The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment Read Online Free PDF Page A

weigh-ins a sense of calm comes over me. I feel that calm on the surface because I can finally EAT, and I feel it on a deeper, more philosophical level because matters are kind of out of my hands at that point. I’ve gotten on the scale. I’ve made a contract with my employers and fans that states I will show up the next day and let them lock the cage door behind me and another guy a lot like me, and we will thrash each other senseless for their pleasure. It’s like letting gravity take over. There’s no way out but down .
    I’ve heard that many people who commit suicide seem strangely upbeat in the days leading up to the actual task of killing themselves, and having been a fighter for some time, I’m pretty certain it’s because the decision has been made, the hard work’s been done, and the pressure is off. The only thing left is that act. I can understand and appreciate that mind-set. After the weigh-ins there is nothing left to do but eat and defend myself—in that order. Those are very basic, primal directives, and when you know that those two things are all that is expected of you, it brings a kind of tranquility and focus.

 

The Mean Streets of West Linn, Oregon
     
    sk any stripper why she made the horrible decision to start taking her clothes off for a living and ninety percent of the time she will tell you it’s because she is trying to put herself through college. It doesn’t matter if she is eighteen or fifty-three. (And yes, there are fifty-three-year-old strippers—and yes, I just threw up a little in my mouth.) If there were actually that many strippers receiving higher educations, the professional business world would be a lot more attractive. In reality, there are only a handful of reasons strippers do what they do, and none of them have to do with earning a degree in astronomy. The same is true for MMA fighters. Fighters are constantly going on and on about why they feel they were destined to become fighters. It’s all rubbish. A guy chooses to climb into the cage for a living because he was either a) loved too much or not enough or, b) because he is an athlete who simply wants to keep doing what he loves.
    I fall into the latter camp, which doesn’t allow me to recount a grandiose tale of woe on the coming pages. I wasn’t smuggled across the border in a backpack, nor did I spend the first nine years of my life in a closet. My story is rather bland, and I think that is a good thing. Personally, I don’t think the general public has any more tears left to shed for fighters who had it rough on the mean streets of Malibu. Even if I did have such an upbringing, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t tell you about it in this book. Personally, I feel there are far more important matters to discuss. Matters that would probably make the United States a better place to live if we all gave them just a few moments of attention.

     

     
    However, the one aspect I will share with you about my upbringing has to do with wrestling. And believe me, this has far more relevance to my current position as a fighter than does a story about how some haunting figure in my family used to beat me with a buggy whip every time I opened my mouth. I started wrestling for two reasons: because it was expected of me, and because there wasn’t much else to do. And when I say there wasn’t much else to do, I mean it. I grew up in West Linn, Oregon, which is pretty much the definition of “the boonies.” My daily routine went like this: get up at the crack of dawn, do some chores, go to school, attend wrestling practice, come home and feed the animals, and then go to bed when the sun went down. We had a television, but it was black-and-white. No remote. And I didn’t have neighbors, at least not any who weren’t a long bike ride away, so except for the time I spent on the mat, there was zero interaction with other children.
    I didn’t have friends, but I didn’t know that I didn’t have friends. That’s just the way