Welcome to "The Ocho" edition of this road trip newsletter! Thank you for tuning into the latest and greatest from the front lines of my ambitions as a martial artist and author. I'm glad you're here and am exceptionally grateful for your support, interest, and investment in this journey.

If you’re new, welcome. If you’re not, welcome back! However we know each other or however you found this newsletter, I hope sharing some stories and thoughts on a monthly-or-more cadence will inspire you to find and follow some courageous and crazy dreams of your own.

If you'd like to catch up on the previous editions, you can check out the full newsletter archive here. You can also view this edition of the newsletter on the web if you don't want to keep reading from your email client. Please pardon any wonky formatting, image blips, or other slight bugs in between platforms.

What Cotton McKnight and Pepper Brooks of ESPN8 "The Ocho" might also say about my quitting my job to train BJJ and write a book (Credits: "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.")

Big thanks to ongoing Patreon supporters

The ROI of the Southern California Writer's Conference was off the charts, and I have your support to thank for it. I hope you enjoyed listening to "Page One" and am excited to share more drafts, WIPs, and special content behind the patron paywall.

If you'd like to join the Patreon family and ride in the literary passenger seat on the long road to publishing this magnum opus—you can contribute here. Every cent counts.

If you have to ask, no, we are not there yet, but we're on the right track.

Before we dive in...

It's been a good month. Things are looking up. Audentes fortuna iuvat. Below you'll find a recap of travel, training, and writing updates, along with some fun pictures in the mix.

Without further ado...

Travel Updates

Staying sharp by indulging the senses...and the stomach

I haven’t spent any time out of town of late, though I am determined to get one good trip to Orange County and Los Angeles on the calendar before I move out of California on April 15th (which is coming up fast…fearsomely so). But just because I haven’t properly traveled doesn’t mean that I haven’t been exploring.

I recently contributed some "wisdom" on creative practice (that, in part, relates to travel and exploration) to a reader mailbag edition of my friend Jeremy's newsletter, The Fire Jar (subscribe here, s'il vous plait):

In efforts to take my own advice, I do my best to take myself to new places, take unfamiliar roads to familiar places, else do something 1% different from my usual in efforts to stay sharp and spark inspiration.

Doing this has been particularly important in San Diego: I've been here for over twice as long as any other city on the road trip, making it easy to fall into a trap of complacent dullness. There's comfort in 'same,' adventure in 'different.' Outside of the reliable, highly-scheduled constants of writing and training, I aim to improvise and mix things up as much as I can.

The easiest way for me to do this is by wandering as far as I can within walking distance of my apartment and trying something new to eat or drink (something I couldn't make at home).

This has led to the inspiration and consumption of:

A vanilla latte at the Golden Hill outpost of Dark Horse Coffee Roasters. Their cup designs give me some mild-but-pleasant BoJack Horseman vibes.
A dessert that convinced me that ordering ice cream at a restaurant doesn't have to be so boring as a scoop in a bowl. Monzu prides itself on his homemade pasta and sauces, but the thing I'll most write home about is the yin-yang of hazelnut and chocolate gelato with a molten chocolate ganache underneath and blanched, crushed hazelnuts surrounding the scoop. I don't have a picture, alas, but you can ogle the rest of their menu.
Two negronis. If a place is willing to stake its reputation on a certain food or drink item, I will feel compelled to try it. Invigatorium on Ninth Ave stakes its reputation the negroni, a cocktail I typically dislike, but was willing to try there for the aforemention reason. I now think I'm ruined for drinking negronis anywhere else. Even if I find a comparably good negroni elsewhere, the rest of the experience will manage to struggle to compete with the atmosphere of Invigatorium: specifically, funk music, dinosaurs, and disco balls. If you recall my loving discussion of Morning Glory from the previous newsletter, Invigatorium is in the same restaurant group.

Been there, done that, drank to that. Look at that big and proper ice cube!

Training Updates

On changing priorities, changing schedules, and chasing the writing over the "fighting"

I have been navigating the unpleasant but likely-overdue transition from competitor to competitive hobbyist. I am making that transition reluctantly.

The last few months fully and finally convinced me that I could not physically endure two-a-days every day, like the real killers at Atos. For me to do so would probably require doing steroids, plain and simple. I'm not interested in juicing and even if I were, PEDs wouldn't be enough for me to overcome the skill and experience gap between me and my average training partner.

I've swallowed my pride and come to terms with the fact that I'm a little too old, too deficient in athletic gifts, and too much else going on to be hanging with the professionally-aspiring competitors in their teens and twenties. And that's okay—I'll give them as much hell as possible, but I can't expect to win against them. These are people for whom jiu-jitsu is not only everything, it's often the only thing.

I used to see this kind of thinking as a small-minded mentality, one full of excuses. Now I see it more as an acceptance of reality, specifically the reality of my own physical durability and of the limits of my mental focus.

In a sentence: I came to terms with the fact that I can't train like the pros and write the book. There was no half-assed way for me to after both pursuits. I had to pick one and go in with both cheeks, so to speak. Last year, I chose to train like the pros. This year, I choose the book.

Tactically, what this means is I've shifted from training in the morning, which is when most of the pros train, to training in the evening, which is when most of the more hobbyist crowd trains (though the pros come in the evenings to beat up and get active drilling reps on the hobbyists).

At first, I was really sad about this transition. I got questions from training partners about where I'd been (even though I was still at the gym every day, I wasn't going at the same time as they were). Those questions made me feel guilty about not taking jiu-jitsu as seriously as they were (or as seriously as I had been). When I saw new tournaments hit the calendar, I felt like a slacker and cop-out, watching friends sign up for them and knowing that I couldn't, in good faith, sign up for anything and train well for it until I finished my manuscript. What was most demoralizing was feeling how significantly my rate of my improvement slowed: by the time I walked into the gym in the evenings, my intellectual capacity had been maxed out from a full day of efforts dedicated toward writing. There simply wasn't as much mental gas in the tank for learning new techniques and problem-solving in rounds.

I've known for years that in order to make any strides with writing, I'd need my intensity in writing to match—if not exceed—the intensity in jiu-jitsu. I just wasn't willing to do it. I was scared that redirecting any time, energy, and effort from jiu-jitsu toward writing wouldn't pay off, and would leave me out-of-shape, frequently strung out on caffeine or alcohol, and depressed to the extent of a bohemian stereotype.

I'll admit that I've been hitting the energy drinks a little harder the last few weeks. But the shift toward writing has been worth it. Thanks to changing my schedule, some tough love from Bug, and having a writing conference to light a fire under my ass, I got more writing done in the last four weeks than I had in the last four months.

The person in the household more likely to have a serious caffeine, alcohol, or drug problem: @snickers_the_degenerate_doxie, pictured here channeling her inner Jordan Belfort. If you're wondering why a big, brass keepsake box shaped like a quaalude has made its way into this newsletter and into my road trip belongings, feel free to reply to this newsletter to ask. It's a longer story.

Writing Updates

I made a number of strides in writing in the last few weeks, in large part due to shifting my primary focus from training to writing. The biggest fruits of my writing-focused labors include:

Finishing my first sample chapter, in earnest. (Patreon peeps get an audio sneak peek of the first page).
Getting 80% done with my book proposal (ahead of getting some professional eyes on it for feedback and editing).
Cold DM-ing a very-relevant-to-what-I'm-writing author on Twitter, having a 45-minute call with him, and getting his thumbs up on endorsing my book when the time comes.
Attending my first writing conference.

I could easily spend a whole newsletter writing about any of the above, but the experience of at writing conference is the most interesting one. I will likely write a separate blog post about it (if you're interested in reading it, shoot me an email and I'll send it your way when ready), but in the meantime, to describe the experience briefly: imagine spending two-and-a-half days in which...

You're surrounded by an abundance of people who have the same weird passion/quirk/obsession that you do.
You don't know a soul but you feel like you're attending a reunion of sorts (family, college, or otherwise). An enjoyable reunion.
Despite having fatigued yourself from a full schedule of activities, you leave more energized than you arrived.

...that's what the Southern California Writers' Conference was like for me.

I got a lot out of my time at the conference. I learned that my book pitch and query were solid but my first chapter (prior to revision) needed a lot of work. I got a sense of whether the story driving my book would be interesting to people who didn't know me personally and didn't do jiu-jitsu (answer: hard yes). I was inspired by a bunch of writers whose reasons for writing and kinds of writing were all over the map (to give one example: a fantasy writer who used to work as a killer whale trainer at Sea World).

If there's one sentiment I had during the weekend and leaving the weekend, it's this: "I'm glad I didn't wait another year to give myself all-in shot at the dream."

Most people I met had long-held dreams of writing a book, but had significant, competing demands from work or family that made it hard for them to write. Many attendees had only started to write once they had retired. I could easily imagine a version of my life in which I waited until a certain promotion, until a certain life milestone, until I hit a certain age before I sat down and wrote the book of my dreams.

If anything, what's true for my jiu-jitsu is also true for my writing: I wish I'd started sooner, but I'm glad I'm doing it now.

One of the most important things learned at the writers' conference: the value of humor and not taking yourself so seriously, which I explore in this Instagram post about my Bat Mitzvah and in my recent purchase of silly Smiski figurines from the Mitsuwa Japanese grocery store in Kearny Mesa. I am embarassed to say how much I enjoy these little creatures. Fortunately, Smiski won't take up much space in the Subaru.

Closing Out

Spotted on the Embarcadero, near Grape Street x N. Harbor Drive on my Sunday morning run. Cue Aerosmith.

If you've been looking for a sign or have been waiting for your ship to come in...this is it!

Until next time,

EZ

PS: A podcast I recorded back in September (while still living in Oklahoma) just came out, and made me smile. A lot has changed in the last five months on the trip--and in the last 20 years since the podcast host and I last saw each other. The podcast is hosted by a childhood classmate of mine, Jonathan Cohen, who knew me between the ages of 4 and 11, during our shared days of Jewish day school and karate classes at Mayer's Karate and Fitness. We reconnected in 2021 via Instagram DM. His show was the first time we spoke in over twenty years.

Issue #008: Zen in the Art of Fighting