Our host prepared a cloud of breakfast seemingly from nowhere, summoning bacon and eggs from from his breakfast reserves with skill. We went to the Detroit Institute of Art and saw the Star Wars costume exhibit. It was bittersweat as most of the costumes were from the prequels where Natalie Portman dressed well but was as emotionally engaged as a marionette. The writing was wooden and she spent most of her scenes talking in front of large windows. No one emerged looking good…except the costumers. The rest of the museum, like the Cleveland Museum of Art was built by now absent money for a now absent populace. But again, the riches have stayed in Detroit’s vault and are generously shared by those who are willing to visit. One of the wings was hosting a sketching group, and one girl of less than 12 but older than 8 was doing what I can describe as Picasso-esque drawings of people. A mother and daughter were being sketched (they seemed to know what was happening) but the page showed a dying aged daughter and a skeletal mother with both people’s necks bent in several places they shouldn’t as well as possibly a dozen additional elbows. I was too timid to interrupt.
That evening, we watched Japanese wrestling followed my MMA. I was very lightly into the then WWF when I was a kid and saw a Royal Rumble at a neighbor’s house. The Japanese matches involved two very sweaty, hairless, blond dyed haired men executing a series of maneuvers over at least an hour. That’s many times longer than I remember those matches being as a kid. The eventual winner was American and I was pleased that he addressed the audience in Japanese and English at the end. The MMA was a bit more of a mixed bag. Matches ranged from anemic to brutal. The final fight of the evening involved what was a two hit take down. What I failed to appreciate at the time was that the time required to execute a punch is much faster than human response time. In the same way a soccer goalie has to choose a direction to dive before the kick is made, the person receiving a blow needs to block, dodge, or respond before the punch in thrown. This explains the cases where someone just got straight up walluped and then fell over.
The matches went long and afterwards we went to bed. This time, my companion took the couch and I got the air mattress.
This post was made on 2018-07-26 and is backdated.