What’s Up, Jesse Taylor?

By now hopefully you’ve had time to process the news that the highly-anticipated Nick Diaz/Jay Hieron Strikeforce welterweight title fight has become the unanticipated, non-title fight between Hieron and Jesse Taylor, who’s known around these parts as “Mongo.”  We figured that as long as Diaz has smoked himself out of a title fight, the rest of us might as well turn our attention to “JT Money” and make the best of a bad situation.

If you’re wondering what Taylor has been up since being ousted from the UFC, the answer is, winning fights.  Dude has won seven straight, including victories over troubled scrapper Drew Fickett (TKO via strikes in the first round) and Korean judoka Dong Sik Yoon (TKO via injury in the first minute), while also picking up titles in the King of Champions and Total Combat organizations in between.  Before we get too excited, however, we should note that his winning streak has included victories over the likes of Rico Altamirano (2-1), Gert Kocani (1-1), and Ruben Barboza (0-1), so it’s not as if he’s been lighting up a cast of grizzled veterans.

But these are just statistics.  They don’t tell us anything about the man.  For that, we must go to the treasure trove of insight and unintentionally hilarious commentary known as YoJTMoney.com.

Did you know that Mongo writes a blog on his website, sort of?  He even seems to be enjoying it, as evidenced in this entry from April, entitled “BLUE SKIES, BLIZZARDS AND BLOOD”:

Blog/Journaling, whatever I?ve started something I only thought sell outs, attention whores and gays do (no offense gay culture please, just noticed this). Whelp I am not gay and certainly not a sell out. In fact I like these, it releases thoughts off my chest and in my mind to paper. In fact the only reason I don?t do these more its cause I?m lazy and too caught up with being busy and falling into the rest of the dull drum of society. Its good to have some moments to thee self, rest, and just think. Especially, when you fight as much as I?ve been lately as few others do as well. This is the way it should be. No breaks, no burn out, all that is for the weak. Did the Vikings get breaks when they were pillaging? Did the Jews get breaks during trying to survive for their lives during the holocaust? No, I did not think so. We are lucky in our society we do not need to worry about this stuff like other society?s do and our past times. Viking Jew you must be.

He's got a point.  Too often we don't think about what vikings and/or Jews must have gone through.  And their struggles were basically the same, so why not equate them both with training and fighting a lot?  While you're at it you might as well point out how much gays love blogging (no offense), as do sell-outs and attention whores (offense?). 

But it’s not all gut-wrenching prose for JT.  There are also some lovely poems, penned by Mongo himself.  Like this one, which he calls “Support the Money Man”:

As I walk with feet
I sorrow for the nature
That trembles and soars and smothers and loves
For sweet breath of the mountains that crumble and cry
Must keep fighting cause we all will die
Lie after lie it just don't make sense
But this earth we live in has no hence

For violence, love, death or misery we will keep on coming
Hither thee to that far place for the trees that turn upside down
And yield to stop signs with a frown

 
For we have no measure or meaning or sense
But will keep writing for pleasure and am tense
So this is a poem for thee not to understand cause what is this world

Goodbye to the land

You crying yet, pussies?  No?  This should do it then.

Update: I asked a friend of mine, who is an actual poet, to see what kind of sense he could make of JT Money's poem.  Here's what he came up with:

"Re: "Support the Money Man." Daring, exuberant usage of "hither" and "thee" beckon back to a simpler time.  This, in conjunction with the nature imagery of the earth mother and the phallic "trees that turn upside down" suggest an inversion of sexuality.  What we are left with, then, is Jesse Tyler's delicate plea to become a 1950's housewife.  Well done. Also, it rhymes.  So there's that too."