Breathing

Breathing is like walking- everyone does it and very few people do it well. It's also one of those subjects where people focus on the minutea to the exclusion of the purpose. The purpose is to get oxygen into your system and carbon dioxide out... and often the expulsion of carbon dioxide is the most important.

It's good to have air in your lungs and let it out when taking a hit to the body.

Some people contend that breathing is the only thing that is both autonomic and voluntary, the only automatic thing that we can consciously control. That's partially true, but it's also been shown that you can control most of the others- heart beat, skin temperature, etc. if you can accurately and easily monitor them. It just takes practice.

Concentrating on breathing out in short, sharp gasps isn't just for lamaze- you can use it to stave off other automatic reactions, too.

Sound travels in air, and breathing requires air. Breath and sound are commingled on many levels. Kiai isn't always audible and people make a big deal about the "spirit shout" but ki means breath just as much as it does 'spirit' and in both senses is cognate with prana and pneuma. Breathing people still have their spirit inside them.

Long, slow breaths in through the mouth, out through the nose help lower the heart rate and ease pain.

The connection of breath and spirit ties breathing to meditation. In through the nose for so many seconds, hold without strain for so many seconds, exhale for so many seconds, hold with empty lungs for so many seconds. As thoughts intrude you acknowledge them and let them go until the world is a cycle of inhale, hold, exhale and hold. Then you get beyond even that.

A short, sharp breath with a sharp, short consonant-rich bark is very useful for triggering explosive speed.

Old style hypnotists would survey their audiences and then change the pattern of their own breathing. After a few minutes they would note which of the potential subjects had subconsciously mimiced the new breathing pattern. These would be the test subjects.

If you are in the middle of a fight and you can smell, you're breathing right and you are triggering your own predator mindset.

Tired

A little fuzzy right now with a low-grade headache. Our agency is nervous about the concept but finally we got permission to teach "vascular restraints" to the officers. We call them vascular restraints because the word 'strangling' is too scary. Under either name, I've been on the receiving end of about forty today. I'd really like to blame the strangles for my present headache and odd mood, but it has more to do with running on less than five hours of sleep (again!).

One of my team members came back to work today. Her knee was injured pretty severely in training and her doctor wants her to stay at home, but she's too bored and too stubborn for that. She's the only female member of the tactical team and she's well aware of it. She trained very hard to make the team and did so, only to find herself the smallest member, physically weakest, not the best shot... but she's stubborn. I'd rather have stubborn backing me up than strong. But I worry that she'll take her identity the only female team member and push past where she should go. That she'll go on an Op and jump in before she's ready. She's young, more afraid that some one will say "she couldn't hack it" than that she'll be walking with a cane before she reaches forty.

She's getting a lot from the team and giving a lot to it. She works hard and brings an energy to the team that's different when it's just a boys club. She makes everyone slightly uncomfortable, which delights my heart as a team leader- I don't want them comfortable.

Even more, I don't want there to be a career-ending injury.

Her knee is weak and I know she'll work her ass off to get it strong. She's fought so long not to be the weakest on the team and now there's another obstacle. On top of that, she needs to make the decision of what to do based on what's best for her- the training, cameraderie and cachet of being a member of an elite team versus the possibility of more damage. I can't help her with that.

Paranoia

One of my psych inmates is refusing his meds. His behavior is still fine, though he's clearly on edge, walking in tighter and tighter circles and showing the gross motor activity (GMA) of near panic or near rage.

He feels he sees the world so much clearer without medication. The 'invisible men' who run everything, route all money through their hands and manipulate the children with television so that they grow up to be unable to think in certain ways or challenge or question... this is all much clearer to him without the fog of medication.

I'm worried that if he sees it clearly enough, he will feel the need to do something and we will once more have to respond to him arguing or fighting with a person that only he can see. That's his cycle both inside and outside of custody.

I was raised on a self-sufficient survivalist ranch in the 70's. My parents were sure that soon, very soon, either a nuclear war or a massive economic crisis or an ecological crisis was inevitable and my teen years were spent training and preparing for it. I still know people who believe the same things and dozens of people who feel that world events and American politics are controlled by a shadowy group of rich and powerful men.

They aren't in prison or on medication. Because their delusions are less severe? Or because they control their behavior better? Most people talk to themselves in their own minds all the time. Is hearing voices a matter of degeree? When I debate two sides of a question with myself or play chess alone, am I flirting with voluntary schizophrenia?

Of course not. Maybe.

Everyone sees the world differently, but there is an unspoken agreement of both how differently we are allowed to see it and how much it can affect our actions before society quitely labels you "other". From that point on, no matter your intelligence or the profundity of your insight, anything you say can be dismissed as "crazy talk".

Everyone has seen something unusual- the human image at the edge of your vision that disappears when you face it. The distinct sound of footsteps in an empty building. And nearly everyone dismisses it as just imagination. An optical illusion. Nothing. They move on. How many children have had imaginary playmates, as real to them as anyone in the house? How many of those children were constantly told to quit lying, quit making things up, quit being a baby until the best friend they ever had is an embarassing memory of delusion?

What if you were to embrace these illusions, look for the people at the edge of your vision? What if you were to find them? What if this was the key to the song-sorcerers of the Finnish Kalevala and the lost Druidic mysteries? Would you be allowed to return to the world that everyone agrees on? Or would they give you some chemicals and call it "crazy talk"?

2006

Thinking about next year. In many ways, the hardest part about this job is the shift work. In the last 15 years only twice have I been on the same schedule two years in a row. It makes long term commitments difficult.

Very few jujtsu students have been able to stay with me for more than a year at a time. Some years, the schedule is hard for people with regular lives to make- noon and midnight classes one year, just noon classes this year. Eight A.M. three days a week a few years ago. It ends up with a small group of students who are also officers and work the same shift. Hard core, but few will happen to switch shifts to the same one I do.

Next year will be another shift change, probably to day shift. It will be great for the kids. My wife and I will have less private time together, which will be a loss. I can so easily imagine dropping all the extra activities and concentrating just on the home. Evenings spent helping the kids with homework, reading "The Aenid" aloud to my daughter. Hacking at blackberries and teaching myself how to repair the mowers and rototillers that are so necessary on a small farm.

So many temptations, though. I miss Search and Rescue. On top of doing good work in the outdoors and extra training, it's great to work with a group of teenagers who aren't criminals. If you need to restore your faith in humanity and particularly youth, volunteer with a busy Explorer SAR group. The kids are heroes and many have done and seen more between the ages of 14 and 20 than most sedentary adults will experience in a lifetime.

The Obukan Judo club beckons. Judo holds the place in my martial heart of a first serious crush. I'd love to go back and sweat and slam with that venerable club. Day shift would make it possible.

Teaching. For the most part, I don't enjoy teaching. People are looking for answers and I'm telling them to look, to just see. It would take maybe two full days to teach everything that works as far as technique... it takes longer to learn to see, but I'm not sure it can be taught, only shown. So why do I teach? Because I find so few people that are able to talk or play at the level I want unless I trained them or they have both lived it and kept the inquisitive spirit up. People will ask me to teach and I will want to. Temptation.

There are events planned. I'm slated to teach at the Gulf Coast Jujitsu Camp in Alabama in January; Martial University in Seattle in May and the Uechi Summerfest in August on Cape Cod, so I'll have my hand in and be able to play. Will it be enough?

Honestly, I'm tired. Physically, mentally and down to my soul. A year off sounds good, with the understanding that a year off means ONLY dealing with about 400 inmates a day, 130 of them with severe psychological issues, leading and training a tactical team, designing and teaching courses for my agency, being a good husband and a good father to two autistic children, keeping a small farm in repair and trying to reclaim it from the scourge of blackberries, improving the house and land, teaching at a few seminars across the nation and working on a book or two.

That's not too bad. That's about half off the current schedule. It does look restful. Still, there's a lot of temptation.

Perceptions

Last night I read a detailed description of an old civil trial concerning an officer-involved shooting. It wasn't an official report and the reporter made no attempt to hide his or her bias. They wanted the "Murdering pig" to pay. The reporter wrote in detail as the plaintiffs presented their rock-solid case and described blow-by-blow as the plaintiffs attorneys shattered the flimsy defense.

The writer was shocked, absolutely shocked when the jury found unanimously in favor of the officer. So were the many people who posted, the people who thanked the writer for the account. It was clearly a miscarriage of justice...

Yet twelve people heard exactly what the reporter heard and NOT ONE came to the same conclusion. The reporter had made up his mind going in and heard what fitted, dismissed what didn't. Each member of the jury must have had a personal bias at some level, too, but the voir dire process is designed to weed out the blatant ones.

So where is my filter for this? I've been in enough violent encounters (but only one shooting) to never say. It's chaotic and sometimes you make a decision in a fractioon of a second on partial information that can impact many people for the rest of their lives. That's why officers and people with experience of violence when asked whether something in the news was a "good" shoot always say, "I don't know. I wasn't there." (And what's a "good" shoot anyway?)

There's a further slant, too. Of the last three local shootings that I'm aware of I didn't know any of the officers and I knew all of the crooks- and they were crooks. For fear of speaking ill of the dead the media largely ignored the criminal history, histories of violence and even the toxicology of the dead, and always used the word 'victim'.

Here's one to think about- a mental patient rushes an officer with a metal pole. Pepper spray (OC) has already been used on him with no effect. The officer fires.

To the officer it was a stocky crazy guy rushing with a weapon; ignoring the drawn firearm, verbal commands and shrugging off OC indicates a dangerously altered level of consciousness. Those factors, to the officer, combine to the decision that his life will be in danger if he doesn't fire.

To some it was a small, mentally disturbed patient brandishing an IV pole ruthlessly shot. His family swore that he was very gentle, had never harmed or threatened to harm anyone and was probably just confused.

To me? I wasn't there. I don't know. But less than twenty-four hours early that individual had been booked into my jail and suddenly turned and attacked me. I'd put him down and cuffed him without injury. Advantages of decades of training and experience? Maybe. Or maybe I just didn't have a firearm.

Who is right? The officer? The family? Where are their filters? Where are yours?

Agreement and Time

Almost an epiphany today. It was like an epiphany because it was an insight that affects almost everything else, but it wasn't a new insight. An old insight is applied to a new context and the world shifts slightly.

It's amazing how much of fighting is mental, how much is pure imagination and how much is an unspoken agreement. Hollywood knockouts, where you get hit in the head and go to sleep for awhile and wake up fine don't occur in nature. If an animal gets hit hard enough in the head for it to go down, there's some serious damage. Same with focused people and people on drugs. But sometimes you give a light tap to a healthy person who has no stomach for the fight and he'll drop, convinced he's been "knocked out". Or you'll take a well aimed hit with no loss of consciousness and be dizzy and puking for three days.

Jointlocks whether on martial artists, new students or threats are largely an agreement. If you put your best wristlock on me if I choose not to buy in to it it falls away. Healthy people can power out of many locks or slip locks, but they think that they can't. It's instinctive and part of an agreement: if I push you, you push back. If I pin you, you struggle against my weight. If I hammerlock you, you struggle against the places you feel pressure, the very places I have the most securely. It goes back, probably, to children and animals attempting to establish dominance.

To struggle against emptiness, finding the voids in locks and pins is easy and powerful and so counterintuitive that it often seems magical when someone does it.

Space is time. Time is space. The epiphany today was realizing, with the help of Devin, that we also hold subconscious agreements about time.

Any good fighter can tell you that he can control the tempo of an altercation. It's dangerous to do in real life, but I have slowed down and found the threat subconsciously slowing down to match me...and once with a PCP freak I found myself accelerating beyond what I thought was my maximum speed to catch up.

Timing is one of the classic elements of dueling and sparring. It's simpler in a real fight but still critical. We emphasize getting and maintaining the initiative, taking the fight to the threat. Fencing has some of the most sophisticated timing concepts of any martial art. Fencers talk about 'beats' where, if I attack on the half beat and you attack on the full, I will win.

The Japanese phrase for this constant assault tactic was "Leaving no space for death to enter". Loren Christiansen has phrased it as elegantly as possible, "There are so many beats in a fight. I want each of those beats filled up with my stuff."

An overwhelming attack is a very, very reliable way to take out a threat. You take up all the time, leaving none for him...

Today it became clear that this, too, is an agreement. Everyone in a battle has their own time and their time is all theirs. It can only be taken away if it is given up. You do not have to wait politely like a child trying to get a word in on a family argument.

Try this with your students (safely)- it's a well respected tactic- throw a flurry of chain punches or 'rolling thunder' at their faces and watch them cover and, subconsciously, wait for their turn to respond.

If the same rain of blows is coming at your face there is nothing but your own mind keeping you from hitting back at the same time... but it does, reliably enough that predatory criminals count on it. His time is not yours.

Juggling Unknowns

I love teaching, obviously. The seminar format is the best- you walk onto the mat or into the room and you have to size up the audience. Probably you could teach to a cookie cutter lesson plan, but that's not teaching for the student, that's ego stroking for yourself. In any group you should make one connection with everyone and find at least one thing you can help them with.

This can make it pretty chaotic. Most of my classes start with asking, "What do you need to work on today?" Most students don't have an answer. I don't believe that they are blind to their own needs, it's more that they don't grasp that they have permission to act and to guide their own training. For a few, for one in particular, I think she withholds suggestions because she wants to see the unknown territory... that's good too.

In a little over two weeks I'll be team teaching with relative strangers. One I feel I know pretty well as a martial artist and teacher. One I know a little bit as a person, but have never actually seen him on the mat. The third is a mystery.

It's fun, for me, to try to coordinate an ambitious plan by e-mail. I'd be perfectly happy winging it- "What do you want to learn today?" Almost as happy with a detailed lesson plan. Comfortable.

I don't know where the other instructors are comfortable. I'm as big an unknown to them as they are to me.

We'll see how it goes. It will be a blast, one way or the other.

Pretenders

Spent yesterday getting fourteen officers up to speed as instructors for the next round of Defensive Tactics instruction for our agency. They were, for the most part, veteran fighters. About half were experienced and ranked martial artists, about a third experienced instructors. The class is set up to be principles-based (as described before) so in about eight hours everyone was up to speed with the material but a couple were hesitant about teaching it.

When are you ready to teach?

Afterwards, Devin and Sean came over for Scotch and talk. (Hmmm, Devin, Sean and Rory- the mad Gaels).

Sean and I came up from different paths to a very similar place in terms of tactics, beliefs and ethics. I doubt if he realizes how important he is to maintaining my sense of conditional normality in this world. By that I mean that certain events, especially long term exposure to violent people and conditions can change you, but only as much as you let them. Our culture, the media and popular opinion hammer two things- you cannot fight monsters without becoming one and/or you will eventually turn into an alcoholic bastard with no friends who mistreats his wife and children. Seriously- when was the last time you saw a media depiction of a jail guard who was a good guy? Or any officer who wasn't 'conflicted'? Sean is living proof that those images are bullshit. He does his job with a great sense of duty and honor.

Devin is an excellent technical fighter who is searching for the answer, the one right way. He is young and believes that there is a right answer and a best choice in all situations. A lot was said last night about how old fighters look at things like attitude versus skill; justice versus duty; right versus effective; the cost even of the best choice in some situations; what it means and what it doesn't -- much more than most non-professionals have ever heard.

He asked at one point about what allowed us to go solo into a cell with someone in obvious excited delerium and talk them down. He asked if we just always convinced ourselves that we would win.

Sean and I both said, after a lot of thought, that we hadn't thought in terms of winning in years. We couldn't even put our finger on when or way that had become an irrelevant concept- but Sean pointed out that it was probably because we don't think of it as a contest.

To the other part of the question... nothing gives us the confidence to do it. It needs to be done and we do it, but there's no belief that it will turn out okay.

I kicked the question to Devin, "What's the difference between being brave and faking it?"

Think about that.

Because if you fake being brave, doing what needs to be done... you are still using will to overcome fear. That is bravery, right?

What's the difference between confidence and faking confidence? I get the jitters every time I teach a roomful of strangers, but no one knows. I pretend to enjoy it... then I start to enjoy it.

When are you ready to teach? If we waited until we knew everything, there would be no teachers.

George Ledyard, an aikido instructor in Seattle wrote an excellent essay several years ago. He wrote about the thousands of martial artists who talked about their 'amazing' instructors. Then he challenged them- When are you going to decide to be amazing?

Decide to be amazing. How simple is that? Work hard, but work hard to be amazing, not 'good enough'.

When you decide who you want to be and you get stuck, fake it. Not the bullshit trappings- don't pretend to be rich when you can't afford the monthly bills- the stuff that makes up you. If you want to be brave and you're shaking in your boots, fake it: Act. You want to be compassionate but you're too self-absorbed, fake it: Listen. You want to be strong and you're small and out of shape, fake it: Pump some iron, run. You want to be confidant, fake it: Talk to a beautiful stranger.

These habits become you, and you pretend your way towards your ideal.

Memories and Not

Years ago, I had a weird and thankless night. It was a combination of pulling off a difficult and dangerous operation immediately followed by being denied a very simple and very necessary (for the agency) request. The message was very clear, it seemed: "We need you to deal with the ugly stuff, otherwise you are to be invisible and we will pretend that your kind are unnecessary and don't exist."

I sent a whiny note out into cyber-space and was answered by Roy Bedard- an officer, martial artist and (now that I've met him I can say) a thoroughly gracious man. Also a thug. You gotta love the combination.

He said that the people who made those decisions didn't deal with the stuff. He also said that if they had experienced that night, they'd be talking about it for years but that I would soon forget as other rough nights would intervene. He was mostly right, but I remember the night because of what he said, not because of the huge, angry Samoan.

I've sat around the campfire as friends recount second by second a cave trip we took years ago. It was a powerful, life changing event for them and I have no memory of it whatsoever. Sometimes it's easy to blame concussions, but crawling in a cave or even most fights don't mean enough to hold a place in my memory.

Is that good? There's cool stuff in the memory, but cool stuff gone, too.

It does make conversation hard. With only a few exceptions my eyes glaze over when most officers talk about their 'big fight'. It's hard to talk to civilian martial artists most of the time.

It seems I talk to Sean and Mac the most... but in retrospect we don't talk about the fights. We talk about what we learned. That's good. It's good enough.

Two Cups of Coffee

Thinking today of an unexpected cup in an unexpected place.

In the early nineties I was in the jungle of Ecuador in and near Coca for a medical relief mission to some of the nearby villages. There are some great memories from this short time- death, birth, miscommunication (someone attempting to pantomime "We have just killed an armadillo and would like to sell it to you for food," CAN be interpreted by an over-eager medic as "One of our friends has just falen off a cliff and broken his spine and we need your help.")

It wasn't a long mission, but our CO had made the odd and brain-dead decision to forbid all personnel from eating off the local economy. If we caught/picked and cleaned it ourselves, fine. But we were forbidden to buy food from the local vendors. That meant MREs and T-Rats. MREs are good, even the old ones but T-Rats.... "Whats yellowish green, greasy, spongy and smells like rotten spam?" "Don't know. It could be the eggs, the eggs and ham or the other thing. Check the label." Worse, other than the little packets of instant in the MREs, there was no coffee.

Get that- we're in Ecuador on the border of Columbia. When we go into the highlands we can smell the coffee blossoms... and we can't get anything other than shitty, iodine flavored instant coffee.

Several days in, after a long day of loading, packing, humping (in the military sense, not the civilian) and treating patients we were unloading gear back at the Ecuadorean Army barracks ("Ejercito del Selva!") when I saw a staff sergeant pull out a thermos and pass it around. I'm quiet, shy and reserved and don't ask for much, but I asked for a cup of coffee. He looked reluctant but said "Sure," and poured some in. It had cream in it, but I was desparate. Took a sip... coffee and irish cream. Alcoholic, caffeinated and ambrosial. I have no idea how he made the coffee, smuggled the Irish Cream in or kept it for that long without drinking it up, but that regs violation did more for morale in that minute than anything else could have.


******

The other coffee story isn't a coffee story. On a graveyard overtime I brought a cup of good coffee to one of the deputies (it's a good habit, learned from that long ago SSgt) and we talked. I was going through some rough times, a cumulative mass of big events that wasn't settling like it should. He was going through rougher times. We sat for hours, talking, surrounded by sleeping inmates. It was honest talk about loss and change and toying with the idea of suicide. Finally, he said, "Sarge, no one commits suicide because of what happened to 'em. They commit suicide because they thought about it too much."

So... we cut down on the thinking about stuff. We've both kept moving since then, kept active. There's no depression brawling in the dojo (or in the jail) or chopping wood or hacking blackberries.

A Short Incident

"Did he fall or was he punched?" the nurse asked. The inmate was bleeding from two places on his face, lying on the wet tiles of the shower floor. His eyes were wide open but he couldn't speak, couldn't move.

I held his head with a gloved hand, stabilizing in case his spine was injured. "Assault," I said, "If he'd fallen and hit the cut would have been on the outside of the orbital ridge. This is on the inside. He was hit."

I caught myself, "Is it terrible that I know that?" I asked.


Later, when the nurse was using super glue (it has another name when a doctor uses it but it's the same stuff) to seal the laceration, the now half-conscious kid asked if it would scar. The nurse said just a little.

"No one will notice it," I said. There was a flash in my memory of a ring on a big fist that matches to a scar in my left eyebrow. "No one notices mine."

Interviews, investigations. The injuries at first seemed serious enough to warrant felony charges. A dorm of 65 inmates with one beaten unconscious and, of course, no one saw a thing. In ten minutes we had the assaulter identified and removed, but it took me another half hour to be absolutely sure it was the right man...

When the injuries proved less serious, it became a misdemeanor, something I could not charge. The victim declined to press charges, balancing his anger, humiliation and desire for revenge against the probability (the near certainty) that he will be in custody again and word will spread that he was a "rat". Societies are self-enforcing in many ways.

So there will be no new charges and it will be handled within the institution with segregation and the loss of priveleges.

Many Leveled Day

So much happened today, may small things with deep resonance- an experiment, a phone call, an attempted good deed.

Friday classes with the Friday student. I've been caught up lately in the kata I've described before, feeling that here is a student who can take that path at that intensity, listening and reading her dealing with the concept... it occured to me today that I was retracing steps on a path. Because the two-man kata were the things that gave certain gifts, the only things in my experience, I'd just accepted that they were the only way. A blind spot, an assumption... so today we started on a new way. It may work. It may work without the risk of catastrophic injury. At the close of class, she mentioned that she did not write enough in her notebook because so few of the concepts were in words, most were in feelings. So I put them in words for her and I was amazed at how much was covered in such a short time, because I remember and know it as a feeling, too.

Contraband in the jail is a big deal or a small issue, depending on the contraband and the circumstances. An officer and I spent the better part of an hour trying not to send someone to the hole for contraband. A delicate balance of what needed to happen (contraband removed) and what needed to not happen (the person getting a reputation as a snitch) and what would be nice to happen (the kid not losing any good time; us avoiding paperwork at the end of shift). The inmate, the kid, was very conscious of what he had to lose in terms of extra days in custody as well as the respect of his inmate peers... he played the line, doing what he felt he had to do, honorable by his own standards. It didn't work out perfectly, choices rarely do. But people learned a lot about each other.

A phone call from a friend is such a little thing. I finished the first draft of the book and sent it to a handful of carefully selected readers for the big critique. Kris called, "Yeah, I got it. I happened to be on the phone with my publisher and he wants to look at it. You mind?" I can stand alone in a cell with a three-hundred pound violent criminal and literally yawn when he starts talking trash... but one little sentance sent a trickle of adrenaline down my spine. A part of me is whispering, "The books not good enough yet. I'M not good enough." The same voice that whispers to everyone who writes and doesn't send it to a publisher, who trains and doesn't compete, who dreams and doesn't act. The voice is still there after the years and the scars and the....everything.

I've written four lines of poetry in my life that I thought were good and true:

The Dream is damned
And Dreamer too
If Dreaming's all
That Dreamer's do

Don't just dream.

"Where Did You Learn This?"

Yesterday was a very, very good day. In case you haven't figured it out, that means that today I am tired and sore and scraped or bruised. Good days involve a little sweat and blood.

My wife asked me to take down some trees for a friend, a pair of 30+ foot tall cherry trees that were diseased and uncomfortably close to a gazebo, play structure, shed and flower beds. Over forty years old and a cool day involves climbing trees, complicated rope work and a chainsaw!

The ropes were to control the fall of each big branch and piece of trunk. Imagine standing with one foot balanced on a 3 inch wide piece of trunk, the other foot on a stub of a branch as you ply a chain saw at neck level on a section of tree, ropes set carefully so when it starts to go it will fall away from you (and hopefully not snap-back) all 20 feet in the air! Yes!

Ris, our friend asked, "Where did you learn this?"

I froze for a second and said that my dad used to make me do it, since I was the climber. But that's not quite right- my dad though I was too small and clumsy to use a chain saw (with some justification- at the start of my senior year I weighed less than a hundred pounds).

I watched him and heard his stories. Like most men in Eastern Oregon, he was an expert with a chainsaw. I've climbed since I could walk, earlier if you believe my parents. The rope work comes from caving, partially...

In the end, a few decades and lots of mileage leaves some skills and partial skills and concepts. If you aren't afraid to try. Just remember to think it through.

The World

My dad was a Korean-era vet. He told me that people could be seen as sheep, wolves or sheepdogs. (You'll find the same analogy in Grossman's "On Killing" from another vet of the same era). To sum up the analogy, most people are generally kind and productive, but they need leaders and will rarely do anything beyond pleasure-seeking/pain-avoidance without some kind of force acting on them.

Wolves prey on the sheep.

Sheepdog protect sheep.

Sheepdogs are very much like wolves, except for the compulsion to protect. A Sheepdog has more in common with a wolf than it will ever have with a sheep. And they make sheep nervous.
---------------------------------

We were on a search for a missing trail runner. I tried to encourage the younger members of the team: "It hasn't been that cold and it's only been two days. If the guy had the most basic survival gear or any common sense, we'll find him alive."
These 14-18 year old kids had more search experience than me. They gave me pitying looks and one said, "Sarge, if he had any common sense he wouldn't have tried to go cross-country at twilight. We don't search for the smart ones."

Later, one of the searchers confided that he wanted to quit, "I've been looking at all the people we've saved in the last two years and I don't want any of them breeding. I don't think saving stupid people is good for society." Harsh.

------------------------------------

The sheepdogs have done a good job. Despite the media, this is the safest world for sheep that has ever been. It isn't perfect in any way, but it is safer, better fed, healthier and more comfortable than any time or place in history. When I hear someone spout some braindead 'insight' into violence or criminal behavior it makes me happy, in a way, that they are safe to hold those beliefs and very unlikely ever to face the truth. That could only happen in a world where the dogs have done well.

At the same time, the sheep control the world and move it ever closer to the perfect sheep world, a world of flat grassland and easy water and comfortable temperature. A world of long healthy life and no surprises.

I am ambivalent, because I know that the world I would love, the world that would make me feel most alive and necessary would be dangerous and uncomfortable for most of the people that I love.

Dogs aren't happy in the sheep world, but they work very hard to create and maintain it.

That's the essence of the sheepdog: he would give his life in a heartbeat to defend a world he feels only contempt for. And he would be honored to do it.

Dimensions

Yesterday was a good day. I'm sore and stretched with rug burns on my elbows and a couple of separted ribs. Spent about an hour with Jordan, the first part introducing him to the sword, the second rolling hard at grappling and infighting. Jordan's big, strong and experienced. He has some skill, too. He makes me work and I was sweating by the end. It's a good feeling.

Drew dropped by class. He won't be at jujutsu for some time. FEMA has activated him to help with the Katrina aftermath. He's a good choice for it. It's a good opportunity for him.

Received an e-mail from a friend who has come to understand a piece of my mind, a piece I might be able to share.

Invited to give an interview on a web-based 'radio'.

Lastly, broke through that writing problem and will be able to finish the first draft...

What made it a great day? The dimensions. In the same day there was my touchstone, brawling. Of all the things in the world it is the one I do with the most animal happiness. I watched the next generation take the next step. Made a connection with a friend and was invited to share with strangers. Present, future and past, all growing.

The Price

In the early eighties a guest lecturer for a criminology class gave insight and advice: "Life boils down to two questions," he said, "What do you want? And what are you willing to pay- in time, sweat, dedication and money to get it?"

Sometimes the price is high. If you are not willing to pay, perhaps you don't want it enough. That's simple maturity. A child wants to acheive the same goal at a lesser price. Often in life the value is in the price.

The two-man kata of traditional Japanese jujutsu were a very sophisticated training method. You were teaching young bushi to kill an armed and armored warrior quickly. Training armor wouldn't help, since you were training to defeat real armor. If you altered the technique for safety, the alteration would become a habit and the warrior would pull his punches under stress. Their solution was for uke to attack with full power, speed and commitment. Tori countered, also, with full power, speed and commitment and then uke would do the one specific thing that would be counter-intuitive on the battlefield but would save him in kata. In Tori ire, uke drops his sword to prevent falling on the tsuba with full body weight focused over his floating ribs. In Kawashime, uke goes limp to prevent his spine from shearing. In Munadori, uke must jump with toe flexion or his collarbone is shattered. Etcetera.

Kata can be done many ways. Most learn the forms and learn them well enough to teach and move on. They become stale, stylistic rituals.

But there is more here. Not from all instructors and not for all students, but there is much more. When Bo and I were training kata to prepare for our cerification, it was very intense. It started with the moves and then speeding it up. Then sensei insisted we add true commitment. When we were uke, we struck at each other (with boken to the head) full force, full power. The only thing in uke's mind was "to cut". If I hand someone a boken and tell them to hit me in the head as hard as they can, very, very few will even be able to do it in a half-hearted way. Most that do swing, when I look in their eyes, will freeze at the last minute, sometimes even pulling muscles to stop from hitting.

From that point on, Bo and I were trusting each other to strike to kill, for real, every time.

Then sensei insisted we "wait in stillness" before moving (to be fair, we'd always done this, but with the introduction of killing intent there was a new level and new consequences). This changed the drill. If uke sensed any movement from tori, uke altered the attack. In other words, uke would strike at the head and if tori moved too soon uke would drop the strike and slam you in the ribs. Tori learned to wait and then explode.

Tachypsychia is the term for the sensation that everything is going in slow motion. It sometimes happens under extreme stress. This is the only training I've ever undergone or even heard of that taught you to consciously access this state.

The last stage was to apply this without the safety of kata. In other words, we would assume position and uke could attack in any way that he chose. Freeform kata, if you will. We found that the responses were rarely out of kata, but highlighted the principles.

What did we get from this? Some criminal screaming that he's going to kill me just isn't intimidating any more. There is more time in a second than I need. I can be still and I can explode. I learned to deal with what is there and not what I expected.

What did it cost? It was dangerous. One of my uke's tried to do an intuitive breakfall and his collarbone was in three pieces. I sprained my neck several times going limp a fraction of a second late. I still remember that second of slow motion time when I realized that Bo was about to land on his bent neck with full force and me yanking to get his body over in the last six inches of falling space... spraining his neck badly but not killing him.

And there was a cool-down period. For much of the last part of this training I couldn't spar. I was on a hair-trigger and couldn't even think of a non-lethal response to anything. It took a while to wear off, because even in a maximum security jail that level of preparation is frowned upon by society.

There's always a price.

What to do...

I'm getting fat and lazy. It appears to be a side-effect of a life going too well.

I love, like and respect my family. My wife of fifteen years still makes romance an adventure and a mystery. If I did not love her I would genuinely and sincerely like her. I've loved my children as babies, toddlers and kids. Now, as a young man and a young woman I am proud and impressed with their budding strength, intelligence and courage. They will be fantastic adults.
The cluttered house is beautiful and full of books, looking south over a sweep of gorge and valley and mountain. The land requires work and improves every time I choose to sweat.

Work is good, though often boring. I don't get challenged by inmates anymore; bad things tend to stop when I show up... but I still get to talk to schizophrenics and stabilize suicidals and mediate disputes and occassionally use the voice that makes violent grown men be quiet.

I don't spend enough time with my friends, but they are special: intelligent, caring, devoted, talented. Adventurers, protectors, hunters, healers and shamans.

Martial arts is where I feel the dissatisfaction most. When I started I thought it would be an infinite learning curve and it could be... except that I decided to focus on practicality and test it in reality. Learning moves to know them no longer appeals. Playfighting is fun but not important. It is rare to learn something new that works. Most instructors, when they talk about violence, are trying to describe an animal they have never seen.

I've never needed much. Anything beyond a daily meal and a relatively warm place to sleep was an extra. My life is all extras now- love, prosperity and even some acclaim.

So when life is going this well, when you have acheived more than you thought you could...how do you keep living? Why?

So what now? Make up some imaginary goal just to keep going? Wrap my life around obligation and duty? (Ooops. Doing that now). Fade away? Rest for a year or two and see what looks interesting?

This is my mid-life crisis, I suppose. When everyone else is looking back from 40 saying how little they've achieved I'm the one saying, "I did all that? Christ, I need a break!"

Bullshit versus Bullshit

Been watching "Penn and Teller's Bullshit" on DVD. These guys are smart, incisive and brutally critical. Some of their arguments are weak and some of the shows are gratuitous, but I've been having a grand time with them.

Watched the episode on self-help last night. They featured a group of people using things that I recognized as old martial arts parlor tricks (fire walking, walking on broken glass, breaking arrows with your throat and bending rebar with your throat) as a self-empowerment course. To Penn (who does all the talking), it was "BULLSHIT".

He was right, in a way. The people walking on coals are not doing what they think they are doing. Simple physics allows them to do something that looks dangerous and potentially lethal. They think they are using the power of their minds to prevent injury... and they're close. They are using the power of their minds to overcome fear.

For many people, the moment that they do something they thought was impossible there is a huge elation, a rush of confidence. This can and has spilled over into the rest of their lives. Penn is very rational and very confident. I won't demean that by saying he was born that way. In all likelihood he worked very hard to understand the world around him and gain control of any aspect he could which has resulted in great success for him. In a way, though, I think he has forgotten that most people have many limiting fears.

And the fears are bullshit. The subjects of this self-empowerment course wanted more- better jobs, richer lives, freedom from insecurity.... blah, blah, blah. We all know the list. Each of these fears and limitations are self-generated and self-perpetuated. There is no law saying you were born on the South side of town so you must be poor all your life. The Director of Personnel doesn't even know that your father was an alcoholic so that can't stop you from getting the promotion...But the subjects believe the limitations are real.

So these courses, these tests, allow the subject to defeat one imaginary problem that is also a very real fear. This one victory may allow them to challenge another imaginary problem and another and another... It is fighting bullshit with bullshit.

The final goal, the one Penn and I would both be happier with, is for the people to recognize the problems are imaginary and let them go. It can happen in time. You can outgrow rituals.

Used to be once a year, the group would get together for the "Drowning of Sorrows". We would name one event from last year that we didn't want to drag into the next. We would name it and drink a cup of sake in memory because it was OVER. The ritual continued until we were out of stuff to forget. Somewhere along the line I quit going to the party because I very, very rarely hung on to anything anymore. The problems were all imaginary.

The ritual was Bullshit and it handily helped us deal with problems that, also, were Bullshit. Then you get over it.

You Don't Need MY Permission

Most people are not okay with success. Nearly all people have this idea of value and self-worth and are uncomfortable and afraid to reach beyond it. We all know a wonderful writer who rarely or never sends manuscripts to an editor. We know brilliant, grounded people who stay in dead-end jobs that they hate because it is "good enough".

What if it isn't good enough? How many of you have friends who tell you constantly that you can "do better"... in work, in relationships, in every or any aspect of your life. Are they wrong? Do you surround yourself with stupid friends? If your friends are smart, they're right.

So what's stopping you? You.

Rick is one of my super-amazing friends. Most of my friends are amazing on some level. When it borders on the supernatural, as it does with Rick, it's super-amazing. He has an uncanny ability to go into a situation: boardroom, biker bar, red-neck watering hole, formal dinner party, blue collar job site and within minutes become everyones close friend. I've watched him walk into a military surplus store, strike up a random conversation and in less than five minutes be offered free and unlimited access to a professional machining shop.

If you read personal accounts of Bill Clinton, this same ability is mentioned. This ability, combined with Clinton's ambition and ruthlessness, propelled him to the White House. Why not Rick?

Okay, Rick's not stupid and doesn't want that kind of life... but he thinks he has the kind of life that he deserves. We all do. We are comfortable middle class, content and happy to be one notch more prosperous than our parents... and every last one of us could be more of we decided to.

It doesn't have to be money, fame and power. I see it in martial arts students. Some get so locked into a world view where their sensei or 'master' is unbelievably amazing that they will never give themselves permission to be even better. Why not? Shouldn't a good instructor in the end make you better than he was? But no matter how good the teacher, the student has to let themselves grow and amaze.

What do you love doing? Do you give yourself permission to be the best? Do you give yourself permission to put it out for others to see and judge and permission to not be the best right away and use the failures to get better?

Life isn't hard. Really stupid people do it all the time. Smart people should do it better, but they have to let themselves.

Permission

This is something I wrote awhile ago, but it leads into something I want to write about later. Consider it a preface:

I've been giving my students permission a lot lately... Sometimes I ask, "Why didn't you...?" reach for a weapon, use a preemptive strike, run, call for help...

And the students says, "I didn't know I could." For the longest time, I assumed that meant the student had never considered it or didn't know how... it didn't occur to me that they thought it might be forbidden.

These are things that should never need to be said but still must, because there is power in the words.

You have permission to defend yourself.

You have permission to be rude.

You have permission to survive, no matter what it takes.

You have permission to act when the scary man reaches for his belt. You do not need to wait until he draws the weapon or until he points it at you or until he hurts you.

You have permission to act.

You have permission to beat me, even if I wear a blackbelt.

You have permission to become better than the best instructor you ever had.

You have permission to invent something better than I ever taught you, and permission to use it in my class and permission to use it to defeat me and permission to teach it to your students.

You have blanket permission to grow and live and survive and fight and run and scream and talk and play and learn and experiment.

You have permission to win, and you have permission to decide what winning is.

Rory

The Real Deal

You meet a lot of 'masters' and 'grandmasters' and other bullshit if you stick around martial arts long enough. Most of them are about 10% skill and 90% ego. A few are really charismatic and have amassed a set of parlor tricks and a couterie of syncophants who obligingly fall on command... some are so deep into the games that they have come to believe in them.

I'm not writing about them. Not today. I want to write about two of the old dragons.

If you are deeply into the martial arts, you know of Jon Bluming. During the time when Donn Draeger was making the first deep western inroads into understanding the Japanes martial traditions, Bluming was his roommate. The Japanese called Bluming "The Beast of Amsterdam" and he was probably the primary reason that non-Japanese were not allowed to compete in Japanese judo tournaments for some time.

I met Bluming sensei in Seattle. His seminar was to be the first time on the mat for me since my knee surgery and it was the day after I'd shot someone. There was a lot in my head and I felt very much the 'realist' in a group of 'artists'.

Bluming is a rude, crude, fearless, outspoken old bastard. He is a bundle of scars and broken bones held together with tape and wraps for horse legs. He's tough and funny and hard and serious... and going on the mat for him is like going home, the one place where everything makes sense.

He was describing his favorite strike, the shotei and said, "I don't punch with my fist anymore because when you hit some guy with your fist and you fracture his skull and tear his ear off and you're waiting in a cold-assed jail cell for hours to find out if he's going to die and what the police are going to charge you with, well, you really wish you'd just hit him with the shotei, which just does the internal damage." At that moment I knew I could learn from him.

He rolled with everyone who wanted and he tapped most of them, this 70+ year old Korean war veteran. His doctor told him to stay out of training, but he couldn't. Keeping him off the mat would be like keeping a fish out of water. A big fish. A big, smart, old, mean fish.

The other one is a sweet, soft-spoken old man who has made a science of pain. Wally Jay founder of Small Circle jujitsu was never a national champion in his youth, but he had the mind to train champions and he did. He worked out principles of physics and efficiency and he centered his personal style around fingerlocks. My god it hurts!

He originally taught Small Circle as something you could add into any art and make it better. My own style is woefully lacking in restraint techniques and SCJJ filled the gap nicely. It is the best thing I've ever found for getting cuffs on a threat... it has grown since then with additions from Wing Tsun and others, moving to a more complete art.

At seventy years+, each of these men will roll with you. They don't need any big spiel or psychological set-up to make their stuff work. Their students are not chosen by how suggestible they are and they have no use for syncophants or yes-men. They want people with heart.

"Pain makes believers"- Wally Jay

"For me it is OK for I am very very busy all those basterds want to have a
seminar now that I am 70 years old ."- Jon Bluming (from an e-mail)

Matrix, Violence and an Invitation

I use a matrix concept in the martial arts. Basically there are many, many kinds of conflict- war to dominance games to sudden assault to surviving sudden assault to restraining criminals or mental patients without harm... When you stretch it beyond violence to MA you can add fitness, sport and 'personal growth'. These are the elements at the top of the matrix.

Each is composed of separate elements that can be widely varied: how much time to prepare? What is the goal? Who is the likely opponent? What is the optimum mindset? What are your resources? These things, ad infinitum, make up the other axis of the matrix.

I teach, maybe preach(?) that it is imperative to understand the difference and when you are training for one you are not training for the others. When a civilian leaves a conflict, it's good self-defense. When a soldier leaves, it's desertion. When a bigger, tougher opponenent slams you to the ground and starts to strangle you and you shoot him, that's self-defense... unless it's in sparring, in which case it is murder.

These things simply aren't the same and don't require the same mindset or tactics... and yet almost every martial artist I know feels that their art covers the whole matrix.

Yesterday, I googled myself and found one of my articles being discussed on a martial arts website that I had never heard of. I was aware of their style, one of my friends studies under their head instructor and speaks very highly of him. It seemed like a good group: intelligent, friendly and incisive. They were asking each other about points that needed clarification so I decided to drop in and explain.

The article was about predator assaults- ambushes. Most people have never experienced one and their guesses and intuition on the subject tend to be farther off than they are willing to believe. The people on the board remained nice, but it reminded me of herd animals clustering together. They were very careful to compare my writing with their doctrine and to point out that it was mostly in line with their teaching, if only dealing with the 'lower aspects'. What struck me most is that again and again they tried to point out limitations and flaws in any training that wasn't theirs and completely denied that my biggest filter was experience.

I was invited to train with the local group. I'll show up, though if I wanted to train this system I'd train with Scott who already has both recognition from their instructor and my deepest respect. But they do seem serious and sincere and intelligent people who like to brawl are my favorite.

However the invitation included the line"Bring an open mind because while many things about XXXXXX will be familiar, there's enough difference that you won't notice if you see it only through your previous MA filters"

Big red flag. And they don't realize that previous martial arts aren't my filter- experience is.

Looking for the Skeleton

I've been working on a book. It grew out of some lectures and a pamphlet on the difference between martial arts and violence. It is the hardest thing I've ever tried to write. Not because of prose or subject matter or dedication or research or knowledge. It's because violence is still a natural history, not a science.

Once upon a time, 'natural history' was a collection of facts and observations and specimens. It was a body of literature gathered by amateurs and professionals all over the world. Then Darwin came along and found the underlying theme to all life and biology was born as a science.

At one time there was a loose collection of facts, processes and experiments with various far-fetched but detailed theories on what each thing meant... then Dalton postulated the atomic theory and philosophy of alchemy became the science of chemistry.

This manuscript deals with what I have learned about violence and it is a collection of observations, a few theories of small parts, systems that have worked for me and my students. It is very, very hard to format.

Normally I'm good at finding underlying patterns and connections. Finding the key that makes entire classes of technique work. Tying everything together so it is easy to learn and remember and extrapolate from... not with this. I see big pieces, such as the effects of adrenaline, where control must be learned as a technique, but it affects perception and affects both threat and victim but in different ways as well as men and women and professionals and everyone else. It is also a big piece of the aftermath and that is different for single events versus sustained exposure...

And I see small pieces that affect these big pieces and may, if I come to understand them, be bigger than I ever realized. Breathing. The touch of a palm on your face.

Grrrr. So I come up with a framework that works hopefully for the reader and with luck, stuff won't fall between the cracks. My attempt to organize the soul of chaos.

We'll see.

Moments

Rapelling into a cavern of unknown depth, reaching the end of the rope and tieing another on, continuing the rapell until my head lamp fades out and for a moment, I'm spinning in sheer darkness...

A judo tournament my freshman year- my opponent out ranks me by four belts and broke Kelly's arm less than an hour ago and he has me in the same hold. Everyone is yelling for me to tap- my teammates, my coach and even my girlfriend. One second of feeling completely alone and I twist my elbow off the breaking point and get to my feet. I can see in his eyes that he is shaken and he taps out to a weak choke a few seconds later. Lesson learned: when you go all the way, you will be alone.

Taking a defunct raft down the side of Mount Hood and getting air and slamming into the ground and seeing flashes of color: blue-white-blue-white.... Thinking, "This is the weirdest concussion I've ever had." Then I realized it was the snow and the sky and I was spinning!

Concussion- learning naginata at the SCA and my coach/partner faked me beautifully and caught me under the helmet. Everything is in slow motion as I see the helmet spin through the air and I'm thinking, "Boy, I hope my head's not still in there." The unbelievable relief and happiness when the helmet bounces off the wall and rolls to my feet and there isn't a head inside.

Taking my son out in the rain in the first seconds after his twenty-three hour ordeal of birth.

My wife after the same labor- a soft rattle wakes me up and she is standing, moving her IV over to get water or something. "What are you doing? Get back to bed!" She looked at me and said, "You looked so tired I didn't want to wake you."

Drinking Chichu with Bobby, a reformed cannibal in Ecuador.

Night time sling load operation- I'm on the top of a humvee holding up a probe so that the static charge created by the copters spinning props doesn't shock anyone bad as a squad of copters come in low over the trees lit only by moonlight. Hold the probe steady as the pilot tries to hold the copter steady while my partner hooks the clips on the sling. It is gale-force winds from the blades and an enormous mass of steel held from crushing me only by the skill of the pilot and load master... and then it is done and I watch the tank-killing vehicle fly into the night dangling from the helicopter.

Hanging out the doors of a helicopter as the pilot flies knap-of-the-earth. He's practicing flying and I'm practicing gunning... the disconcerting feel that the earth has risen to vertical because there is almost no sensation that we are flying on our side.

Really wild sex in a tropical rainstorm on top of a Mayan watch tower.

Walking away from a violent, developementally disabled, schizophrenic and bipolar arrestee who always fights but has just promised that he would be quiet and behave and even went so far as to give me some friendly advice (he suggested a good counselor, he thought I could use one) when another experienced officer walks over and whispers, "How the hell do you do that, Sarge?" The force has great power over weak minds....

Playing bad guy, I'm literally standing on one foot, balanced on a speaker above the door when the tactical team enters. No one looks up. They enter, fan out... and I drop down behind them and just leave. They all look up now.

In a hanging valley on Snoqualmie pass, camping. Early in the morning the little jays are begging for food and we get the Francis of Assissi pictures with wild birds eating out of our hands... within an hour we're trying to drive the little buggers off so we can eat in peace.

Another year in the same camp site with good friends, good scotch and the Aurora Borealis lighting the sky.

Playing bad guy again, I was a bit unprofessional. Their team leader had ignored my critique, so I decided to role-play me instead of a random criminal for their second run through the scenario. Now the four-man cell is standing there, each with a smear of paint from a sim bullet or two on the helmet and two in the chest and one or two at the hips. I've been hit once in the arm and twice in the leg out of 40 bullets down range.. and all the hits were after I was out of ammo.

My family shows up at a DT instructor's meeting to take me to lunch. We're boxing. "Anybody want to box?" I ask and without hesitation my eleven-year old daughter says, "Sure!" and grabs some gloves.

It's a good life, and a life is nothing but moments and stories. I hope all of you reading this are living the stories you dream.

Honor and Warriors

The Budoshoshinshu says that the three qualities a warrior must possess are integrity, loyalty and courage.

My interpretation: Integrity, because if a man's beliefs, words and actions contradict, if he says one thing and does another, he is at best worthless and at worst, evil. Simply, integrity limits your value as a human being. You can only be as good, as human or as honorable as you are true.

Loyalty, because there must be something more important to you than your own life. If you are the most important thing in your life, you will harm others to further your self-interest. A skilled warrior who serves only himself causes harm to many and must be put down like a rabid dog.

Courage, because it is the job of a warrior to walk into the places where no one else wishes to go and make them better.

All human beings need the elements of Integrity and Loyalty to be worthwhile, but only the warrior requires courage, and only the warrior is defined as facing danger.

A note on this- Warrior is a loaded word and people jump on it as a crutch for their self image. I use it here because the translation I use used the word. It is nothing noble or heroic or special- it is a small group of people who have chosen to face conflict as a job. If someone defines or seeks to define themselves as a 'warrior' they need to get over themselves.

Honor, then, is acting in accordance with the three virtues. Any act of honor will have all three of these elements- it will be true (this does not eliminate the ruse de guerre), it will be done for the betterment of someone or something other than the person who acts and it will be risky.

'Face' is reputation. When a person acts because it must, by his moral code, be done, he acts from honor. When he acts from fear of what people will think of him, he acts to save or increase face.

Fighting fair- consideration of honor in conflict come in before the conflict. The question of honor is decided in what I will fight for. Once conflict begins, the goal is to subdue or destroy. When the need rises to the level and there are no other options (or at least no time to find them) and that goal is set, either to subdue or destroy, the battle is on.

Two quotes to think about:

"No matter whether a person belongs to the upper ranks or the lower, if he has not put his life on the line at least once he has cause for shame." -Nabeshima Naoshige

"The foundation of a man's duty as a man is in truth. Beyond this there is nothing to be said." --Torii Mototada

Professionals and Amateurs

There are degrees of professionalism. My colleagues and I are paid, and paid well, primarily to deal with violent and dangerous people. The rest of the job could be done better by a decent secretary- but to deal with violence, to judiciously control it or avoid it or prevail as appropriate is a skill and an art.

Not all professionals are the same. We all get paid to deal with violence and all that that means- the injuries, sure, but also the mental after-effects, the social effects and the possibility of infection- but the majority really don't. If we know or suspect that a situation is about to go bad, we call for a handful of select individuals. These are people that maintain their cool and have a reputation: the common reputation is that most of the time the fight doesn't happen, when it does it is over very quickly with minimal injury. I'm one of those people for my agency.

This has an odd effect in that it really concentrates experience in a handful of people- I've been in a room with a dozen senior deputies with perhaps 150 years of experience between them and less than a hundred "uses of force"... I quit counting mine at 300. As much as there is an acknowledged gap in experience and attitudes between the people on "the Job" and "civilians" there is almost as big a gap between the "average officer" and the "meat eater" within the Job. I've trained in advanced first aid, volunteered with Search and Rescue, acted as a peer counselor and crisis debriefer, trained for hostage negotiation, design courses, research and write and been the point sergeant for the mental health team for the last couple of years and I still get told "You're just a tactical guy." or "The idea of you working at headquarters makes people nervous." Meat eaters make sheep nervous.

Sorry about the vent.

Back to the point- Amateurs in violence (think martial artists) do not have the same idea of a fight as a pro does. The amateur thinks 'winning'. The pro thinks 'going home'. To the amateur it is a contest. To the pro, if it ever becomes a contest it's because he didn't cheat enough or early enough. To the amateur, it is a game and to the pro it is a job. Like any other job you do it as quickly and as lazily and as safely as possible. Could you imagine if a factory worker looked at each car as a challenge with a risk of injury? "Whew! It was tough, but we got the new Camaro out today. I may need to get a cast on my wrist but we won!"

There are levels for Pros, too. That's what I learned today. An inmate pretending to be crazy threatened to attack any officer who came into the interview room he was in. The person in charge of the area, a very, very good sergeant had come up with a plan to be sure we would win the fight. It was a good plan. I ignored it completely because I had no intention of there ever being a fight. (Side effect of being considered a go-to guy for trouble is that people don't get their feelings hurt if you have a better plan). The sergeant who came up with the plan was a pro, but he'd let the threat decide that there was going to be a fight and he went with the threat's basic game plan. To my mind, that was absurd- there's only going to be a fight if I say so and on MY terms. Hence no fight.

Two Busy Days

I woke up very early yesterday to the sound of my daughter screaming, "Dad! There's been an accident! Somebody's hurt!" I bailed out of bed and dressed and ran. A pickup had rear-ended a school bus, my son's school bus, and the driver of the pickup was on the ground, moaning and bleed ing from his nose. The kids on the bus were okay, Kami was on the phone to Dispatch. I attended to the driver: Primary Survey (RABC); Secondary survey (head-to-toe visual and palpation survey with neuro check). LOC good, alerted and oriented x4.... lots of jargon. I haven't done the EMT or 91B Combat Medical NCO thing in a while but it was all there. When fire rescue arrived I maintained spine immobilization, then the ambulance showed and I transferred custody... and went in to the house for coffee.

Followed by a run into work a little more than four hours early to teach a DT (Defensive Tactics) class to some enforcement deputies with visiting Feds- entries, infighting and counter assault with ground fighting elements. Fun and sweaty.

Then regular work- mental health issues, inmates threatening others, nothing memorable, but a classis day in that I don't remember doing much but I never quite had time for lunch and was writing reports up to the last minute.

Today started slower- spending a good deal of time saying goodbye to K before she heads off to a convention in Seattle. Work was insane, literally, for the first 4 hours. An inmate on disciplinary status decided to play the "suicide card". Many think that if they express suicidal thoughts, they will get special priveleges or not be held responsible for misconduct. Instead they are locked down in a room with no furnishings and given a quilted smock and nothing else. This one was claiming to hear voices. He then made the mistake of threatening to kill any officer that came to move him. So they called me. No problem, but by the end of everything it was halfway through my shift and I hadn't even set foot in my assigned sector- which had fuses blown in one dorm, climate control out in another and inmate phones dead in a third. Seven hours into the shift, finally a chance to sit down and eat.

You know what? Those are two good days!

Gory Details

For the writers of fiction:

In November, my lovely wife has arranged for me to talk to a large group of writers, readers and people who want to write. "What do I say?" I asked.
"Talk to them about the things that they write about but they don't know. What criminals are really like, how and why they fight, what it feels and sounds and smells like when you're fighting for your life. They same things you try to tell martial artists."

Oh. That stuff.

We had to put down Gazelle, a paralyzed goat. Put down means "kill". Maybe it means, 'kill for its own good, for the cessation of pain.' I went out early in the morning and dug the grave. It is a sin in my family to waste meat, but since the paralysis was probably due to loss of circulation the meat may not have been safe. I dug the grave close because I know that limp bodies are much harder to move than stiff ones. I took aim from about a foot and a half away with a .40 caliber semi-automatic handgun and pulled the trigger.

First note: "Putting to sleep" ie euthanization from drugs is the procedure used in a veterinarian's office. It looks very peaceful and is much easier on the grieving owners... but one of our family friends, a veterinarian in Eastern Oregon did her doctoral thesis on euthanasia. She said it looks peaceful because of the effects of the muscle relaxants but that the EEG showed unmistakable signs of panic as the animal slowly died... whereas a shot to the head went from normal to flatline instantly. She said that some people can't take the responsibility of killing their own animal, but if they can a gunshot is more humane, though it can be messier.

The shot was very loud in the morning quiet. I'd aimed for the sniper spot, the brainstem. We are taught that in a hostage situation a direct hit on the brainstem will make the threat go limp, so they will not reflexively clench their hands and pull a trigger. I missed. I'm a very, very good shot with a handgun. That means that on my best days I'm about half as good as a TV hero. The miss (live targets move or I may have rushed the shot out of fear that Gazelle would move) was about an inch from my aim point, missing the brainstem but entering the brain cavity. It was a special expanding bullet and didn't exit the skull. Gazelle started shuddering and twitching.

She was dead- CSF (cerebral spinal fluid) and blood had erupted from both ears and her nose at the shot. Her eyes were fixed. I touched her eyeball and there was no blink reflex. She was dead, dead, dead. But the brainstem is old and animal and it kept her legs jerking and her heart beating and her breath going in little raspy gasps. For about a minute. I think I watched that long because I was convincing myself that she was dead and I didn't screw up. But Kami was there (my excuse?) and it was hard on her to watch (oh, no, couldn't be hard on me... I've been butchering animals since I was a kid! Bullshit. It's still hard. I just do it more efficiently and with more respect and with clearer reasons now). So I fired again, this time hitting the sniper spot, and Gazelle went limp instantly.

People don't die much different.

Is this what the writers will want?

0230 Hrs

Brilliant moon last night. It was some hours after midnight and I'd not been able to sleep when there was a shriek from outside. Probably a coyote or owl found a meal. The shriek was repeated. The animal that was food wasn't dying easily. For a moment I was afraid that it was one of the cats and I couldn't sleep anyway... so I slowly got out of bed to keep from waking K, grabbed the glock and the MP light and a pair of sandals and went out to the sound.

This isn't about rushing into danger or some bullshit like that. I did manage to surprise a pair of racoons (and heard the rest of the family in the blackberries) and startle a big deer out of the garden... and we have had cougar, bobcats and possibly a black bear (judging from the scat) in the area.

This is about moonlight and warm night air on bare skin. A moon so bright that you can see the path and dodge the blackberry vines that reach for flesh. Using your ears more than eyes and your nose.

I was clumsy and out of practice. It's been years since I truly stalked in the dark. My world has been one of people and lights for too long now- brightly lit corridors and dorms and cells populated with criminals. Home is work too: making sure that the people I love are happy and safe and growing. Between the two are the commutes and teaching JJ and teaching for the agency. Somewhere along the way, my world became about people instead of about solitude.

I truly care for the people my life is about, so there are no regrets on that score- but I do miss the solitude. The energy that used to go into running for hours through the desert at night now goes into waking up and making commitments and, occassionally, scouting or fighting. The perception and skill and patience that used to be for stalking into the midst of a herd of deer now goes to really listening to a drunk or drugged or violent or mentally ill inmate and slowly, carefully influencing him or her to be, for the next little while, sane and stable and respectful. It's a great challenge that I still love. My skill is still growing.

But I miss the night wind on bare skin. I walk like a city dweller now- heel toe, heel toe. It takes longer than I remember for my eyes to adjust between bright moonlight and deep shadow. I smelled the air last night, but didn't taste it.

Definitely out of practice.

Just workin'

The work day starts a half hour early, sitting in a conference room with medical staff, security staff and counselors as we discuss the needs and treatment plans and how we are going to run two dorms totalling 127 severely mentally ill inmates for the next four days.

We apprise each other of the ones who haven't been taking their medication or are prone to violent outbursts- we list all the problems we can see coming and map out responses. I get tasked with developing rapport and gently modifying the behavior of two who will be trouble soon, I'm the Jedi Thug and "the Force has great power over weak minds".

My radio squawks and I'm sprinting before I'm consciously aware that this transmission is different from the others: through the code-locked door, to the outer and inner sally port door waiting for ever for Central Control to buzz me in. "What's going on?" Someone yells, following me out of the meeting room. "Back-up to Dorm 5". The first door buzzes and other officers push in, slowing things down, slowing me down because the inner door can't open before the outer door closes.

At last, and I'm in the jail proper, sprinting. The Dorm door is open, officers are already there and three inmates are in cuffs. I call Central to clear the back-up.

A white supremacist and two hispanic gang members. I stay with the big white guy- he's the most agitated, still adrenalized and volatile. I walk him out, to medical, take the cuffs off as he's examined, careful to make sure that he and the other fighters don't cross paths. He knows me, like most of the criminals and convicts in the area. He's relaxed. At one point we discuss the scarring on our knuckles. He volunteers that his are from boxing. He doesn't ask about mine. He's bleeding from his ear and the doctor on duty uses dermabond (essentially super glue) to close the cut. The fighter says, "If my nail had been longer he'd be bleeding down his throat right now."

I cuff him back up and take him to Segregation, "the Hole" which in our facility is clean and painted in cream and beige and light blue.

I check my watch while walking out- the first hour went pretty quick today.

The Stupidest Person in the Room

I've had this experience twice.

Once upon a time, many, many years ago we noticed that too many of our friends had birthdays in August. After a summer or two of spending every weekend at a different party and still missing many we decided to have just one big birthday party- the August Babies Birthday Bash.

At one of the first ABBBs, I had the distinct pleasure of sitting in a room as my best friends earnestly discussed the problem: If King Kong was real and he had fallen from the Empire State Building, would his skin have ruptured on impact?

In deadly seriousness and frequently resorting to calculators and paper, they discussed this- a software engineer with a second Master's in physics; a Doctor of Biochemistry who sings like an angel; a techno geek who can make a radar out of a microwave oven and collects obsolete computers; a chemist/caver/climber; a pilot/rally driver/shaman; my lovely wife who was studying Engineering Physics when I met her because regular engineering didn't have hard enough math; there were more- bikers and EMTs and LAN administrators with uncanny social skill...

It suddenly occured to me that I was the stupidest person in the room. It was a warm feeling and greatly contented. I still can't explain it, but there was no insecurity, just the sensation of honor to be welcome in company of that quality.

Three years ago I went to Montreal for the first time for a Martial Arts symposium. I wanted to meet Fabien Senna, if only to meet a French guy who teaches Chinese martial arts in Japan. We met late at night in a Crepe restaurant in Vieux Montreal, Old Town. A table full of talented martial artists. Over the course of food and wine it dawned on me that everyone at the table (except me) spoke at least three languages fluently. Everyone (except me) had a day job in highly technical fields. Once again, I was the stupidest person in the room and once again, it was a great feeling of humble contentment.

Maybe that's how my dog feels, curled up in the sun, "I'll just be me, pal. You be the smart one. You can open the cans, I'll take care of my thing."

Sif and Tyche

Sif, wife of Thor, is the Norse goddess of battle skill.

Tyche is the Greek goddess of luck, twin sister to Nike, the goddess of victory.

A very few of my friends have heard me whisper those names under my breath just before doing something either incredibly fun or incredibly necessary. It's not a prayer so much as a reminder. No matter how well prepared you are there comes the moment of action where luck can play a deciding role. You can slip in unseen sweat or blood. You can go into a situation thinking it is one thing and find a trap.

On the other hand: the harder you train, the luckier you get.

It's not a prayer because the prayer to Sif is practice. Every drop of sweat in training, every ragged breath, every new manual, every hour spent with a new instructor is a prayer to the Goddess of Skill.

The prayer to Tyche is just as all consuming and simple- her prayer is to open your eyes to the randomness all around and seize it when it breaks your way, endure it or turn it around when it doesn't. With constant practice it becomes a habit and you find yourself seeking chaos where others reach for the comfort of the known and predictable.

The best fighters/officers/medics have an awareness of variables that is difficult to teach. They may start with a plan but they understand the fluidity of the situation and step off the plan the minute it becomes counter-productive. They let go without hesitation.

You can only prepare so far. Some things you will never be completely ready for no matter how hard you train. When the call comes you go in with the training you have. That's the job. There are some who fear the chaos of life so much that they train and train and train and never test it, never play in the muddy waters of life, never risk the chaos... and that's a waste.

Skill and luck to you.

The Best Things in Life

The feel of smooth skin over firm muscle.

The smoky taste of good scotch on a mountain under brilliant stars.

The floating, satisfied exhaustion of a grappling match or ten with a really skilled, strong opponent.

Looking over students who you know will be better than you.

The understanding gaze of wide gray eyes.

Rapturous exhilaration of free fall- from a plane or judo or at the top of a bungee bounce or in a dream.

The pride and awe of your own children from birth to the present- I helped make them... I still am.

The feeling of rough rock under your fingers and sun on your back and wind in your ears and emptiness beneath you.

Stories with friends and brothers around the bonfire late into the night.

That moment when avoidance and defusing has failed and the battle is on: the rush of fierce joy and fear as civilization falls away and everything for the next few seconds will be completely real.

The first cup of black coffee right after teeth are brushed.

The smell of sweat- sex sweat and workout sweat.

Running under the wing, paragliding, and your feet magically leave the ground and you are running for a moment on air.

Snorkling in clear warm water and suddenly realizing you have no idea how long you have been down and it feels like you could hold your breath and keep swimming forever.

Smell of campfire smoke in your lover's hair.

Squishing mud with your bare feet.

The water from a hot spring falling on your back in a little waterfall as cold Pacific water laps at your feet: the hot and the cold, the smell of sulfur and salt.

The world is a big place, and full of many things. Most of those things are beautiful if you look and listen and smell and feel and taste.

Providence and Cape Cod

Did anybody miss me?

We flew to Providence, Rhode Island last Thursday for good friends, good food and three days of brawling on Cape Cod. So much to write and think about and let settle. Images.

Finally meeting Norm Abramson. I've admired his posts for two years now, his incredible knack for asking the right question and draw out a deeper meeting... meeting him and realizing that the only thing I knew about him was this gift of asking questions. Shy as he was, it wasn't enough to get a conversation started.

Talking under a burning sun with an old war horse, critiquing the frauds we had met in the martial arts and philosophizing about how to inject the truth about violence to people who only think they want it.

"I'll be back in two years," the young man said. "I'll have some stories of my own, then. I'm going to Iraq." Good luck and be safe, soldier.

Sitting and drinking scotch, talking to a man who brought a system of karate to America and one of his earliest students- nearly eighty years of experience between the two of them. Long after the rest of the attendees had gone to bed, the die-hards stayed up, talking about physiology and technique and history and management. Psychology and fatherhood and old injuries. Just talking, the most precious memory of this weekend.

The Bahamanian contingent with their quick laughs, beautiful ladies and serious karate.

Brigette who will be a fine boxer, watching her fighter's heart as she took on again and again two nationally ranked MMA fighters in their ground fighting arena.

Rolling with those two fighters, exultant and feeling my age both, sore and happy. The completely destroyed shirt....

Raffi, a great natural teacher with stick or knife or empty hands.

Taking students who don't know me and introducing them to infighting then blindfolding one of each pair. Their delight when they understood they could feel what was about to happen, what was open and what to cover.... the laugh of a yondan who suddenly sees the power of a small wave action in his knee or hand.

Breaking my own rigidity of belief in what a karate kata is and should be, learning how much variation is allowed and encouraged in this system.

Preparing to show an assassination technique, I point at an attractive young lady student, "Who would like to kiss this girl?" They freeze, these karateka... not at all sure what they just heard or what they are supposed to do.

Related- "Biting is perfectly acceptable in this drill," I told them and they all choked.

I think we should work on contact next year. Not just the hard contact like boxing but touching. It's integral to jujutsu, integral to all real fighting but the karateka balked at it twice with me, once when my wife instructed them to put their hands on their partner's hip to feel the motion.

My Wife! Kami the slave driver warming up an entire camp of karatekas with slow, tortuous belly dancing exercises. For a few minutes, most actually had it and I had the privelege of seeing a hundred rough, tough karate fighters swinging their hips in a decent cabaret shimmy.

It was a good place, a good time, made so by good people.

Packing

I'm getting excited, which is unusual. It's a good feeling, with a bubbly stomach and a grin pulling at the corners of my mouth. K and I are packing for a trip to the East Coast, leaving tomorrow. For three days we will be brawling and contemplating, learning and teaching. Grass stains, mud, sweat and sunburn. Old friends, new friends and new stories.

Several years ago (5?), just learning about this Internet thing, I found out about forums. There are a lot of forums out there, many catering to Martial Artists. Like martial arts, many forums are populated by youngsters with active fantasy lives, inadequacies or (worse) delusions of adequacy. There's a huge population of wannabes following the latest trends, whether that is koryu, MMA or WWII combatives. The wannabes tend to be both rabidly fanatical and ignorant.

There are also older martial artists with good heart and deep experience. Men like Robert Carver and Jeff Burger and Jeff Cook at BudoSeek! Or Fabien Sienna and David and Jaime at Cyberkwoon.

Very rarely there are the few for whom violence is not a hobby, but a tool and they can afford no illusions, Like Tony U and Mauricio and Cliff. People I can talk to and learn from. People who understand when I say, "Ugly night. Won't be able to talk about it for three years."

One of the boards was designed for a specific style of Okinawan karate, Uechi-ryu. Do I study Uechi? No. Do I study karate? No. But the board struck me with its sincerity and its passion. There were people looking into the history, even trying to find and teach the Chinese roots of the style and people comparing it to and criticizing it from the perspective of modern sports training and modern research on violence. There were people doing medical research and tying it back to their tradition and others working on the new system of hand to hand combat for the USMC. They squabble like a great big family. They take care of each other like a great big family, too.

Last year, by luck, I happened to have the time of the annual Summerfest off from work and had done so much overtime that I needed a way to spend the money. I cheerfully announced that Kami and I could and would make it to Summerfest 2004. George, the patriarch of this huge brawling clan asked if I'd mind "teaching a few classes" while I was there.

I was honored of course, but also intrigued and awed- the Uechi clan only knew me from my typed messages. The leap of faith, to invite someone to teach who could have been some delusional, disease-ridden, obese, crippled, addicted... anything was, to me, amazing. (I also really had to fight the urge to hire a scabby panhandler at Logan airport to impersonate me). They sent a limo to the airport. It was a great weekend.

The doctor turned out to look much younger and less wise (looking) than I pictured him. The one who I'd imagined as an older, fiery Sicilliano was a fine, Old-World gentleman. George, the patriarch, was much as I'd pictured him- laid back, alert, busy, charming and friendly. Mostly busy.

We brawled and played and drank and talked. Vinny and Henry and Wes and Mark and Cindy... so many names, so many real moments. We watched, in the person of David Mott some of the finest kata I have seen.

We fly out tomorrow to repeat the process. I'll teach these karateka about locking and dumping and infighting. Kami will teach how the mechanics of Middle-Eastern dance relate to karate and we will learn. If all, goes well I will learn Sanchin kata enough to play with it on my own as a new meditation for the next few years.

Type more when we return.

Friends and Brothers

It was an eighty foot cliff of ugly, weathered, moss-eaten rock. I looked it up and down, scanning for routes and holds, reaches and slide areas. "I can climb it," I said.

"Maybe. Of course you'd be stupid to try." Jake thought for a minute. "That's never stopped you before."

True. I started up and he mumbled something under his breath that sounded like 'idiot'. It was the kind of climbing I loved- no ropes, no safety, no sight-seers. It was natural rock and sky; it was random with unpredictable winds and wet spaces and weak holds that could and did break on you with too much weight. I would call it a 'cat save' when my hold broke and I was able to launch or fall to another.

It took a long while to get near the top, but there was no sense of time, just the numb and limp fatigue in your fingers and forearms and the awesome feeling of being truly alive with every sense at full pitch and everything riding on your own skill and courage.

The trouble was at the very top. The last three feet of the stone ridge carved out by the sea was covered with wind blown soil and gull shit and grass. Loose dirt, no holds. My ascent had destroyed most of the foot holds on the way up, there was no way down.

Sometimes, when you are trapped like a rat, you'll get a really, really stupid idea. If you can perform the stupid idea with absolute purity of intent, you can create miracles. It occured to me that I was a martial artist. As a martial artist I could throw myself into the air and launch a pair of nukite strikes (hand spears) into the soft dirt, pulling myself up over the slope. With seventy or more feet of nothing between me and the rocky shore, with absolute intent I launched off with my legs and struck...

I already said it was a stupid idea. The power of the strike would launch me away from the cliff far more efficiently than my stubby fingers could penetrate soil.

A big hand wrapped around my wrist. Jake was lying on top of the ridge. "Hold on, " he said. He pulled and I scrambled until I was lying on the crest. "Told you it was stupid to try."

"How did you get up here?" I asked.

He pointed along the length of the ridge, "There's a path. I think it might be invisible to people with testosterone poisoning." Point taken.

"You just saved my life."

Jake shrugged. "That's what friends are for."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A year ago, a new voice came into a cyberspace I spend time in. He wanted to (If I remember accurately) "say hi to all my brothers in blue". I told him I had a green uniform and a black one, that we might be cousins, but I've bled with my brothers.
I was thinking about Jake when I typed it.

New Ways

My Friday student is special. I teach her about violence and criminals. She teaches me about teaching and about myself. I'm getting the best end of that deal. We work principles and concepts and scenarios. Very, very little technique, almost no repetetive technique. It feels odd because it is so different from the way that I was taught. I mentioned that and she dragged out the feeling into words:

Every truly great fighter that I know has followed a very similar path in their growth. To be clear, I'm not talking about tournament champions or martial artists- I'm talking about fighters. A man who stopped a jail riot by breaking the ring leaders spine. Another who was stabbed and... broke the guy's spine. A person who took down an enraged, violent drugged-up threat, a threat who got the first move at close range and put him down without injuring him, controlling with his knees alone and politely asked him to stop resisting. An old, old man who had retired from jobs in the military and the civilian police force immobilizing a threat that two hot young martial artist bouncers were struggling with and doing it without spilling his coffee (thanks, Jim).

The path was the same- they trained hard for many years on technique. Thousands of reps, thousands of applications and sparring bouts and matches. Then they were exposed to real violence- not a single incident, but extensively usually working as cops. They realized how little of their training matched reality. The ones who didn't become good, quit training. The ones who became great fighters started ruthlessly stripping down their training: comparing each thing they were taught to what they used, always aiming to simplify and make more adaptable.

When I first started teaching, I had this list of what I wanted students to know at each stage. Looking at that list, there are techniques on there that I don't even teach or think about anymore. Specific, detailed techniques that don't fit with any practical strategy.

What I am trying to do is skip the first two steps with my students.

Instead of learning a hundred or more joint locks, they learn what makes locks work (which takes less than an hour to cover completely) and play with the idea, melding it with their own natural movement. They hopefully learn the dynamics of violent encounters instead of memorizing possible attacks and scripted responses.

The students should be spared the second stage. Rob asked me what I wanted from teaching in an e-mail. Part of my reply: "It's very important to me that you both exceed my level of skill- but without the blurry vision from a scarred cornea, arthritis from broken fingers, screws in the knee, fingers that go numb if the arms are above the head at night and memory loss from concussions. You guys do not, IMO need to learn from experience if you can run on a broken fibula or reduce a shoulder dislocation in a fight and keep going. It was important to me to know, but I'm paying for the knowledge and always will be."

I don't want them to pay. I do want them to have the skill.

So it feels like wandering in the darkess. It feels right and good and efficient to teach this way. It would be easier if I could point to one person who has already done it.

That's what the Friday student dragged out.