Everything else in my life has basically faded away.

I quit playing Go, and I quit playing Guitar. I quit basically all my other hobbies. I don’t really play video games anymore. I quit drinking, and I quit smoking. Smoking took a very long time, and I paid a dear price to quit it, but I did that on purpose. The point is I quit. So yay me. I still have one problem left, which is my weight, but it is the sort of concern which will resolve itself over time as long as everything else goes according to plan.

I did all of this to prepare the way to study Tai Chi Ch’uan. We all start martial arts for different reasons, or from a short list of reasons I suppose. But over time I can say that Tai Chi grew on me in ways that playing Go (Wei-Qi) or playing Guitar, and video games did not. I touched on this in the last post. The thing is that with Tai Chi, when you have it, it’s really yours, you own it. Like cash in hand versus in the bank. So however I got here, somehow, I got here, and now I have a very serious problem.

I am dying.

I cannot stand this anymore. The lifestyle, even as much as I have changed it, is killing me. I feel like I am trapped in time, trapped, or like falling off a cliff and I am about to die. I have to rent a place and open a Tai Chi school. I have to get out of Taiwan. It’s not that Taiwan is bad. I don’t mean leave the country. I mean get out of the oppressive heat and bugs in the park. If I can rent a good place for a Tai Chi school I will end up spending 6 to 8 hours a day in that place. That will only do me good. That is what I need. I know I need it, and I know I can do it. I’ve done it before, in better climate, and in kung fu schools, I would spend as much time as I could in a community center gym, just going over basics. So it’s not like I don’t know what I am getting into. It’s not like I don’t have the time or the will. I do. In fact I have the kind of time that “nobody has time like that anymore”. I can do that kind of training. I can make this my life. It kind of already is.

And that is why I am dying slowly here, now. Trapped and alone with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

I console myself by telling myself that this situation will resolve itself within a few months. But this is going to be perhaps the most difficult few months of my life so far. Then again, I can’t tell you how much it pleases me to be able to say that.

When I get this whole enterprise up and running, this blog will die. It will die by being reborn. I’ve always liked the Tsukino clan, so we will see what happens, but I am probably going to be looking for a new name this time. The fact is, this is a Chinese pursuit, and it should rightly be given a Chinese name. I already have one in mind, from one of my old books.