Early morning, the airport hotel.

There was a problem with the coffee machines, this was not a good start.

A ill portent for the coming trip?

My inner addict was calmed by the notion of upgrading the slaying of the cold turkey by substituting the usual low-dose amphetamine (filter coffee) for multiple hits of pure uncut cocaine (double espressos). This I did, and with my mug filled to the brim with a lethal overdose of my drug of choice, I had returned to my table and sat alone, and watched the dining area slowly fill with various travellers as the fog of sleep lifted thanks to the huge surge of caffeine.

The last time I made that trip, I was sixteen.

I was visiting family in Georgia, my grandfather, my uncles, my mother’s partner David, as well as other family members. Within a couple of years of that trip, they were all dead. I learned to suppress that part of my identity and carry on, never thinking that I would return and visualising my times there, and the people that filled those times, as almost dreamlike, as though experienced by someone else.

But, there I was, fifty six years old and sitting alone, sipping coffee before my flight later that day. A flight gifted to me by my friend James, a man who despite us having talked many times and collaborated on projects including a novel together, I had never met before in person, or maybe I had, just not as this person?

The plan was we would hang out in Baltimore, do some writing, training and attend the 2026 Modern Agonistics fight weekend, where fighters from various backgrounds travel from across the US to enter full contact unarmed and armed bouts with each other, for no other reason than honourable competition and self discovery.

“Agonistics is an ancient Hellenic term that translates as "contest-preparation". The root is Agon meaning "contest". The English word agony was borrowed from the ancient Greek term for "contestant's suffering" referring to the trials of a combatant.” - James LaFond

For me though, I was already grappling with the realisation that this journey to America was never just about fight training. It would become a profound reckoning with loss, time, and rediscovered identity. For years I had carried multiple griefs I could not release. Not because I feared pain, but because I had been unable to return and close that circle directly. America had shaped my sense of self since childhood, a constant presence through memories, stories, music, films, training and an inherited pull I could never fully express. Yet that belonging was repeatedly interrupted by visas, circumstances, and life’s detours. Each denial felt like a small wound. Now, after decades of wandering, having lost everyone who once anchored me, I returned alone. This was a return to Ithaca in the deepest, inner sense.

Now let me stop right there and state that no, I am no Odysseus, but it dawned on me over coffee what a weirdly apt travel book Lattimore’s translation of The Odyssey of Homer was to have brought with me.

In it, Odysseus fights for ten years at Troy, then spends another ten fighting his way home through monsters, gods, temptations, and heartbreak. His journey is the soul’s long reclamation. When he finally reaches Ithaca, he arrives unrecognised, tested to breaking point, stripped of companions and illusions. The island still knows him. The true, inner meaning here is clear to any man who feels the ancient tug to complete the circle after long exile, to remember who he is beneath the layers of loss and adaptation that are forced upon him by life.

For some of us, martial training, physical ordeal, and esoteric pursuit awaken this current. The road is lonely and yet something deeper than willpower insists that you go back, remember, and become.

But this is never a straightforward process...

There seemed to be a malign force at play after I checked out of the hotel that was determined that this voyage should be doomed from outset. The trains to terminal five were cancelled and the platform announcement in broken English was simply:

“Leeeve de platform!”

The waiting herd turned and stampeded with various huge suitcases for exits and some hint of the Piccadilly Line as an alternate route of salvation.

Elevators!

Lifts!

Stairs!

Wrong way!

Back down the stairs!

I finally arrived at Terminal five and attempted to navigate:

Levels!

Areas!

Security pre-check!

Security!

Boots off!

Scanners!

And….. through to the Mammon Temple of duty free and departure lounges. Despite the chaos of the trains I was still a couple of hours early for boarding and sat and read my book while waiting. Having bought a bottle of over-proof rum for that night’s accommodation host Charles, I finally moved to board the plane.

Onboard, I immediately found myself sharing cabin space with an American hipster couple whose luggage appeared to have been packed according to some avant-garde theory of spatial optimism. Between the neck pillows, blankets, plush toys and oversized bags, they managed to annex a surprising amount of aircraft. I watched one of them (allegedly the male of the two, complete with multicolour painted nails) repeatedly batter my cabin bag containing Charles’ bottle of rum while attempting to improve his own circumstances, and I decided that the avoidance of being the star of a viral air rage beating video before take-off was probably the wiser course.

The entertainment continued when a stewardess asked for a volunteer to move a bag and instead triggered a minor class war between passengers. One young lad ended up moving his, received a seat upgrade for his trouble, and vanished into greater comfort. His hideous, she-devil critic spent the next nine hours beside the toilets. Justice, if not always blind, occasionally has a sense of humour.

Take-off and, unable to sleep, I settled down to what seemed an eternity of contortionism in the small seat space, my surgery knee and lower back screaming at me for hours.

On arriving at Baltimore airport, I made my way to immigration and got in the line that consisted of one man in front of me. Security there was in stark contrast to the UK as it seemed to actually function!

I got called over.

“Passport.”

“Why are you here?”

“Look in the camera.”

“Four fingers on the pad.”

“Both thumbs on the pad.”

“Welcome to America.”

That last part unexpectedly hit me a bit and I was aware again of the time that had passed since my last time there. With my small pack, I made my way forward and collected my thoughts.

Man, I hoped James was on the other side at arrivals!

I walked towards the doors and through.

Arrivals, and the announcement rang out with bureaucratic finality:

“If you do not have a valid reason to be in this airport – you must leave!”

In that peculiar moment, a thought surfaced: perhaps I carried the truest reason of anyone present, even if I could not yet name it? This was dispelled as a black guy in a ripped t shirt scanned me up and down before heading toward the exit on command.

Looking round…

Some elderly seated travellers.

Guy in a trucker hat and a hopeful expression waiting for someone to arrive.

An old guy with a sun visor asking people if they need directions.

And …. No James.

Now, one may have natural initial concerns at points like this about being in Baltimore at night and realising that you have no idea what to do next if your friends don’t materialise, especially as the mobile add-ons for the US that cost so much money before you left...naturally aren’t working.

My brain remembered dimly that airport wifi was a thing, and having connected to it, Bingo, calls from James. Out through the doors, along the taxi rank and finally, a warm handshake welcome from my friend.

Charles grins, shakes my hand and takes the wheel as we depart into the evening traffic.

“Welcome to Harm City...”

The following day was spent in the midday heat of a nearby park training stickfighting with Charles (who is such an affable and relaxed guy until that is, he hits you with a strike you saw coming but seemed totally unable to evade or disrupt!), while James and Alex trained bareknuckle for Alex’s upcoming fight. We all sheltered from the burning Sun God beneath some trees while James and Alex continued to cover as many preparatory ideas as possible. Both men stripped to the waist, with only the sounds of exertion. Their shoes kicked up dust as Charles and I watched, an image that seemed to defy the time we were in as though watching men from a hundred years earlier in real-time, the oddest experience.

From there we went for lunch at The Raven Inn, the owners made us more than welcome as we discussed the coming weekend and Alex and I briefly discussed our Greek ancestry, though more distal in my case.

Later, James, Charles, K and I went to the Shamrock, home to Mr Terry, possibly one of the most entertaining guys I’ve met. As a fellow barkeep, I need to seriously up my game to approach the zenith of Terry’s knowledge and presence. Ask about the condoms on the bar, enjoy the famous Rubens (seriously fucking amazing), stay away from the lady that reports road accidents as a chat up line, but don’t ask about crack heads being locked up in the basement!

Here I finally got to meet Mr Grey, who with a strong handshake, sat beside me and proceeded to immediately seem like someone I’d known my whole life, an immediate friend.

The next day, or as it more closely seemed like a few short hours later, we visited Erique’s place for stick and knife training with James and Charles. Despite a growing fatigue relapse which I was ignoring, I found myself stick sparring James for the first time, which was a daunting experience. He has a unconventional style of movement that belays the power he can hit with. My goal became to merely try and relax as the blows rained in unchecked from seemingly any angle. Charles took pity on my flagging hide and took me through some striking from relaxed positions on the heavy bag that would really help me over the coming weekend. Then to stick and then, knife training with Erique, and practicing with Mr Grey.

Back in the car, up the road a while, and next we were pulling up at the lakeside cabin that would be the setting for the training weekend. The house seemed deserted and James and I entered to find a place to dump our stuff.

We stopped at the first room and I suggested James take top bunk in true jailhouse style. Noises were heard and I loudly called “Hello?” as it occurred to me that walking into a house unannounced was a good way to get lead poisoning. This was answered by the beaming smile and vice-like handshake of Sean who entered from the back porch, our host and director of proceedings for the coming weekend.

The back door opened out to a view of a lake and woodland, still and silent until the arrival one by one of the various men that began to arrive to make our number for the coming events. Lead, fists, knives, swords, sticks, hammers, machetes, baseball bats, steel rebars, crowbars…

Unbeknownst to us, it would seem as though something was determined that these two older geezers were not to realise their goals. The malign current had shown itself already at the airport journey. Now it would try striking at our bodies more directly.

I was unaware at this point that my health was sliding downwards, and the next morning I had a near-collapse and the cramps and spasms I’d had for a few evenings went to another level, I lost control of my hands which curled up like useless claws and my thinking went slow and confused. I decided that simply nothing (or perhaps more accurately, as we will discuss later No Thing) was going to derail what I’d come to do, and that if I died there, I was in good company and doing what I loved, better than a fucking care home.

I spent the rest of the days necking hydration sachets kindly provided by a concerned Sean, the symptoms eased but failed to leave completely for the rest of the trip and even back in the UK some weeks later.

That same night, I woke with barely working legs (my feet locked upwards) to find James having a seizure, with William, Charles, and Sean to help him out, he had to forego our boxing bout for Saturday morning. It seemed that for both of us, our mission now was to resist that malign presence to the best of our abilities.

Travelling nearly four thousand miles, and then fighting a more physically capable stranger in a basement on Saturday morning during a health “episode” is quite a thing, it was also one of the highlights of my trip along with the camaraderie that was present and the drinks, and food we had that night where I can safely say I can’t remember laughing that hard in my life and for around six hours!

Without satellite coverage, all men present had slipped the digital eye of an instantly nullified “smart” chaperone, and there was a return to a natural state of conversation, thought and companionship being the only means available for the passing of time, just as it had been between friends for millennia before our distracted and surveilled age.

Monday morning we said our “see you next years” rather than goodbyes to all present and left for a stay at Nero the Pict’s place towards Baltimore.

Here in “Nero”, I would meet another new “old friend”, a man with uncannily similar life experiences in terms of work and outlook. More late night conversations, circling subjects we all shared that would become clear on my final day.

From here to our next host, Erique and his family who so kindly housed us at their guest house, where we helped out with some of Erique’s self defence teaching for local women, watched cool films with the visiting Mr Grey and got to experience The Crackpot, The Hoodrat, Baltimore’s Violence Guy himself dutifully carrying collected flowers for the princess of the house, Erique’s daughter.

Our last morning before heading back to Baltimore with Mr Grey was spent laughing for hours as we wrote out an RPG game christened “The Silver Ferret”, based on navigating the Baltimore dating scene through the eyes of Mr LaFond for young men…

Between breaks for smuggled English tea, I sat and wrote in a notebook in the quiet, the only sounds being James writing at his laptop in the room next door.

I sat at the desk in the guest house as morning light filled the room. The literal fog and the heavier figurative one had both lifted. I picked up a copy of The Traveller’s Guide to the Astral Plane by Steven Richards, a gift that James showed me he had received from Richard Barrett. The book fell open and I read a paragraph on alternative realities that feel completely real during altered states. Richards asks if perhaps they are real, elsewhere or otherwise?

Looking out the window, I was looking directly at the unreal, a myth, a personal one, my own alternate reality that was never realised. The American landscape stretched far beyond sight, humming with traffic and punctuated by distant hammering, an echoing report of a guy fixing his house nearby. Had this land existed unchanged without me, or did it only fully awaken again beneath my returning gaze? The question lingered.

An air of unreality persisted even as my senses reported otherwise: the sweet artificial scent of apple pie air freshener, the cool conditioned air, the bruises and welts from fists, sticks, and knives those past days. I felt the handshake-grip memory in my palms and the warmth of kind words from new friends. All of it registered as real, yet I moved through the scene like a man walking inside a remembered dream from forty years ago. Part of me still wanted to board a train south, find the people I left behind, and simply pick up where we stopped, as though time had waited for me. The rational brain kicked in to tell me with finality that all I would find would be graves, another part of me wanted to try anyway, to never give up hope.

Conversations with D and our kids clarified something important when I described what I was feeling: I fitted in the US more naturally than back in the UK. It felt as though I had been quietly continuing, alone, on the path that had opened in the early eighties when I met my mother’s biological family here for the first time, a family it had taken her decades to find.

Speaking with James, and earlier with Dr Brek and Richard, I sensed the roots reach further still. Is this pre-destination? A final reverting to type? The feeling was too strong to just discount as emotional baggage.

I wasn’t alone in this rediscovery. Here in another land, I met and talked with other men who were suspecting something deeper was at play than just a convening for fighting. Each seemed to hold a piece of a puzzle that they had mined themselves and brought to this gathering. Perhaps something stirs in the blood? An inherited DNA memory from ancestors who faced their own quests for expansion through ordeal? Many would not have been through the luxury of choice. When certain men are drawn to this type of training and remain there, it is rarely from casual interest. It is the old ways reasserting themselves through trial, impact, and overcoming.

Reflecting again on the weekend that had passed, I reflected that the welcome I received from men who had never met me in person remained one of the most precious experiences of the trip. They extended trust, training, and an equal place in the circle based only on reputation and shared word. James referred to me as his “somewhat younger brother”, which though comical about our age and appearance in comparison to many of the younger men present, had a deeper meaning for me given the experience of returning to this land without living family remaining here to welcome me.

As James R. Andersen wrote: The training weekend “has only one requirement for attendance, you must fight. This has a strong weeding-out effect; keeping away posers, cowards, and tourists. The men there were a motley bunch, but all part of the select few in modern society who will willingly engage in violence. A shrinking percentage of men willing to enter the arena, and I was proud to know every one of them.” (1)

The heart of the weekend was the fight day itself known as the Agon, drawn from the ancient Greek practice of agonistics. Two men at a time were paired for full-contact fights (from fists to grappling weapons over the day) while the rest watched and encouraged. There were no trophies, no rankings, no material stakes. The fighting was for honour alone, an honest test of will, skill, and character, which regardless of outcome, both men would leave the circle possessing. In that circle, ego dissolved and something older emerged. You felt every strike, and conversely, the support of every shout from the sidelines, and the slaps on the back of support for both of you when you exited.

There was absolute hilarity on the final night, the kind that only emerges when you have tested each other’s limits and found respect on the other side. Richard Barrett and I spoke at length about how esoteric and martial paths ultimately converge, at least for those compelled by something larger than themselves to chase the experience all the way to the core which seemed the case for the men present.

Martial systems can often times function like barely disguised cults or religions, offering lotus-eater comfort to those who prefer the structure over the truth. Yet for some, they become the sharpest vehicle for genuine self-realisation.

Both James and I have, in different seasons, felt a Thanos-like impulse, a dark gravitation toward ending or escape in the face of a broken world.

Actually let me stop there...not broken, that is the wrong word, evil is the only true conclusion one can come to about the surroundings we find ourselves in, many of its inhabitants and those that rule here.

Fighting or attempting to learn to fight, stands as the natural and noble counter-force. Each round, each moment of deliberate discomfort replaces the desire for disappearance with stubborn presence. It is a daily act of defiance, refusing to let a hateful age shrink the soul. I’m nothing special, and I don’t care if I win or lose, just that I spat and clawed back.

There are moments when you realize you are living inside an alchemical process. Lead is being transmuted not into eternal youth, but into something more worthy of your true self. This trip offered exactly that gift. Men I had never met extended opportunities to prove potential, to step into discomfort, and to change. Such trust is rare. But I am not just talking about the few days of physical fighting that we shared together. The journey was not over and I felt that I began to understand through a series of very deep conversations over several days that the various disparate threads of understanding were being drawn together for me, towards one final morning talking with James, which I view, without hyperbole or care for the impression that I give by saying it was one of the most important conversations of my life.

The days revealed uncanny parallels in life experience between James, Nero the Pict, and myself went beyond coincidence. Conversations with Dr Brek and Richard Barrett about reincarnation brought older thoughts to the surface. I remembered a Serbian fighter friend on another trip years ago and his mentioning of birthmarks as possible echoes of fatal wounds from former lives. Delusion? Perhaps. Yet it sometimes feels like the only framework large enough to hold the depth of what we sense. Richard had seen a roadside sign days before the event:

“A change is coming.”

He recognised it, and it matters not if others don’t.

The journey reached its quiet destination during a conversation with James about demonic attacks in dreams, experiences we had both had in our lives. Not, cling-at-straws attempts to explain or embellish a mere bad dream, I mean being attacked by the only word left to explain the experience: demonically. For my part since childhood including while awake, and in James’ case, severe enough to hospitalise him.

While sitting at the bar for hours at the Raven Inn for breakfast on my last day in Baltimore, ...battletown, we discussed how the fighting path, we agreed, is one of authentic self-realisation, yet it seemingly attracts resistance from every side, and perhaps beyond that.

“Sendings” appear to derail any attempts, even the unwitting ones, at stumbling towards your true path. Some in human form, some as events, but always with perfect design and timing when viewed in retrospect.

It is as though the commitment to remember and embody that dimly perceived memory, threatens something ancient and adversarial, a force invested in our fear and corruption. And as though this combative process is capable of awakening something that puts you beyond its grasp.

It sometimes seemed as though there was a malign intelligence behind certain events, one that fed on fear, and corruption of true purpose. A black demonic presence that thrives and lives by our subjugation.

The only thing it seems to fear is that you stand up, fight back and say: “No.”

I am well aware that to an outsider this may all sound insane and perhaps it is, however I no longer care as this explanation of experience at this point in life is the only one that makes sense of something beyond rationalisation.

The several men that I had spoken to, like myself, had a part of a puzzle, but by listening I had seen several parts at once, enabling me to catch a glimpse at a larger picture. Something or more accurately someone like James just needed to be the catalyst about which of those parts were brought together.

I hesitate to use the word revelation, but it was as if the final conversation with James was the Rosetta stone that I was unaware that I had been seeking. A sense of catching a fleeting truth of human life, certainly my life, and a source of great clarity and power had come from it. I had seen the enemy of my soul, for that’s what I believe it is, and its hold had been lessened by that.

Fittingly, we sat talking by the image of the Raven, one of Odin’s two servants of memory and thought, more strikingly and inexplicable is the presence of a six foot plus statue of a demonic entity with an American flag standing watch as we talk.

This training, this return, these new brothers, they represent the Great Work in motion. Self-expansion hadn’t just been symbolic or abstract. It happened in a literal sense too through impact, black eyes, and honest friendship. Ancestral memory rises in men who refuse to remain lost. The alchemical or, Taboo Man does not merely survive the crucible, rather he is refined by it, emerging heavier through addition, brighter, more himself.

On departure, I laughed as I was singled out from the departure queue at security for the full TSA search experience.

A large, long-bearded hippy sporting a fresh black eye.

‘That one!’

With a thought process almost as audible as the announcements had been at my arrival, the flag bearing demon made it clear that it wasn’t quite finished with me!

The visible mark of the weekend felt like a perfect, humorous punctuation, or perhaps due to being more like a comma in shape, hinting at a continuing sentence? A story not yet finished?

To the friends who opened the door without hesitation, thank you for such fellowship upon this voyage of rediscovery and return, as together we start to remember the men we will be tomorrow.

Notes:

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