Let’s do the daily ramble. Yesterday I suddenly went from completely okay to ‘let’s drink and die’. I guess that has become the real new post-pandemic normal. However my mood was stable. I mean, I didn’t yell at my monitor. That’s actually how it used to be, but with a quarter of the current alcohol intake. But today everything will finally change and in a week from now I will have good news 🙂
Yeah no this has to change now.
Yeah. So February 2013. My life was in the process of getting destroyed by means of greatness. Anyway, at the time I was thinking along the lines of ‘it seems that I might be teaching chess for a long time, do you actually want that Ash’?
I mean, I didn’t quit chess in 2003 for no reason. Already for a few years I simply wasn’t that interested anymore, and sure, the psychiatric circus made things a million times worse, but still, in the end I made the conscious decision not to try and become a titled player. Let’s even say I’d be a chess GM (Grand Master) right now, and just presume that a few years of real dedication would have gotten me there, what then? Would I be happier? No. Would I be whatever? I guess. Then I could say I’d be a GM.
Yeah so what? To prove that I’m what exactly?
So no. So whatever these people made out of everything, the question at the time was ‘Do I actually want to teach chess almost every day of my life?’ Sacrifices would have to be made, such as not being able to run a marathon every other weekend and such things. You would have summer camps, winter camps; the freedom that I had would be largely gone, in exchange for being able to live on of course, but yeah.
Do you want that? To teach chess of all things?
So I did what I think you have to do then. I decided to play in some real tournaments. So I went to Guam (February) and Bangkok (April) to just check and see if chess was still at least doable or that I simply really did not want to see a chess board anymore. Today we’ll talk about Guam.
I’ll go on with Guam tomorrow. It’ll be a long story. Let’s split it up into a few shorter posts. So February 2013 I went to Guam to play a chess tournament.
Things are about to become pretty weird I tell ya.
