i know that pain all too well

i’m starting to wonder if i’m cursed…

…seriously.

it felt like every spurs game in the recent finals i “watched” they lost (we didn’t have any of the streamers the finals were on, so i just checked score on the phone, but still). i had always tried (and failed) to see motörhead live. when i finally did, they played two songs at half normal pace, started a third, and lemmy bailed. it would be their last performance in austin and in texas and in the united states before lemmy’s passing.

i used to be way into the ufc. shane and i watched em all, mostly at this place, occasionally at sean patrick’s (where both sean and patrick shared our table with us on a couple of occasions) and we also had a run at the hometown cinemas here in lockhart. always a good time, but back in 2009 when i started working at atomic i fell off this pretty badly due to always working weekends. for a while i was able to keep up via chris preseau, a piercer we had that would download the fights onto his laptop and we’d watch em on the shop tv on monday’s at the 183 atomic. but after he split i just started missing enough i couldn’t follow who was who or what and it just kinda faded. i couldn’t tell you the name of any fighter in the “modern era” (i.e. the last fifteen years) except for one…

conor fuckin’ mcgregor.

he was the only one that had come around since i used to watch regularly that i knew who he was, what he looked like, etc. shit, i even drink his whiskey now that mine’s not available (the apple one, that is…still not a huge fan of the regular stuff). but i’d never seen him fight because i don’t really go to bars by myself to see that kinda thing, nik had no real interest, and i’m still working pretty much up until the undercard starts making a night out a bigger pain in the ass than it would be worth…and i refused to pay the pay-per-view rapey charges.

then came their deal with paramount plus, which we have.

so last night, after i got home, and right when we were about to crash, i remembered the fights were on. it’s sad when you reach that age where you’re honestly torn between watching the fights and just going to sleep because it’s already “late” (10pm or so). it’s almost more sad when you get to do both. we tuned in just in time for the two main events – the first of which contained two fighters i’ve never heard of, and lasted less than a minute. my wife, who was watching ufc for the first time, noted that it took longer for them to walk out then it took for the actual fight.

then came the fight we actually all came to see, with all the pomp and circumstance and bluster and intro videos of the recovery from what people thought was a career ending injury for conor, and then we had another one less than two minutes into the fight and it was called. so i watched both of the main events and still made it to bed relatively close to the usual time. not for any of the right reasons, though. a sad ending to my first mcgregor fight…and we’ll see if i actually get to see a second one.