complaints of the American Left.

  Among those complaining and shrieking loudest and most often is Bill Maher, a lefty political pundit masquerading as a comedian. On his show, Maher crowns himself dictator of America and then creates the “new rules” Americans must abide by, or else suffer the consequence of not getting to sit at the table with the cool kids. Every week Maher goes over his set of rules, cleverly disguised as punchlines at otherwise low points in the show, followed by a three-to-four-minute description of said rule in action, delivered in a manner that is half-comedy and half-seething vitriol.

  But, again, are his new rules better than the ones laid down by our forefathers two hundred plus years ago as they framed our Constitution and the nation we have become? Does Bill Maher have some insight that eluded these great men, some of the greatest thinkers in modern history? Is it possible that the old rules were in fact superior to the new ones? Let’s take a look at the old and new rules of charity, and I’ll let you decide.

  There was a time when charity meant that nice people put on their best smiles, came to you with hat in hand, and made their most passionate case for their cause. If you were kind enough, gentle enough, righteous enough, you may have offered up a few of your hard-earned dollars to help with their plight. Realizing the uncertainty of future funding, these people were exceedingly careful in how they spent every dollar you donated. Furthermore, society pitied these poor souls who required help. This made the recipients of charity hesitant about accepting the help and services of others, or at least cautious about abusing the goodwill of their neighbors.

  Fast-forward a few decades. Now “charity” is liberal double-speak for “a group of people smarter than you are showing up at your house with guns, taking about half of what you earn, and giving it to their friends.” Sure, some of it will go to the truly needy, but the bulk will go to the well-connected. And the rest will be used to create a permanent class of people who feel righteously entitled, not just to take your money, but to live a good life off it and simultaneously condemn you for living an even better life than they do. When charity is a choice, people’s goodwill is divvied up equally among those they feel are the neediest. When charity is an obligation, the donors become jaded, the recipients become entitled, and the truly needy are often left out in the cold.

  Don’t get me wrong: Not everything old is better. Google is a better search engine than AOL, Cael Sanderson is a better wrestler than Farmer Burns, and Chael P. Sonnen is better than all that came before him. But in the immortal words of Issac Newton, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” For new to truly be better, it must be based on using the wisdom of those before you, expanding upon it, and coming up with something a step beyond. This holds true for search-engine development, wrestling technique, or political dogma. Ideas that worked in the past can work in the future. It’s foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when a simple tweak to a proven conservative formula could easily be the answer to the situation at hand. We just need to stand on the shoulders of giants, not the shoulders of self-righteous people like Bill Maher.

  n my line of work I’ve heard it all, and frankly, I’m sick of hearing people say one thing but mean something entirely different. This is especially true in the world of mixed martial arts. To help you cut through all the mumbo jumbo, I will now offer my translations of the most typical lines you hear in the sport, and the true meanings behind them.

  ack when I was a sociology major at the University of Oregon, I had two roommates, Kevin and Jessie. While I was busy studying and building my genius, they liked to play pranks on each other. Some were harmless, and others were rather vicious. One that fell somewhere in the middle took place on April 1 of my sophomore year. On this particular day, I walked into the kitchen to find Jessie brewing a disgusting concoction in a giant salad bowl. He started by pouring in a little milk, then he added some eggs. I didn’t think much of it until he pulled a container of lunch meat from the fridge and started shredding it into little bits and dropping it into the bowl.

  “What the heck are you doing?” I asked.

  He said nothing, just kept a sinister smile on his face as he put a lid on the salad bowl and then poked small holes into the top, as if there were something in the nasty sludge he needed to keep alive.

  I knew something was up, so I followed him as he carried the sloshing bowl to Kevin’s room. I watched in amusement as he wedged the bowl into the narrow space under Kevin’s bed. It wasn’t until he removed Kevin’s mattress and poked holes in his box spring that I realized the extent of his commitment. He didn’t want Kevin
to immediately notice the smell; he wanted the stench to slowly work its way up through his box spring, through his mattress, and then infiltrate Kevin’s dreams.

  I knew the punch line was going to take a while, so I went back about my business. So did Jessie. Sometime around the middle of May—six weeks after April Foolss Day—Kevin came into the living room and proclaimed, “My room stinks.” I went in to investigate. His room didn’t just stink—it smelled worse than a toilet in the slums of Mumbai. I had completely forgotten about Jessie’s little prank. I was in the process of helping Kevin find the source of the stench when Jessie pulled me aside and reminded me about the little brew he had deposited under Kevin’s bed.

  At this point, Kevin had begun dating this very annoying, very mean girl whom both Jessie and I had a strong disdain for, so we joined forces and tried to convince Kevin that it was the girl who had made his room smell bad. “Dude, I think she has some issues,” were among the words spoken. Kevin ignored us and, to the best of his ability, the smell. But it was finals week, and the smell in his room got so bad that he could no longer study. He washed his sheets every single day, sometimes twice a day. He vacuumed his floor incessantly. He wiped everything down in his room with disinfecting wipes. And still he couldn’t get rid of the smell. Although it was mid-May, it was freezing cold in Oregon, and he had to sleep with his widows wide open. Unable to remove the smell by cleaning, he began to believe that perhaps we might be right about his girlfriend, and he broke up with her. When that still didn’t get rid of the vile stench, he checked into a hotel.

  The minute he left the apartment, Jessie removed the rancorous bowl and disposed of it. When Kevin returned from the hotel, the smell was gone. Needless to say, Jessie and I informed him that having the apartment free of his former girlfriend for five days finally allowed her stench to clear out. Remember, neither one of us wanted him to get back with her.

  Although we kept what we had done a secret from Kevin, we didn’t keep it a secret from our other friends. At the time, Ben Crane, the now-famous golfer, was one of our study partners, and he shared a good laugh at Jessie’s shenanigans. We told him every last detail of the prank. We shot our mouths off far and wide, and we realized that it would eventually get back to Kevin. So on graduation day, Jessie handed Kevin a card inside which was a detailed description of the origin of the mystery smell that had permeated his room months earlier. As you would imagine, a very pissed off Kevin began chasing a giggling Jessie around the campus, confusing everyone in their Sunday best. That was the end of the matter. Jessie had a great story to tell his grandkids.

  Fast-forward four years. Jessie and his wife were in town, and Jessie invited his old buddy Ben Crane and his wife out to dinner. At one point the conversation died down, and Ben’s wife said to him, “Hey, tell them the story about what you did to your roommate in college. You know, about that prank that you pulled with the salad container.”

  “Aw, I don’t want to tell that story,” Ben said.

  “No, you have to tell it. It is soooo funny!”

  Ben looked across the table, right into Jessie’s eyes, and said, “For April Fools’ Day one year, I filled a salad container with a whole bunch of nasty stuff and stuck it under my roommate’s bed.”

  “Really?” Jessie said.

  “Yeah.” He went on to describe Jessie’s prank in minute detail. He talked about how he broke up pieces of turkey, and how his roommate dumped his annoying girlfriend and even moved into a hotel so he could study for finals.

  Jessie didn’t need a bullshit detector to know Ben Crane was lying, was retelling Jessie’s story as if it were his. Apparently Ben had told the lie so often, he had completely forgotten that it was Jessie who had told him the story in the first place. Jessie, being a good guy, was going to let it ride. But Jessie had told his wife that story on many occasions, and she wasn’t going to let it fly. Immediately she said, “Ben, you do realize that you are telling Jessie’s story. You realize that he is the one who did that prank, not you.”

  I will spare you all the details about the havoc this caused at the dinner table, but let’s just say that it was pretty freakin’ hilarious: Ben’s wife began screaming at him for lying to her for so many years, and Ben looked as if he wanted to run out of the restaurant. When you break it down, I guess there are several morals to this story. The first one is, Don’t lie. And the second one is, Don’t believe a word that comes out of the mouth of a professional athlete. Unless, of course, that athlete is Chael P.

  That reminds me, did I ever tell you about the time I stopped a mugging the day I was to fight for the title. Yeah, it was Greg Jackson and me. …

  HISTORY of Wrestling and The Martial Arts

  ot much can be said about wrestling—other than it is the best sport in the history of the universe. It also happens to be a very old sport. Now, if you read my blurb on ancient knowledge, you know I’m not a huge fan of people who worship something simply because it is old and mysterious. People have done a lot of stupid things throughout history, and there are groups of people today who like to identify themselves with those stupid things, not realizing that they are even stupider now than when they were first practiced. If you look back through history, wrestling was one of the few things that people got right. How do you know? Just look at the class of people who wrestled.

  In Egypt hieroglyphs engraved in stone circa 2500 BC depict athletes wrestling it out for supremacy. I’m not a big fan of Egypt, simply because of the buildings shaped like triangles there, and after my fight with Anderson, I have come to hate all things that have anything to do with that horrible geometrical form. But you have to admit that the Egyptians were pretty badass. Baquet III, Egyptian governor and wrestling fanatic, had 405 images of wrestlers chiseled onto his tomb when he kicked the bucket. In these scenes you can find double-leg takedowns and knee blasts. The Egyptians even wrote a list of rules and instructions on papyrus around AD 100, laying out all the aspects of wrestling training and competition.

  The Egyptians weren’t the only ones to wrestle for sport. Ancient Indian civilizations made mention of wrestling in their epic Sanskrit texts as early as the fifth century BC, and the Chinese used wrestling to keep their soldiers on their toes during peacetime. Even Genghis Khan, the super awesome Mongolian warlord and leader, was reported to have instructed his soldiers to learn the perfect trifecta of “the three manly skills”—wrestling, archery, and horseback riding.

  Who knows how long wrestling has been around. In prehistoric times, all the real men were out wrestling sabertooth tigers, and all the liberal-arts majors failed to survive childbirth. It wasn’t until we began coddling and subsidizing the liberal-arts wieners that articles were written about the sport. The bottom line is that for as long as men have had arms, they’ve been wrestling. To solve disputes. To stay in shape. To sharpen body, mind, and soul against any and all challenges they might face in their brutal existence. In short, every little society on earth that had two brain cells to rub together independently realized the great heights that can be attained by having the young men of their culture grab each other and toss each other to the ground.

  Unfortunately, some societies did not have two brain cells to rub together. Unfortunately, some societies didn’t even have one brain cell to rub against the empty space filling up the rest of their brain cavity. Against all odds, these societies were too stupid to invent wrestling or at least a reasonable facsimile. Instead, they developed a “martial art.” In hindsight, voluntarily forfeiting their lives to slavery would have been a better choice for these cultures, as they have added very little to the betterment of the human race. Below I offer a brief description of these martial arts, allowing you to make up your own mind as far as their relevance.

  Karate

  When discussing pointless, time-wasting endeavors, karate has to be the second activity you consider (the first being trying to convince the California State Athletic Commission of your innocence). Karate was developed on the small
Japanese island now known as Okinawa by out-of-work fishermen. Because of their humble position in the economic structure of feudal Japan, these malnourished fishermen began consuming their own urine to recycle vital nutrients missing from their meager diets. Of course Japanese society frowned upon this, and eventually the fishermen-turned-urophagists were exiled to the outskirts of society. To exact their revenge on Japanese society at large, these pariahs developed a unique style of martial art to perfect their minds and sharpen their bodies. Unfortunately, they were still extremely malnourished and quite easily broke their hand bones. They remedied this situation by swatting weak kicks at their opponent and then simply refusing to engage for hours at a time. This method would annoy most opponents into defeat. This style of pseudo-attacking and running for your life, called karate, was born, and Japan adopted it, and the fishermen, into society with open arms. In an effort to make the story more family-friendly, Japanese society buried the true story about the piss-drinking originators of the “art.” However, once in a blue moon, before important fights, you can still find Japanese karatea drinking their own urine in an effort to connect with their forgotten ancestors.

  Tae Kwon Do

  Surprisingly, despite its humble origins as a coping mechanism for insecure Japanese salarymen, karate did have its imitators. Korea, aka, Japan Jr., also wanted a piece of the running-in-circles-while-randomly-throwing-kicks pie. Koreans will take any opportunity to rip off the Japanese and steal a part of their culture while vehemently arguing not only that they are its originators but also that they in fact do it better. This was the case when Korea imported karate, changed nothing, and called it tae kwon do. I’m fairly certain that “tae kwon do” literally means “avoiding copyright infringement.” Because of the weak legal system in the Far East (so weak in fact that 94 percent of Korean lawsuits are settled by a coin flip), they managed to get away with this blatant theft. But if you look at the bricks and mortar of the arts, you’ll see that tae kwon do is exactly the same as karate. Illegal face punching? Check. Thin, wispy gi to allow airy comfort in the crotch region? Check. A dizzying array of kicks so powerful they could decapitate a butterfly? Double check. Do yourself a favor: when trying to decide between taking up karate or tae kwon do, choose suicide instead.