The body rebels in the mornings, ironically exerting more effort towards laziness and immobility then will ever be required during your light, pre-dawn workout. The joints are stiff and rusty, making you feel like you exist in only 2 dimensions. Your head is foggy, your vision compromised and sense of balance askew. Undeterred, you lumber like Frankenstein's Monster to your sink and turn the handle, grinning as the mechanics of the system creak to life in the limbo of awakening, just like you. In a moment, you feel warm, pleasantly scalding water coat your face, stirring you into being, forcibly returning some sense to your weary self. Your mind, best friend, most essential tool, and hated enemy, peppers you with verbal jabs, but you deftly perry them with the ease of the experienced. "Your bed looks soft and inviting.", he whispers enticingly. "Yet, my floor is annoyingly absent sweat.", you reply curtly, a grin appearing in defiance of your own weakness. "No one else is up this early inflicting this anguish on themselves.", he thunders, perturbed that you wont succumb into compliance with the middling majority. "And thats why they will never be me.", you roar in return, invigorated by your own mettle. Quiet moments like these are your tangible show of dedication to God that you will heed His call. They are instances where you scream to the world that you wont be beaten, ever, for you are exceptional, a ferocious predator among sonambulant prey. One day, as these moments stack up and compound like money faithfully and consistently invested in the stock market, you will escape and surpass their stifling ranks. Hit the deck. Your training starts in 2 minutes.
This life can be arduously lonely. Countless nights have been spent at a solitary barstool or far flung corner booth drenched in shadow, humbly reading a book and cradling my confidence and self worth gently and protectively in my rough, callused hands. The right friends will make their way to me eventually, I tell myself, quoting Carl Jung as I skip along the fringes of the world. Within the sphere of PUA, there are many people that fall under the moniker of the ancient Grecian alphabet. An Alpha is the quintessential jock, square jawed and dominant. People are drawn to him like a whore to money, and he commands attention and, sometimes begrudging, respect. His self-assuredness is unrivaled and steadfast, rooted in almost absurdly comical narcissism in some cases. The Sigma, me, is the Alpha of the darkness. Possessing prodigal social skills but lacking the temperament to use them fully and powerfully in all cases, he observes rather than participates. If the Alpha is in the limelight constantly, completely comfortable under the gazes of an adoring public, then the Sigma is the ghost that moves in time with the flickering shade of that same luminescence, the spectre with an evil grin and seductive gleam in his eye that promises the raunchy, forbidden and taboo. If the Alpha is the classic preppy overachiever, the Sigma is the ferocious rebel, clad in a leather jacket with an ocean of pomade holding back his thick waves of black hair. The Alpha is acceptance and praise, the embodiment of mainstream success and approval. The Sigma is the tattooed outlaw, the dreadnought that rides in on his Harley with a backpack full of literature, the imposing dreadnaught with the silver tongue. Long live the outcasts.
I take inspiration and comfort from the stories and lives of other's who've struggled and endured the whipping winds while scaling the cliffs of destiny. I am a modern day Sisyphus, pushing my ponderous boulder daily up the slopes of unforgiving adversity. I find solace in those that have walked this battered, beaten path before. Sylvester Stallone is one. Before getting his break at 30 in Rocky, he was a faceless, perpetually broke butcher constantly toeing the line between poverty and obscurity. Trapped in a broken marriage and completely removed from any support for his dreams other than the relentless beating of his own passionate, raging heart, he found reprieve and comfort in the New York Public Library. Its warmth emanated deep from within its halls and beckoned him, the bereft wanderer, grieving for a life he had never known at that point. Among those books, any texts really, one can find the raw materials one needs to rescue their reveries and longings from the incarceration of imagination and thrust them raw and exposed into the light of the world. Herschel Walker was another. Bullied from a young age for his excess of size rather than lack of it, I found instant relatability to his life. His dedication to his calisthenics regime is what I owe 1000% credence too. Reading of his athletic exploits at 18 infected me with an unerring love for training, and to this day I will never miss a session. He was ridiculed and ostracized his entire life, even after achieving greatness in both academia and athletics. His unique and, to the weak, unnerving synthesis of intelligence and strength formed a formiddable juxtaposition. He was the consumate outsider, regarded more as a Demi-God than a peer or friend. I discovered kinship in this story. Even now at this new workplace, I endure an idiot that seeks to rile me up simply because I train. In Herschel's example Im granted perspective. He turns to Jesus to quell those violent urges, so I do the same in turn.
This life can be trying and challenging. I contemplate often, what exactly is the point of entertaining the trappings? I can get home and guzzle down 3 or 4 beers instead of 2 liters of fresh water. I can lay in bed and fester in my own filth in place of training hard and showering. I can live vicariously through a jumble of animated polygons in a videogame rather than plow through my customary book of the week. It would be easy. And easy kills. Nothing great ever came of leisure, it has to be earned. Back to the boulder.
This life can be arduously lonely. Countless nights have been spent at a solitary barstool or far flung corner booth drenched in shadow, humbly reading a book and cradling my confidence and self worth gently and protectively in my rough, callused hands. The right friends will make their way to me eventually, I tell myself, quoting Carl Jung as I skip along the fringes of the world. Within the sphere of PUA, there are many people that fall under the moniker of the ancient Grecian alphabet. An Alpha is the quintessential jock, square jawed and dominant. People are drawn to him like a whore to money, and he commands attention and, sometimes begrudging, respect. His self-assuredness is unrivaled and steadfast, rooted in almost absurdly comical narcissism in some cases. The Sigma, me, is the Alpha of the darkness. Possessing prodigal social skills but lacking the temperament to use them fully and powerfully in all cases, he observes rather than participates. If the Alpha is in the limelight constantly, completely comfortable under the gazes of an adoring public, then the Sigma is the ghost that moves in time with the flickering shade of that same luminescence, the spectre with an evil grin and seductive gleam in his eye that promises the raunchy, forbidden and taboo. If the Alpha is the classic preppy overachiever, the Sigma is the ferocious rebel, clad in a leather jacket with an ocean of pomade holding back his thick waves of black hair. The Alpha is acceptance and praise, the embodiment of mainstream success and approval. The Sigma is the tattooed outlaw, the dreadnought that rides in on his Harley with a backpack full of literature, the imposing dreadnaught with the silver tongue. Long live the outcasts.
I take inspiration and comfort from the stories and lives of other's who've struggled and endured the whipping winds while scaling the cliffs of destiny. I am a modern day Sisyphus, pushing my ponderous boulder daily up the slopes of unforgiving adversity. I find solace in those that have walked this battered, beaten path before. Sylvester Stallone is one. Before getting his break at 30 in Rocky, he was a faceless, perpetually broke butcher constantly toeing the line between poverty and obscurity. Trapped in a broken marriage and completely removed from any support for his dreams other than the relentless beating of his own passionate, raging heart, he found reprieve and comfort in the New York Public Library. Its warmth emanated deep from within its halls and beckoned him, the bereft wanderer, grieving for a life he had never known at that point. Among those books, any texts really, one can find the raw materials one needs to rescue their reveries and longings from the incarceration of imagination and thrust them raw and exposed into the light of the world. Herschel Walker was another. Bullied from a young age for his excess of size rather than lack of it, I found instant relatability to his life. His dedication to his calisthenics regime is what I owe 1000% credence too. Reading of his athletic exploits at 18 infected me with an unerring love for training, and to this day I will never miss a session. He was ridiculed and ostracized his entire life, even after achieving greatness in both academia and athletics. His unique and, to the weak, unnerving synthesis of intelligence and strength formed a formiddable juxtaposition. He was the consumate outsider, regarded more as a Demi-God than a peer or friend. I discovered kinship in this story. Even now at this new workplace, I endure an idiot that seeks to rile me up simply because I train. In Herschel's example Im granted perspective. He turns to Jesus to quell those violent urges, so I do the same in turn.
This life can be trying and challenging. I contemplate often, what exactly is the point of entertaining the trappings? I can get home and guzzle down 3 or 4 beers instead of 2 liters of fresh water. I can lay in bed and fester in my own filth in place of training hard and showering. I can live vicariously through a jumble of animated polygons in a videogame rather than plow through my customary book of the week. It would be easy. And easy kills. Nothing great ever came of leisure, it has to be earned. Back to the boulder.