Glitches

It seems my primary teaching modality is "training to the glitches". Put the student in a scenario or a drill and watch for the subtle hesitations and freezes. The things they either can't do or have to consciously force themselves to do. Each of those little freezes is a problem, a place where the mind and the will aren't working together. It's all about integration.

Obviously, you have a body and a mind. You have had them your whole life. I will not be able to teach you anything about how to move your own body that you don't already know...unless you have (deliberately, though subconsciously) either hidden information from yourself or ignored it. So combatives isn't and can't be about teaching you how to move. Side effect of having a body and being active is that you have hurt yourself in hundreds of ways over the years- so it's not about teaching you how to hurt a human body (not that there aren't nuances or information at the upper ends of force, e.g. what brains smell like, that you probably haven't and don't want to learn first hand).

If it's not about moving or hurting, what is training in combatives all about? Integration.

Mauricio Machuca talks about capability versus capacity. As you train, you become more and more capable of certain actions, but it doesn't automatically affect your capacity. I can teach you how to break a neck in a few minutes. Whether you could actually do it to a real person who was breathing, struggling, crying- that's a matter of your capacity, something training doesn't automatically address.

Capacity is largely a matter of integration and clarity. If your tactical mind says killing is the appropriate response, but your conscience has never clarified when it is acceptable to kill, you will glitch. If your reasoning and observation leads you to believe that a calm, neutral expression is your best option but your panic makes your voice squeek, there is a glitch.

So you look for glitches, for inconsistancies.

Here's an aside- have you ever watched a martial arts class where hours and hours are spent on basics, and then when they spar it looks nothing like the basics? That's a glitch... but the ugly truth, for the arts that I am thinking of, is that the techniques that work well in real life look a lot like those basics, and nothing like their sparring. FWIW.

You watch the talented student who can knock the shit out of the heavy bag but can only lightly tap a person. That's a glitch. Is it moral? Spiritual? A conditioned response from childhood? Decades of expectations?

The officer who gets hit with the ConSim paint bullet and 'dies'. Who trained him to die?

Adults who freeze when they get slapped in the face. Or when they suddenly see an unexpected knife in a drill. Trained martial artists who try to get control of the weapon when they know they need to shut down the brainstem. All glitches, all things that came from somewhere. Too often, they came from training.

Just a Big Old Softie

"I feel guilty," I said. I had just given the new baby goats their shots and held them while Kami slid a tight rubber band over their testicals to castrate them.
"Hmmph. Considering you're planning on butchering them, I don't see why this would bother you."
"This is way worse. If I snuck up behind you and shot you in the head, would you hate me forever? Would your identity be shattered? Would you be miserable for the rest of your life?"
"No."
"If I wrestled you down and put bands around your breasts so that they would hurt terribly and then slowly go numb and then wither away through lack of blood and literally dry up and fall off like shriveled pieces of meat, you'd hate me for the rest of your life, right? I feel way more guilty about this than I do butchering."

I had racoon shit all over my shirt today. We went to the vet to get some innoculations for the goats. While we were there, we met a very nice Scottish Deerhound and a Newfoundland puppy named Gus. The Deerhound was nervous, waiting for his owner, not sure if he should let this strange person in this strange place pet him or not. Gus wasn't shy at all. Only three months and already big with huge webbed paws, he was in my lap getting his tummy scratched in a matter of seconds...and me, the middleaged, balding, tactical team sergeant thug was down on my knees happy to pet the cute little puppy. The vet then said that she had three orphaned racoon kits in the back room if I wanted to see them.. Oh, yeah. I'm a big softie. Tiny little things, making a wide array of noises, purring and chattering. They suckled at my fingers and climbed all over my shirt, nestling into my neck... and one just dumped on my shirt, a big slimy goop of mustard yellow racoon shit. Didn't matter- even with all my common sense and experience with racoons, I still would have taken them home if it was an option.

Beast, the airedale, gave me a strange and betrayed look when we got home. He's okay with me smelling of other dogs and cats. He's used to it and no longer gets jealous of my time with other animals. He's pretty much written me off as a slut. But a racoon, his mortal enemy. That was going too far.

Bivy Sack

The last week has been busy. Lots of hard work on the property. With tons of unused vacation time, I burned some to spend fencing pasture, cutting down blackberries and pouring concrete. Much of my time now is spent indoors, communicating and subtly balancing the dynamics of 400 or so criminals (most with mental disorders) in an enclosed space. This week is a reminder of how good it feels to get up early in the morning and spend a whole day sweating in the sun and the wind. I miss living and working on a ranch.

Change of pace, today- we are due for a dump run, so we spent time cleaning out the garage. So many memories there. Climbing hardware that has sat unused for a couple of years. Caving outfits. Waterproof bags, covered in dust were a reminder of kayak camping years ago...my first open water kayak trip was forty miles solo of mixed lazy river and white water from the Willamette valley to the coast.

I threw away a long expired box of erythromycin, legacy of two weeks in Ecuador bringing medical supplies to villages and military bases on the Rio Napo.

The bivy sack got to me, for some reason. We'd been doing a lot of hiking, bike trekking, kayak camping. 'We' is a little off- much of it was solo. I'd just gotten a real job and the bivy sack was the sign of the transition- I could now afford something that provided great shelter and could be slung from a bike or stowed in a kayak without taking up space or weight. I never used it much- the job that made it possible also took a lot of time and involved switching from shift to shift and changing days off, weaning me from the few climbers and recreational explorers who were willing to play at my level. I set it up, just to make sure it was all there, then stowed it away.

So many dusty things in that garage- head lamps, harnesses, crampons. The goretex cover that Kami made for my sleeping bag. Combined with the fleece insert (which I didn't find) it transformed a mediocre, inexpensive bag into something that could handle snow camping in comfort. A gift of great love from someone who knew me well. An old love-letter too, that I had been too self-absorbed at the time to recognize for what it was, only seeing a friend's stab at poetry. A pair of small knives to match a kukri I can't find. A dutch oven full of parafin that we used to melt to harden leather for armor. An Argentinian bayonet. Two bags of obsidian and knapping supplies (I never spent the time to get decent at that). A collection of fire starters including the cool military sun screen that acted as an alcohol gel and could be used as lighter fluid or a fuse. Threw away some military stuff that I've been keeping for too long and for no reason.

It's good to clean things out, good to dust off the memories once in a while. Today was beautiful day for it.

Smelling the Spring Wind

Wind whips over the tall grass. Last night Mt. Hood was a pale blue shadow against a barely darkening sky. Brilliant stars in the darkness, shiny white clouds in the blue.

The sky, the universe, is all as it should be. If the gate to Heaven, bliss, nirvana were to open right now I wouldn't enter.

I love being human and living in a human-sized world with human problems and human joys. I love the connection of humans with compassion listening and helping each other, even if the problems aren't that real. I love the taste and feel of good food and the burn of honest, real pain. What could paradise offer that could equal a drink of cold water in the back of your throat?

I love being flawed and challenged and struggling. That is what life is and I am loath to give it up. All around are beautiful, passionate human people, too often blind to their own wonder.

If angels and gods are watching us, they are watching us with envy.

Martial University

Received the class schedule for Martial University over the weekend. Damn.

Once a year Kris Wilder, a goju instructor in Seattle puts together MU. It's a cool seminar. He hand picks a variety of local instructors. Each hour, five of them step forward and describe what they will teach for that hour. The students who signed up thus get to pick from five possibilities each hour. That runs to six classes plus the noon bonus. The last few years the noon bonus has been a lecture from off the beaten path. This year it will be a kendo demonstration

Kris assigned me to teach five classes. Crap, do I know five things? We'll see. We won't have the lecture room this year, so I'll do mostly mat time. I'm thinking a class on pain. Everyone knows what pain is as an event, but most haven't thought it through as a tool. It will also allow some segues into strategic and tactical thinking and the tactical matrix.

Then a class on entries, requested by John Migliore. He asked what I teach/do for a sudden ambush. It's a good skill and allows an intro to the strategic matrix as well as operant conditioning as a training method.

I want to do a knife eye-opener. I don't claim to teach knife defense largely because I have so little confidence in most of what is taught. I'll print out some pictures of knife wounds and then we'll play two games- the Manson Drill, designed by Tony Blauer and my Reception Line drill. They're both myth busters. Then we can talk about the tendency to tailor training to create unrealistic success.

Love to do a class on Sosuishitsu-ryu kata, let them see some true koryu stuff. Not sure who will be up for it, but it will be cool for me at least.

That's four. In the past I've done principles-based classes on joint locks and takedowns and lectures on violence. If there hasn't been a big turn-over in student base, that might be boring. Maybe infighting strikes? Blindfolded infighting? Power generation at three ranges?

Should be fun.
http://www.westseattlekarate.com/martialu.shtml

Martial University, May 20th. Bellevue Washington.

Theory

The incident is months old. One of our officers was attacked at close range with a knife. He parried, pushed the threat away, drew his Taser and lit him up. This deputy talks about it, critiquing the incident. He wasn't there: he saw it on TV like everyone else. This deputy has opinions, strong ones. He's careful to be respectful, saying over and over again, "I don't want you to get the impression I think he did anything wrong, it turned out perfect. But..." Always a 'but'. Always a what if. There are always 'buts' and 'what ifs'.

He quotes from our use of force and survival training- aren't we taught to never go up against a threat with a lesser level of force? Won't you always react the way you trained?

I reply that we are required to use the lowest level of force that we reasonably believe will stop the threat. That you will react the way you were trained, maybe, until your fiftieth or hundredth Use of Force- then you will exceed it.

He lets that pass, going on about the things he will never do and what he WILL do if he is ever in that situation. Aaah.

I ask him how many fights he's had. He hesitates. He hasn't had any yet. Times have changed. Assignments have changed. The kid's been on five years. I think I was approaching two hundred by my fifth year.

So this is all theory, I say.
Am I wrong? he asks.

I shrug. Get fifty fights down and you quit using words like 'never' and 'I will'.

We teach, I teach, not to use a lower level of force than the threat. You shouldn't bring a knife to a gunfight or try to wrestle a knife away. The very fact that someone thinks he can reliably do it is a sure sign that he's too ignorant to let try. So, to keep the people from letting their fantasy skill levels endanger their lives, we teach them 'never'.

But the best and the most experienced go beyond their training. You get to a place where a vast number of variables are handled subconsciously. The right decision seems to be made by your body. You can, in an instant, choose the Taser instead of the gun or to push at exactly the right angle instead strike. You can take the knife away.

But only in that moment. The more moments you have, the more you realize that because something worked last time doesn't mean it will work next time.

I don't know who said it first: "In theory, there's no difference between theory and reality. In reality, there is."

Revisiting the Past

We are all products of our history. Genetics, sure, but how we interact with the world, how we see it is, a product of the events we have survived. We are the result of our triumphs and our losses.

Everything you have been through has culminated in a YOU, pure and perfect. Not flawless, not perfect in the sense of a symmetrical crystal. Perfect in the sense that you are the ultimate you. There are no imitations, no one who will ever out-do you in youness. In this second, you are exactly what you are.

But humans just can't seem to be satisfied with that. It's not enough to survive, remember, grieve, cherish, assimilate and grow. They have the power of memory- fragile and corruptable as it is, more a composite created than a recording. They use the memory, revisiting the past. It's not a bad thing, for most people. Events need to be remembered to be assimilated. They need to be analyzed to discover their lessons. It is important to check your actions and be sure they are in line with what you think are your ethics (the action, not the thought, will always be the truth, but you can will action to thoughts and create a new truth).

But sometimes people revisit pain to little purpose. To learn, to forgive and grow, to understand and to heal are good reasons to revisit pain. To hold onto pain as a shield and an excuse serves nothing but the little chattering conscious mind that wants to hide from its own strength and never risk growth.

The conscious mind is the weakest aspects of our brain. It is merely the words on the computer screen- the actual thinking is much deeper and in a far older and simpler code. What we "remember" is what our conscious mind can dig up and share, and research has shown again and again that more of it is created than actually recalled. The memories have been subtly (or grossly) twisted to fit our present needs.

This is the first danger of introspection. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but often what is being examined isn't the life at all, but an edited and airbrushed child's painting of the life.

Combined with the human mind's need to find patterns and our infinite creativity, excessive introspection brings a second danger. Seekers who continuously strive to go deeper and deeper into their own consciousness at some point are no longer finding insights but creating them, manufacturing not just a psuedo-enlightenment but even entire imaginary problems and life-altering events.

There is a reason why true meditation disciplines are based on silencing the monkey chatter in the mind. That is the conscious part, the weakest part, the part that can't tell an object in your hands from the idea or the word. Because everything is already assimilated... just not in the 'word' part of your mind. And the word part is too small to handle it anyway. But it's there if you can just keep the chattering monkey's hands off it.

Blood and Leadership

There's a new leadership book out that our management has fallen in love with. Most of the upper-level management has read it and they recommend it and even have several copies to hand out. 1) Highly recommended, 2) will have an influence on my supervisors and 3) free... definitely need to read it.

The Captain asked what I thought of it. "Another book written by a manager who thinks he's a leader," I said.

That's not exactly true. There are a lot of leadership books out there that I have a hard time connecting with. Why? There's good stuff in this book, some stuff I will use. Some weaknesses that I'd attributed to circumstance or environment that are actually internal and controllable, changeable (different perspectives help me to see the blind spots). Why my personal disconnect? Opposition and stakes?

When Lee Iacocca turned Chrysler around, who really wanted him to fail? Even the union, who too often is at war with management, didn't want all those jobs and their reason for the union's existence to disappear. The government probably wanted Iacocca humiliated and begging, wanted one of the most outspoken critics of government intervention in business to be seen begging for government help... but no one in the government wanted to lose the tax base or for those jobs to disappear. Who was the enemy?

Even Churchill and Lincoln (who the author uses a lot) who definitely had enemies and led a state at war, didn't really deal with the enemies. They dealt with the government and the press and the electorate. They inspired people who wanted to be inspired and led people who wanted to survive and maintain their way of life. The people who faced the opposition, who dealt with people trying to kill them, were the soldiers. The people who led the soldiers were the NCOs and the low-level officers who were tasked with taking the grand strategy and making it a reality in the forests and the swamps and the snow. The men who gave those orders had to be loud enough and close enough to be heard over the deafening roar of the artillery and the screaming of the wounded. Close enough to really see and to risk along with their men.

The stakes, too. Market share? I know it's important globally, but this is what I imagine: "In order to save the company, we have to implement my plan. If we make an error, if I've made an error, we stand to lose 20% of the market share and the company will go under. Are you with me?" How does that compare to, "Team, we've lost the eastside facility. Four hostages that we know of, about 170 threats. Here's the tactical plan. We're undermanned for this mission but time is critical. Four lives on the line now, plus us if anything screws up. If anybody wants to opt out, go now." (Caveat- no one in this business would actually make a speech like that or go running into a mission without good planning and resources. I was trying to make a point about the stakes.) A CEO makes a mistake, no one dies. A president or a general or a senior administrator makes a mistake, even if people die, it's not anybody that they know. And it's not them.

The author uses examples from business and sports a lot. That's part of it. There's an aspect of adrenaline to those, but I don't imagine an NBA player, even a rookie, dealing with white-knuckle fear or making sure that his will is in order before warming up for the big game. Thinking about how their kids will turn out as orphans.

So that's the source of the disconnect. I see nothing in this book about how to train AND empower people to make quick decisions under stress while operating independently but still staying on the game plan. There might be something about setting a good example, but nothing about keeping cool under fire and letting the troops see it or how to model dealing with post-incident stressors. It's a concern because. like violence, so little has been written about that extreme edge of leadership and, like violence, most people have the luxury to believe that anything that falls under the label must be the same thing.

It's also a concern because politicians and administrators who either never spent time on the line or did so very long ago will see the word "Leadership" in the title and think that it will help them communicate with and influence the front line.

Details

I have three types of dreams. Most are just entertainment, my subconscious screwing around. Rarely remember those. Some are literally training exercises: my subconscious sets up a scenario and lets the conscious mind solve the problem. Some of these are memorable, and most are bloody with military situations, monsters... but they're never nightmares per se since I never feel helpless or defeated.

The symbolic dreams are very rare, but I always remember them for a few days and they are easy to recognize. A few days ago, the dream was about a group of people (familiar in the dream but I almost never dream about people I actually know) in the high desert of Eastern Oregon near a shack, a mine and an outhouse looking at the carcasses of vultures. I was admiring the intricacies of the skeleton and others were complaining of the smell or wondering what to do.

I didn't get the dream. It was clearly symbolic and my subconscious never does this unless there is something important in real life that I'm missing. Usually it's a fairly quick interpretation. I didn't get this one and Kami couldn't help.

So the next night, the subconscious lobbed an easy one- Trying to teach someone to interpret tracks there was a place where a bird had tried to land on a piece of snow that looked like a perch and the snow had broken. The broken snow perch and the light marks of the feathers told the story and I was badgering the student to SEE it. The whole time I never noticed that the bird, a very young robin, was lying on the ground beneath the interesting track, freezing.

Too much time spent on details is the message. Look at the big picture. Trivia is a distraction when people are hurting around you. The tracks are important, but not when what made them is right there...

Cool to have a subconscious that that can dumb down when I need it.

Compulsive Competence

Decades ago, in an upper-level class on personality difference the professor would interview a subject each week and we would analyze the subject. Tom was an outstanding teacher and therapist with absolutely no voice inflection or visible emotion. That's an aside. One class he interviewed a young man. When he was done and the subject left, he asked for our first impressions.

I jumped in, "He's the healthiest person we've seen so far. He's getting good grades, keeping a variety of healthy relationships, maintaining athletics and an obligation to the military. He has a long-term plan for his life. We haven't seen anyone doing that well in so many areas. His life seems balanced."

"You're exactly wrong," Tom said, "That kind of compulsive competence is a sure sign of early childhood trauma."

I'd never heard the phrase 'compulsive competence' before and it had to bounce around in my head for awhile. Let me get this straight- if everything is going well, you're screwed up? Taking control of your life and forcing yourself to do your best is a sign of being screwed up? Hell with it then, I'm proud to be that screwed up.

Tom was right in a way, though. And Kevin was right in his comment on the last entry- you don't become strong or smart if your life is easy. All of your strengths arose from your hardships. The most interesting and the best people I know (like you, Kai) outgrew and overcame. They outgrew and overcame real problems. They categorically did not create problems in their head so that they could fit in with their angst-group peers.

So cherish what made you You. It wasn't easy. Good. Cause I don't know anyone who had a perfect childhood who was worth a shit as an adult.

To all the Compulsive Competents out there, welcome to the club.

Currency

Epiphany again, something that happens a lot with this student. Not a martial epiphany or even a teaching epipheny, a regular old epiphany.

Why does it seem that the best martial arts instructors don't teach for money?

Read that sentance. Re-read it. Then point out, in detail, how the sentance itself is designed to mislead to a forgone conclusion. (Homework).

It's an old debate in certain circles. Everyone knows an amazing instructor who teaches out of his garage for little or no money. Everyone has been exposed to the glitzy schools that will sign you, if they can, to a contract totalling thousands of dollars that guarantees you a black belt whether you attend class or not.

From these common examples, they conclude that business sense is incompatible with "true" martial instruction. Maybe. I was in this camp for a long time, largely because 1) the best instructors I'd seen didn't charge; 2) One of the instructor lineages I was most impressed by made it a formal part of their philosophy- you didn't pay for the instruction in money now, you paid in the sweat and heartache of teaching the next generation; 3) I was told, and I believed without researching it for myself, that the Japanese Bushi class was incompatible and antagonistic to the merchant class and that there was no greater insult than to be a warrior for money.

Am I Japanese? No. Is this even true? No idea. Didn't the bushi recieve at least a stipend for their armed service? Hmmm. When all is said and done, aren't I paid and paid well to fight (in the most controlled, restrained and civilized manner possible, of course) for money? Damn right.

The person who actually got me thinking was Barry McConnell. Barry is one of those Hapkido/Arnis guys. He's also wicked, mean, funny, intelligent and sensible. Very much worth listening to. He asked, if you can't make money, maybe it's because what you're teaching isn't worth anything. Harsh, but accurate. If you feel your panties getting in a twist, take a moment and make sure it's not because he's right.

Barry got me thinking, but I can't honestly say I thought much about it. I don't need to teach for money and I've never cared for dealing with finances and accounting, so I just didn't bother charging.

On to the epiphany. This student really isn't a student. She is working on a project about teaching and I'm very eager to read what she has to say. She mentioned that in certain types of teaching, money is almost a taboo. She pointed out that I never talk about it and that not talking meant something. She plans to write a section on this. She asked the right questions to open up the back of my mind.

It's not about money. It never has been. It's about the relationship between teacher and student. In most endeavors, you hire a teacher or a guide with a pretty sure knowledge of where you want to go. A piano teacher will teach you to play the piano. If I was teaching a style, if I was _only_ teaching the motions of Sosuishitsu-ryu, it could be done this way: Give me X amount of dollars and I will show you the syllabus.

The relationship to teach about combat or survival is very different. I'm not an employee. I can't be. At some point, the student got to know me and I got to know the student and the student said, "Take me there." Take me to a dangerous, scary place that I have never seen. If I was an employee and the student was the boss, they could skip the rough spots and avoid the dangers and they would decide when they had arrived, even if they did not know what the destination looked like. The old relationship, the true relationship, has to give the guide, the instructor, the sensei freedom to push the student when the student wants to stop, freedom to force what the student most wants to avoid and freedom to terminate the relationship at any time. Sometimes because the goal has been reached, even if the student does not recognize it.

(Note- without an instructor of good heart and great experience, this system is ripe for abuse. An ignorant instructor of good heart can do nearly as much damage as an evil instructor).

She said that there is always an exchange in the student/teacher relationship. Both sides benefit in money or ego gratification or insight or skill or something else. There is always a currency exchanged. What is yours?

Borrowing Trouble

When my father died, it wasn't a huge blow. It was sudden, it was unexpected but it wasn't devastating or crippling. He'd never been one of those fathers who said, "I'll always be there for you." He had always been clear that someday he would die and someday mom would die. That someday, each of us will be alone. He said that his entire duty as a parent was to prepare us for that. Death had never been anything special in our house. The proper attitude to mourning was to focus on the ones who were hurting most and help them.

Dad's wake was a big affair and in many ways it clued me in that there was a lot about his life that I didn't know. One memory of that night, however, still pisses me off. A well-meaning pair of relatives, an aunt and uncle took me aside to tell me I was taking dad's death "too well" and needed professional help.

That stayed in my head for far too long. When someone with a medical degree or counseling experience tells you that there is a problem, it's hard not to second guess yourself. It's easy to "borrow trouble", to create a problem because you expect one.

I've said it several times before, but most of the world is imaginary. What people think of you exists in their head. It only exists in yours if you let it. I'm not denying that people with power over aspects of your life can't change things based on their thoughts... but how important those changes are exists only in your thoughts. It is possible and far too easy to put so much belief and energy into an imaginary problem that it sucks energy and creates stress like a real wound.

It's said that the unexamined life is not worth living. That's absolutely true. To develop you must experience life AND you must integrate that experience. But humans are monkeys and are driven to play with things. We are genetically programmed to see patterns and can find or create patterns (or excuses or entire religions) in completely random events. And that's a danger with introspection.

The goal, for a lot of soul-searchers, is to clarify life to a point that there are no glitches. That things, even unpleasant things, are what they are but don't cause discomfort or a bad reaction when they come into awareness. You don't freeze on them. For people obsessed with clarifying parent issues (for example) they want to remember their childhood and see the effects without reliving the pain. They want to see the source of some of their problems, give themselves power to change their behavior.

Do you see that the goal, really, is to NOT think about it too much? Not wallow, at least. Simply, not borrowing trouble.

I've read a series of articles lately by people who didn't have a problem until they fell in with a group of people who existed for that problem. They were told that if they were a certain... (size, age, color, religion, economic class, social class, gender) they must have these problems, that any belief that they didn't notice or didn't bother was (egad!) repression...

After months of soul-searching and deep meditation, they found the problem. They found deeply buried resentments and hates and repressed acts of repression. Most disturbing, to me, the writing of these two people changed palpably from voices of strength and wisdom to voices of hurt and anger. I can't help but feel that there was less uncovering of hurt than creating of it, because they had been told by people that they love and respect what they were supposed to feel.

Rule of thumb- if soul searching makes you more angry and less loving, you're probably deluding yourself. Remember that the human monkey-mind likes creating stuff out of nothing and needs to be part of the herd... but a unique part of the herd... but not too unique... but special... but not ...

Brothers in Famine

For the first time in months I met with my team as a team. The present budget crisis (is it real or imaginary this time? What's the difference?) has been targeted at overtime and especially "specialty teams". We are a "specialty team". If you get taken hostage inside the jail or there is an inmate uprising, we deal with it- that's our specialty. We'll be expected to deal with it whether we have trained or not.

The last time this happened, it was eight months and it took everything Dre and I had to hold the team together. We did, and we came back stronger. As a team. Everything as a team.

We cheated to day. Due to workman's compensation issues and completely unfounded fears that the media will label us as a rogue unit or a cabal, we have not only had our training budget frozen, but we have been FORBIDDEN to train on our own time. We train on our own all the time- this is a group of men and women (woman) that live for training. We put in time in the gym, time at martial arts or shooting or climbing and most of us read.

Training as a unit, though, is hard. So today we cheated. It's time for semi-annual qualifications at the agency. We 'accidentally' signed up for the same day, on a day when all the instructors were team members. Qualification was budgeted for three hours. We kicked it out in a third of that for some time to work together on our own skills.

Not as much time as we needed and honestly, we didn't use it efficiently. We work three different shifts and seven or eight different assignments, so a lot of the time was spent catching up, reconnecting. With a little bitching about the lack of training.

It's a good crew. I miss them. For the first time in a long time, shooting didn't seem like a chore.

Silly Games

Since the kids were babies, we would play "Pounce". The idea is to sneak up on each other and suddenly leap in the air, grabbing your prey and yelling "Pounce!". I would stalk the kids and they would stalk me.

The kids are too grown up to play Pounce now, at the ages of 12 and 14. Not Dad, though. I still play.

Lately, I've been driving my son nuts by talking to myself while stalking him.

Slowly, stealthily, I sneak to the table where he is making notes for a role-playing game. He catches a reflection in the sliding glass door and says, "I see you, Dad. Knock it off."

"Ah," I say out loud, "the wary prey has noticed the reflection of the predator. The predator holds perfectly still, knowing that herd animals are weak and stupid and will soon forget the imminent threat."

"Dad, I can hear you. You're talking out loud. Go away. And I'm not weak and stupid."

"The prey, hoping to discourage the predator, makes weak bleats of protest. Secure in the stupidity of his prey, the predator slowly advances."

"Mom! Dad's gonna pounce me and he's doing that stupid talking out loud while he does it. Make him stop."

"Once again, helpless, the prey squeels for aid from an uncaring world. Soon, very soon, he will be but another nutritious meal provided by nature in the bloody struggle for survival."

He finally turns on me, trying to keep a straight face. "Dad, you are a very silly man who doesn't understand the concept of inner monologue. I see you and I hear you. Knock it off."

"POUNCE."

Tickling ensues.

It's a silly game, but it's really funny.

Shadows

I sit across the table and listen to this man. He has the flickering tongue of years of psych meds and the toothless grin of an old crack addict. He talks to me because I listen. He is so easy to dismiss as a crazy old man, a crazy old addict, a crazy old criminal. A couple of years ago, when I first talked to him, he was bursting with the crazy story of getting a medal for saving someone from drowning. He was laughed off and pushed away, crazy old man.

I got on the internet and checked. He had recieved a local life saving medal for exactly what he said. The article identified him as homeless and a Vietnam-era Marine Corps veteran.

In his mind, it was the Medal of Honor... but other than that his story was accurate.

Today we sat and talked. Not about anything specific, yet it was. It was about living to your fifties through things that had killed many people who you knew and liked. (Luck? A divine plan? Or were you just faster?) About following orders and moving fast. About doing what needed to be done.

And we talked about the shadows- the memories of smells and sounds that you can never share. The failures and addictions. The boredom of the heart (his concept, half words, half gestures as he tapped his chest time and again, saying, "Bored right here, bored and so tired.") When you transition from intensity of that level to... what? A job, family and white picket fence?

Once you've been beyond that veil, it becomes almost impossible to relate to civilized people or have them relate to you. They fantasize about it, write books and film movies about it- but they don't want to see it and if you really share what is in your head they flinch away.

There's a shadow to that too, because though they never want to see beyond the veil, they have no problem judging the people who went there.

Sometimes I think that for my age and era, I have experienced many things, some very dark... then I talk to someone like this man and realize that I've barely scratched the surface of darkness and its echoing shadows.

As I was leaving, the deputy working that dorm called me over to say I had the "patience of a saint" for listening to the crazy old man. I didn't know how to tell her that I was honored and awed. No matter how much or how little time he spent in-country, he is still paying for it. It was an honor to listen and maybe lighten his payments for a few minutes.

Homework

The rookie was asking a lot of questions today. He'd been on the edge of sending someone to the hole, balancing all the rookie concerns: Is it right? Is it justified? Will the inmates think I'm weak if I don't? Will they think I'm authoritarian if I do?....

He asked some advice and I made him make his own decision, which was to talk one more time and if it went bad, send him to Seg. It was a good, balanced decision, but it brought up more questions- if it had gone bad, then what? How do you cuff a real criminal? What if...

It's been a very, very long time. I told him the verbals I use and how the response tells you right away if there is going to be a problem; then I gave him a few verbals I use if there is going to be a problem to prevent it. Some were words to the inmate, some words to other people. I told him that in any group of 75 people your ability to read and influence was only limited by your imagination.

The rookie confided that he's been watching a lot of officers, comparing their different 'styles' and mine was very different (no!). He said it was calm. He said he's seen me talk down things he was sure were doomed to go down bad (it took me a while but I remembered he was the rookie who was hovering around when the psych lost it and needed to be transported (the Mac Moment). Then he asked how.

Crap, I've been doing this for fifteen years. I have no idea how I do it. Lots of experience and trial and error and clear priorities. Good teachers and bad ones and knowing the difference. Taking the failures as lessons instead of making excuses.

So I gave him homework. (Rookies will do anything you tell 'em to). You can do it too, if you want.

Step # 1: Write down everything that matters to you. It should be a long list and take some time. Not just people, but things like safety and duty and causes. Make it a good list. If you are doing it for real, take a break before you read any further and make the list. I never do that, but it might be prudent.



Step #2: Cross out everything on the list that is imaginary. Safety, my friends is imaginary. If everyone dies, you can't be safe, only safer. The social contract, every aspect of it, is imaginary. You don't have to be punctual, you happen to live in a society that chooses to value it and you choose to act on that value. Punctuality is imaginary. Very, very few things on that list are real.



Step #3: Look at all the things you crossed off. Choose the ones that you WANT to matter. Decide which ones you will act as if they were real. You are actually choosing your own ethical code. Choose them, live by them, but never forget that they are imaginary. It is your code. It's foolish to argue about imaginary things or to expect anyone else to live by your imaginary ethics. This allows for great tolerance- I can disagree on fundamental levels with murderers and drug pushers and vegetarians and still listen with respect. It allows me to deal with the issue of the moment instead of dredging up past events or my judgment of past events.

Does it make me condone murder? No. And if an inmate asks, and they have, I will say (and have said) "I think you deserve to fry for that." And they don't get offended.

Looking at my personal list of imaginary things, almost everything that I value is internal. Integrity is on the list, but reputation stays crossed off.

So why did I do this to the rookie? Because not one person in a thousand differentiates between their real values and their imaginary ones. Because humans will almost always serve their real needs before their imaginary ones. Because if you can clearly know your own real and chosen list, your entire reality is less cluttered, cleaner and you see and breathe and move like a wild thing. And with a little practice, you can see the line between other people's imaginary and real values, and then you literally can predict their behavior better than they can. This kind of clarity, well, it leaves rookies asking "How do you do that?"

What Do You Want?

There's a constant interplay in our heads between the world and how we want or expect the world to be. Because of my interest, I see this mostly in the concept of martial arts versus the world of violence. I just read an article by someone describing 20 years of training- he's trained and trained hard for many years with people who most martial artists consider legends. One of his stories is about finding a traditional Chinese instructor with a small dojo. The instructor talked and trained mostly in the esoteric aspects of his art. When the author asked him about practicality, the instructor said that practicality was simple and didn't interest him anymore. The author, of course, asked for a demonstration. In a matter of seconds, he got his balls handed to him. By an older, slower, smaller, less athletic, traditional, meditating...

The author shook hands and chose not to study there. That puzzles me.

If he was looking for effective, why did he run away when he saw it? Was it because the fight (wrong word, it was more like a demonstration) that he lost so spectacularly didn't look or feel like the image of a fight that he carries around in his head?

Fighting for your life is very simple. It is very quick, or you lose. It is very ruthless, or you lose. It is maximum power and speed applied where it will do the most good. And all the while, someone is trying to do the same thing to you and he started first.

Sometimes the strongest wins. Sometimes the fastest. But usually it is the meanest. If you decide that you are going to beat me and I decide I am going to hurt you, hurt you so bad that you wake up crying every night for the rest of your life, I will win. If I decide that this is going to be the worst day of your life and I don't care what I have to pay to make it happen, I will win. When I embody your pain with absolutely no concern for my own life, I will win.

Most people have never faced this mindset. Most have never felt it. Thus, they can never comprehend it. And they are happier for that lack. Trust me.

So, when and if you look at your martial arts, think about what you want. If you want a good exercise program, go for the one that works. If you want trophies and belts, go for it. If you want to learn about violence and defending yourself, those aren't just words. Those are pain and fear and ruthless simplicity.

All day!

K fixed her steely gaze on me, obviously angry.

Still bleary, one cup of coffee down, it took me a second to notice. "You're in a pissy mood," I said.

She tapped her foot. "You haven't kissed me or tickled me all day! Of course I'm pissy."

"Babe, I just got up. All day is only, like, fifteen minutes."

"So? Get to work, Bucky."

Sigh. "I'm going to brush my teeth. Then I'll think about it."

"I'm thinking about kicking you in the testicals right now. I thought you should know."

I tried not to smile, but I failed. She was both dramatic and deadpan and perfectly cute. I brushed my teeth. I then pretended to have a hard time deciding between kissing and having more coffee. Kissing won.

That's cool. We've been together for over nineteen years now and still play and flirt. We still make up stuff to argue about to stay busy. We still tickle and cuddle and wrestle Life is sweet.

People and Problems

I don't have time to cover this in the depth it deserves right now.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060213fa_fact

This was the kernal that started an entire string of thought, added to fifteen years of dealing with criminals, the violent and the insane.

The 'Normal Distribution', commonly called the bell curve, is one of those statistical fundamentals that are everywhere. In a given group of people, some are very short, some very tall, and the majority make up the middle. Same with intelligence. Same with most things. The mistake we make is that the bell curve is so common that we assume it is universal until proven otherwise. Many of our solutions to big problems are based on this assumption even when the assumption is wrong.

Homelessness was one of these issues. Society as a whole has assumed that homelessness is a fairly long term situation that follows a normal distribution: a very small number are homeless for only a few days, a very small number are permanently homeless and the majority are somewhere in the middle, homeless for a few months to a few years.

That's completely wrong. According to the research done by Dennis Culhane, it turns out the most common length of time for a person to be homeless is one day. The second most common is two days. These short time, one-time homeless account for eighty percent of the homeless. People are people and they are adaptable. If they find themselves homeless and don't like it they will overcome and get on with their lives.

There were about 10% who come in periodically for a couple of weeks, usually in winter. The last 10% were the chronic homeless. It was this group that make up the people that most of us think of as homeless, whether you think of them as pitiful and severely disabled or alcoholics and grifters.

This means many things. First and foremost, it means the problem is small enough to solve, not just treat.

Philip Mangano, mentioned in the article, has a solution to the problem of chronic homelessness: it would actually save money to give them a nice apartment and provide for all their needs with a dedicated staff of social workers. It would be cheaper than it is to pick up their bills for Emergency Room visits and jail time.

I had a solution, too, but society isn't ready to let people die. I firmly believe that when a safety net begins to enable, it must be removed from that individual. If the person still continues to behave in a self-destructive way society should have no guilt when they suffer the consequences. But that's me- I'm aware that I don't exactly have a standard outlook on problems.

Side thought (and there were many side thoughts from this article) my instinct, when given a problem, is to solve the people (shut down the threat, train the rookie, counsel the errant) to change them in a crisis or help them change themselves... others, including Mangano, solve the environment.

More side thoughts- criminals also follow this distribution. Violent crime is committed by a relatively small percentage of criminals, and they do far more than we ever get them for. Solve the problem or solve the person?

The article applies this to police misconduct- the vast majority of officers do an excellent professional job, a small percentage are asses. The whole idea of the standard response to negative media attention (more sensitivity training) is based on the bell curve assumption. Mass training always is trying to shift the curve a little bit to the 'saint' side. The trouble is that when you have a distribution that runs closer to 30% saint; 25% hero; 20% good guy; 15% civil servant; 7% lazy bastard; and 3% asshole the training insults 75% of your people and the 10% you're trying to reach either don't care or won't act. Again, when the real problem is this small, you can solve it. I prefer firing, but our agency has a tendancy to put the worst officers in positions away from the public, which sometimes involves a promotion. Solving the environment instead of the person.

Not enough time to draw out all the things this article made me think of. Read it.

Did you get a visceral reaction to the idea of giving the worst of the worst everything: housing, medical care, special help? According to the article, if you got that reaction because it's wrong to reward people for being bad, you're a right winger. If the reaction was based on the belief that no one should get it unless everyone does, you're a left winger. I suppose if you're reaction was "Wouldn't it be cheaper to just let them die?" you'd probably get the cold-hearted bastard label.

One more: There is a difference between a policing problem and a policy problem. I don't necessarily want to tie this directly to the two statistical curves without more thought. However, given a problem, sometimes it can be solved by writing guidelines and sometimes it can be solved by enforcing the guidelines already in place. Writing more gun laws is a policy approach to a percieved problem: if we throw more words at it, define more actions as wrong or criminal, fewer people will die. In truth, almost evry bad thing you can do with a firearm is already illegal. The laws just need to be enforced. It is a policing problem.

Darwin, Hobbes and Synergy

This is what the last post was laying the groundwork for:

I'm reading Hobbes' "Leviathan," a philosophical treatise on the need for a State and why they evolved. If you aren't familiar with Hobbes, he's the one who said that the life of Man in his natural state was ,"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Probably not an optimist, I'm thinking.

His premise and argument is that without a society that has standards as well as the will and power to enforce those standards, the strong will take from the weak not only because they can but because it is logically in their best interest to do so. Since trusting on any level leaves you vulnerable to the one you trust, mistrust is the best survival strategy and in this condition, without a State, the natural way of man is a war of all against all.

You can see the logic in this, but it didn't happen (much). Darwin stepped in.

In any given population there will be immense variation in any given trait. One of those traits will be trust. True, in most cases in the Hobbes World, trust is a negative. But if two people with trust hook up and form a partnership, their power- both to gather stuff in this eternal war and to watch each other's back- is a tenfold advantage over the other players in this war.

It is such an advantage that it counts as a change in the environment: With one or two of these partner units operating, the only effective survival strategy is to form one yourself. The farther you extend the trust, the bigger and safer becomes your unit. Betrayal can crash the whole unit- what might have killed one long ago now can destroy an entire tribe or culture. Natural selection moves on- the truer the trust, the longer lived the unit. Someone said that cooperation is the only hope for mankind. On a tribal level it already has been.

Thought for the day: There are things that we can do that are so powerful that they count as changes in the environment.