Exit

It looks like I will get an exit interview after all.

It won't be with any member of the command structure, not a sworn officer. I will be interviewed by one of the Human Resources people, an office worker. No idea if what I have to say will be heard by the people who need to hear it. I think that if anyone had cared to hear it, I wouldn't be leaving.

It took a lot to make this decision. The new opportunity is amazing, a huge step forward in challenge and learning opportunities. There are several aspects that will require me to bring my game up to new levels. That makes it a logical progression to someone who has been asking, "What's the next step?" and "Where do I go from here?" for years.

The new opportunity isn't the whole story, though. If you have been reading this blog for any length of time it's pretty clear that I love this job. I love the challenge of it, the daily dealing with and stabilizing chaos, the constant need to switch communication modes when dealing with predators and victims and professionals and civilians. I egotistically thrive on being the one who gets called for the ugly, the dangerous, the tricky and the delicate issues. I love doing the impossible and being told later it looked effortless. I love sitting in class with 'experts' teaching that such-and-such is "impossible" when I have done that very thing. Twice. In the last week.

It takes something huge to make me walk away from the best fit of any job, to abandon a career two thirds of the way to a comfortable retirement. To leave a place and a challenge and people that I love.

In the end though, they made it very easy.

When it is all done, I'll fill you in on the next step. A few of you have guessed already.

On a completely unrelated note:
Amazon has a "Only two copies left" notice on Meditations. I think that is a very good sign.

Living

Hundreds of people in the wall. The names on the small bronze plaques belong to ashes, the bigger names on bigger bronze plaques belong to bodies, quietly rotting. Outside, hundreds more in the dirt, marked by stone or bronze with names and dates. There are dates ninety years apart and dates only weeks apart. Ninety years is nothing compared to the universe, a huge chunk of time compared to a human's attention span. How often did the person that used to be actually live even five of their ninety years?

This is where it all ends, my friends. Rotten meat in the ground probably poisoning worms with preservative chemicals or gray gritty powder released to the wind. All of us, every time, the same end. No matter the vitamins you take or the fitness regimen you pursue or which god you try to suck up to or buy off. Worm food or ashes.

Do you feel the freedom in this knowledge? Revel in it.

Central to West

I love the high desert. The sun beats down from a clear sky, white clouds scattered to the east, half a moon glows pale from the blue, the dark half of the moon disappearing in a color that looks too perfect to be natural and is ultimately natural. Smells of sagebrush and juniper; the dank smell of rodent nests in a cave.

The wind blows, bringing a chill that battles the sun. The thermometer says sixty degrees but in the sun and out of the wind it is sweaty warm; in the shade and the wind it is cold, crisp. 'Crisp' is such a good word for a dry cold.

The canals and rivers shine in the sun like solid things. The rimrocks stand like fortresses above the valleys. Snowy mountains reflect the light like fake ivory, the shadows on the glaciers an eerie blue, darker than the sky.

Tomorrow we drive, a long trip I used to take as a child. My mother wishes to see her mother's grave. We will juggle her oxygen tanks into the car and drive and talk. Over the mountains I see on the horizon, through the alpine forests and the rain forests and to the edge of the ocean where we will place flowers on a grave. I know what my mom will be thinking as she breathes through tubes and looks at a stone with a name and a pair of dates. It has the feeling of a quest, a journey to say hello and goodbye while there is still time.

In one day, the smell of sage and salt sea; the open vista of the desert and the dense green of the coast range; sunburn and probably rain; poking at the line of life and death.

Cigar?

It's time to share.

Last Wednesday, I lit up a cigar.  I don't like cigars.  They taste nasty, they smell terrible but sometimes it just seems like the thing to do.  About ten years ago I wrote a magazine article on a whim and it sold.  The first place that would get the magazine in town was a locally famous cigar store.  I picked up the magazine and a cigar and sat on the bank of the Willamette reading my first article and smoking my first cigar.

Last week, the fine people at YMAA express mailed me a copy of the book right off the presses.  I had to wait until after work and it was too dark to sit on the deck and smoke a cigar and read, but the tradition has become pretty strong.  I puffed a little in the cloudy midnight and went inside and read.

It looks good.  I found one spelling error and one of the copy-editors really likes commas, but it reads pretty well.  There are places where I struggled with the formatting but that is what happens when you try to deal with a complicated subject.  Each thing affects many other things and the effects of stress have to be discussed in training and in application and in thinking and in the aftermath.

The pictures, a few provided by Critical Care Bio-Recovery (Thanks, Jennifer!) and martial friends and several taken by my wife are effective, even though the book was written without pictures in mind.

The foreword by Steve Barnes is powerful.  The advance praise is very good.

My local Barnes and Noble  and Borders and Powells have all assured me they are on order and will be on shelves very soon.

So I'm a little jazzed right now.  Life is very cool.

Adventure awaits.

Math and Martial Arts

In a comment on Persistence of Patterns, Ukemi pointed out some stuff that's worth worth going into.

Using metaphors is always problematic.  I described a martial artist's skill set as a collection of answers.  I was thinking technique here, but also the way in which it is sometimes taught: If the bad guy does this, it sets him up so and you do that...  In the metaphor, this skill or technique is the answer to that problem.

Ukemi brought up math as a counter analogy- a mathematician learns the functions and applies them in an order based on principles and derives an answer, the mathematician doesn't memorize the answer to all possible algebra equations.

That's a damn good point, and it's a good place to get to... but...  Even an advanced mathematician works basic multiplication from memory.  What is 5x7?  6x8? 2x9?  This is where beginners are.  Even good mathematicians (I assume, not being one) when he applies the functions, has memorized them.  Memorized the meta answers, in a way.

None of that really matters and I'm not arguing Ukemi's point.  It powerfully showed a weakness in my metaphor.  Cool. And thank you.

So, given an already weak and damaged metaphor (really just a comparison, now) I'm going to run with it:

There are two huge but related differences between training for math and training for conflict.  The first is that almost every kid in America is forced to take math to a fairly high level.  For much of history algebra and especially trigonometry were secret, almost magical knowledge.  My kids are required to learn things that were mysteries to the architects who built the pyramids.  By the time a kid graduates from high school he has about 2400 hours of training in mathematics.  And it's not the same 100 hours merely repeated over and over again, it progresses, each grade building on what came before.  Martial arts are often progressive, too, but rarely as logically detailed in that progression.  

The related difference: martial artists are allowed to stop when they are comfortable.  Kids learning math aren't.  You want to do just kata?  Fine.  There are schools for that. Competition?  Easy.  Feel-good two hour self-defense seminars? Everywhere.  Get a nifty black belt?  Sign on the dotted line.  Feel a connection to Bruce Lee?  Within two hundred miles is someone who trained with him directly, there are probably a dozen who trained with his direct students in any good-sized city.  You want to take it all the way- interpersonal violence to armed conflict? That gets way harder.  I had to go to jail to get a taste.

There are unrelated differences, too.  You can safely test the outer edge of your math skills.  You can actually use trigonometry to judge distance in the real world.

There is another, very important real world similarity between violence and math: If you are confronted by a problem in real life that can be solved, either with violence or math, you don't get to choose the problem.  If you have to work out a budget you don't get to say, "How about if I just count ceiling tiles?  It's still math."  Same with being confronted with violence- you avoid all the violence you can and the only thing you can predict about the violence you get is that you weren't able to avoid it.

But in martial arts training (and this is what the post on Persistence of Patterns was really all about) in training and only in training do you get to change the questions to fit with the answers you are comfortable with.  It is, for most players, completely subconscious.  It wasn't the guys defending in the knife drill that were saying, "Back up and give me room so that I have a chance."  It was the partners playing bad guy and they did not realize they were doing it.

From Here to There

Steve wrote an excellent comment on the last post, the killer question: How do we get there from here?  How do you systematically teach chaos?  Skills, principles, drills- everything you teach has to be safe enough to practice.  It takes minutes at a time resulting in hours of training and repetition to get the most basic skills- sensitivity, structure, power generation and stealing, targeting, exploiting motion, tactical intuition, ... on and on.  Then you have to be able to use those skills in a dynamic net, all of the skills playing off of each other and do it when you don't have any preparation time or any safety net.

I'm working on it.

The cheap answer is "mindfulness."  You and your students need to know what you are actually doing and, more importantly, what you are not doing.  Sparring is an okay way to work on timing, an excellent first step to teaching tactical awareness and sometimes intuition.  It is not practicing self defense.  That's not enough, either: for non-grappling systems it actually hurts your distancing (you either have to pull or you are wearing gloves that can displace the point of contact an inch or so, and an inch off in a fight can suck) can compromise your power generation (I'm a relatively small guy who doesn't train full contact- the last time I went somewhere and had to box I broke two ribs through armor while wearing sixteen ounce gloves- the guys who trained full contact weren't hitting that hard, because if they did, they run out of students.  They were hitting light AND didn't know it AND thought they were hitting "right".)

So that's the first thing, know what you are doing and, more importantly, know what you aren't doing.  Does any of this make any drill bad?  Hardly.  As long as you milk it for what is there, there aren't many bad drills.  They just get dangerous when a student (or, gad, an instructor) believes that it is something it isn't.

Second, always know the flaw in the drill.  Quoting myself: "In the end, a martial artist is training to kill, cripple or maim another human being. In any drill where the students are not regularly taken to the hospital, there is a safety flaw built in."

Judo starts from the very beginning with a very specific follow-through to the hip and shoulder throws.  Students are taught that this follow-through increases control and sets up the uke for a quick arm-bar or osaekomi.   The simple fact is that the four traditional follow-throughs either shattered the shoulder, snapped the neck, broke the tailbone or knocked the wind out.  The judo follow through is taught as control, but was introduced for safety.

The pronated fist in karate is almost unheard of in the Okinawan systems. It was (according to one of the grand old men of shito-ryu) a Japanese innovation to make the strike safer- the Japanese were not willing to allow the number of training deaths that the Okinawans did. That one should be obvious to anyone who has paid attention to their own body while hitting a bag: pronating the fist shortens the arm, it makes the wrist much weaker, it forces an unnatural bend to get the two big knuckles in line with the radius and ulna (resulting in many strained wrists) it even crosses the radius and ulna.  Everyone who has done this has felt it... but it was "the right way" and they made up a bucketful of myths about why it was the right way.

So, suggestion number two: always look for why your partner is not going to the emergency room.  It's okay -critical- to have safety flaws.  We need to recycle partners.  But be mindful that it is a flaw and be sure to balance it with another drill that works to offset that flaw- if you've been playing pitty-pat sparring with a partner, take some time to unload on a heavy bag (and watch your feet and you will see that not only did you shortchange your power generation when sparring, but you stand much closer to a bag you want to unload on than a person you are playing with- which distance do you suppose is right?)

Corollary to suggestion number two:  Don't practice the flaws!  If you find that you are expected to put extra time or effort into perfecting the part of a technique that is designed to not hurt someone, walk away.  Seriously.  I would leave an instructor in a heartbeat who was wasting time like that.

Third, don't practice against imaginary attacks.  We know a lot about how people really attack.  We know about monkey dancing and how to avoid that.  We know about predatory assault and how those are set up and executed.  We know how domestics go bad and what an enraged person is likely to do with a kitchen knife.  Most stuff works against the monkey dance, including walking away.  Great- we got the skills for the one we can avoid.  There is no one way an attack will happen, but I will go out on a limb and say that there are a few ways that they almost never happen: the slow-motion lunge from two feet out of range and the slow motion downward stab, both holding the arm in one place for long enough to do something to it. About ninety percent of all martial arts weapons defenses that I've seen are concentrated against attacks that I've never seen outside training (Not just martial arts, the one they taught at the academy was one of the worst).

Bad guys aren't stupid and they don't use weapons for an edge.  They use the weapon to finish things.  They attack with surprise, from very close with all the power and speed they can muster, preferably inhibiting your movement at the same time.  If you honestly give the guy with the weapon permission to act like a real bad guy, you will lose.  A lot.  You probably won't find anything that works, but you will find a few things that work better and, strangely enough, you will find those things centered around fast, close, hard and surprise.

Discouraged? Don't be.  You might not find answers training this way but you will become very familiar with the question, and that is a huge advantage.  The danger or temptation here is to just slip back into the old ways.  Go ahead and drink the grape kool-aide and have your uke be stupid and slow and obvious, because that works, baby.

When you let your bad guys be bad guys, it's a whole new world, and your skills build at an amazing rate.

Last (for now)- break patterns and freeze.  This one applies especially to grapplers, but it also works for anyone and I even do it in restaurants: freeze the drill, stop, and think- If I had to take this guy out completely, right now, how would I do it?  In almost any situation if you have any skill at all there is a pretty reliable finishing option- C-1, eardrum, philtrum,  throat, carotid triangle, jaw hinge, peritoneal nerve, knee, ankle...

It's a good mindset game, but the real question, once you realize that one of these is almost always right there, is why you weren't already doing it. Why is this a break from your pattern?  What pattern were you in?  Playing a game?  Locked in a rut?

Persistence of Patterns

One of the most fundamental differences between martial arts and violence is the goal. Most martial arts have a single definition of a win- the KO, the submission, ippon, five legal touches...-and in any real conflict the goal (as well as the parameters) may be different. Fighting to destroy is different than fighting to subdue, both are different than fighting to escape or fighting to cover someone else's escape. Sometime you need to create space to access a force option or create enough time to get help or make a plan.

One of the fundamental differences between martial artists and violence professionals is the ability to choose the appropriate goal and to fight to that goal. It is single-minded (though the awareness should be wide open). Single minded can be taken wrong: Fighting to win is one thing. Fighting not to lose is something completely different. A violence professional will do one or the other. A martial artists tends to try to find a balance, and they tend to be very confused by someone who ignores the balancing niceties and just does what it takes. YMMV.

Even worse, the stated goal in a martial arts class is rarely the real goal. In the class, you may be told or believe that you are practicing 'fighting' or 'self-defense', but the students are actually always striving to make the teacher happy.  So they try to move the way the teacher moves and they try to 'flow'.. and they don't run or draw hidden weapons or break the pattern.  Breaking an expected pattern is almost always a good survival strategy.

The seminar went well and I did what I was supposed to do. Kj would present a drill, the students would practice it, and then I would explain how it could get you killed but also what was inside it that made the drill valuable.  'The drill is not the thing' was the mantra for the day.

One of the drills was a continuous attack with two weapons and the defender, with a short stick, was to flow and counter attack.  I've seen this drill a lot in arnis and related arts. I paired with one person and we played for a few seconds before I stopped it. "Change your mindset, " I said, "You're thinking about flow and foot work and stuff.  Let's do the same thing but this time, HURT ME."

For the rest of the drill she was still fluid, but the improvement was palpable.  How she moved, her distancing, her targeting, her balance of offense and defense were profoundly different. Profoundly improved, from the survival point of view.

I did/said something similar with an instructor rank.  He didn't get it, so we switched- he went for the continuous attack.  I'm not sure what I did could be called a flow.  In slow motion I slipped him, took his back and extended his spine.  Owned his balance, both his weapons were neutralized and the pommel of my stick was over his exposed and stretched trachea.  His eyes got very big.  He saw it, he could move as well as I did (honestly, better- he probably has more original issue joints).  Within a half hour, though, he was back in the exact same pattern of movement he had started in.  The years of training had ground a deep rut for his mind.

This really came to my attention hard towards the end of the seminar.  KJ had me go over how real knife assaults happen- close, fast, surprise if the threat can get it, usually in a confined space, and with part of you grabbed and controlled.  There are a few things that work from there and we played them, had them practice.  The notebook with the pictures of knife wounds was on the table.  They knew or should have known that this was the no bullshit deal- maybe just a few percentage points of chance, but stuff that had worked against real attacks, against attacks the way they happen.  Everyone started backed up against the wall with their partner/enemy at bad breath range.

Within ten minutes, all of the bad guys had taken a step back so that they could work at dojo range and were giving long, slow, obvious leads.  The technique works better that way, I guess.

The weird part, and the danger of patterns, is that they had all done it and no one realized it.

When I was a rookie sergeant the policy at the time was to assign you to supervise the place and shift you were least familiar with. That meant, for me, a big jump from maximum security and booking to medium security. The skills and flow of the two environments are very different. Max is all about taking control and crisis management. Medium is about managing group dynamics and maintaining the generally good status quo.

So i was in a position of learning to be a supervisor AND learning a new way of jailing. Ralph was the crusty old sergeant who took me under his wing. He was old school enough to be hell on wheels in a fight, but smart and old enough to know that talking was better- there is no healing time after talking someone down. They started the experimental psych unit shortly after that and Ralph and I stepped in, and he was a wonder to watch work there. Big, gruff old guy who had been doing the job long enough that he knew the cons and often their fathers and sometimes their grandfathers too.

He had a ritual with new deputies that came to the shift. He would take them aside and sit them down and talk about the job- what they would see and how it would change them. He talked with heartbreaking honesty about mistakes he had made and what he learned from them. Shortly after my arrival, he got me involved, too. It was unofficial and really due to the initiative of one man, but I believe that those quiet little sessions in the conference room were some of the most valuable training ever provided in any agency.

I've seen him angry and sad and surprised. Cleaned up after he survived a close-range ambush. Went for lunch after he had his knee surgery. I always listened when he talked, always watched him when he was talking with or watching the inmates. He was my first real teacher after I became a sergeant.

Yesterday I watched this crippled up old man on his last full day at work- pitching in, helping the escorts, dealing with problems. Except for a radio call, "243, for the last time, radio check," it was just another day. A good, hard working day.

In a little over an hour, Ralph retires. He was one of the good guys. I'll miss him.

Pieces and Wholes

And holes, now that I think about it.

This Saturday I've been asked to drop in at a weapons seminar.  KJ is going to teach some basics- ways to move, ways to make and keep contact, what to do when bad things happen too close.  I'm supposed to step into the middle and mess everything up.

The problem is that in any training for bad things each piece by itself is not only incomplete, but actually wrong.  Siniwalli is an arnis drill. As a stand alone it is purely a collection of bad habits- you target the weapon, you maintain the movement pattern instead of finishing, some of the pattern ignores a better, faster, more decisive move that would finish the encounter- but encounters need to be finished and drills need to be prolonged and repeated.

Don't start down-talking arnis, I can point out something like this from any training.  The training isn't wrong, unless you take it out of context.  Each piece is important, but the piece isn't the thing.

What KJ will do at this seminar is teach patterns, patterns that keep your weapon a constant threat to the enemy and keep the weapon in your strong zone and don't expose you to much.  I will be showing how the killing attack will be an escape from that pattern from one side, from the other side how to exploit those strengths and turn them into weaknesses.

What we have to be careful is that the students understand that this is not a contradiction.

It boils down to time.  Battles (especially with weapons) are won in fractions of seconds. Training is conducted about a half minute at a time.  So patterns are learned, but they are exploited by knowing, in a flash, exactly where your body and weapon and the threat's body and weapons are, where they are going (recognizing the pattern) and deciding to continue or break what you recognize is happening.

Sensitivity drills, like chi-sao can last a long time and they teach you a lot- how to read just by touch power and motion and balance and intent... but in application it is the ability to know and exploit those things in a single instant of contact.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of repetition to develop that skill.  It takes big chunks of time to learn tiny slices of time.  Where some martial artists get trapped is trying to take big time skills- drill skills- and apply them as they stand in a fight.

That's another special training: to apply your skills at superspeed, to get the information that normally takes a few seconds of feeling out your partner in a single touch... but if not, you get stuck in an imaginary world where you have plenty of time.

So training, from one perspective, is spending a lot of time ingraining tiny separate pieces (studying them like they were big pieces or maybe even the whole thing) with the hope that you will be able to put them all together, ruthlessly, without any time at all.

It sounds hard and maybe counter-intuitive, but it isn't.  Reps are good. Refinement and nuance are good.  The only thing that is sometimes (often) missing is the actual context of the application, a good understanding of what the skill looks like in its end-state.

Begging the Question

I like it when people argue, sometimes.  They think they are demonstrating how they think, but more often than not they are demonstrating how they choose to see- their own prejudices and blind spots.  Not just because it is fun to laugh at people, but because they almost always phrase things in specific ways for specific types of blind spots- and if you pay attention, when you catch yourself using those phrases, you can find some of your own.

I like stylistic partisans.  If somebody blatantly states that their style is the best, I probably won't buy it, but I will listen to them.  The really committed will show me the best of what they have and intensely argue its value, and I will learn more faster than from someone more equivocal.

One of my friends is ranked in (and loves) a chinese dueling system.  He found out I'd been exposed to it and wanted to know my thoughts.  That's a lie. He wanted to hear me gush about it's great superiority over everything else and how I had become a true believer. He asked what I thought.  That's what he got: too linear; very easy to throw them into walls; fast hands but pathetic power; most damning, it was a dueling system and trained for face to face challenge matches- the guys I played with had absolutely no idea what to do if attacked from the rear or flank.

He argued everything (I had, after all, insulted his holy thing) but to the last point he just said, "You just turn into the attack, from that point on it's just like dueling."

This is called begging the question.  If you are getting pounded from the rear or sides- or grabbed- turning into it is not something you 'just' do.  It's difficult and it is a skill, a critical skill for ambush survival.  

Watch for that word 'just'.  When you catch yourself saying "Just do it" (sorry, Nike) and you have no real idea how to do it, that is a blind spot.  The mechanism of that little 'just' is to convince yourself that whatever it is is easy.  It's just turning.  Just hit the guy. Just move.  Don't just stand there.  Just be yourself.

It's not just (I had to) a martial thing.  Look for it in politics, in overly-simplified morality, in finance... all the places where answers are easier than facts to base them on.

Just Whining

First day back to work in a while.  I've been out with pneumonia.  First time. Interesting.  Went to work less because I was feeling better than because I was going stir crazy.  I spent last evening (when I wasn't rescuing the dogs from the scary thunder or watching the beautiful storm) pacing in tight circles.

So- work hasn't changed much.  An inmate who used to be one of the biggest (and most obvious) manipulators has been in custody for almost a month and finally got the courage to ask me for something he knows is against the rules.  He's three weeks behind schedule. Normally he would be in the hole by now.  An alarm went off that doesn't seem to be connected to any known system.  Fire alarm, HVAC, everything normal... just a very loud, very obvious audible alarm that our facility engineer says doesn't exist.  It's a mystery.  And this mid-forties old man recovering from pneumonia still has the fastest sprint in the building.  Three back-up alarms tonight. None serious.  But after each sprint as soon as I could be alone, I coughed my lungs up.

Another entry on the Big List of Things that Suck: Coughing so hard you puke.

That's probably too much information. 

Stupid Moves

Kevin wants me to drop by the seminar he is teaching at the end of the month.  He'll go over a lot of weapon stuff and he had me look at his curriculum.  The man doesn't need my advice, but he's polite enough to ask for it.  In the course of the conversation, he described some of the techniques he would have them do for warm-ups.  Very simple stuff- slide in kicks; jab cross combos.

"Oooh, oooh," I said, "Make them do this one!" I held my right hand in front of my stomach, brought it in a circular action in front of my right hip, leading with the back of the hand and then up to eye height just in front of my shoulder, fingers facing forward like a hissing snake in a bad kung fu movie. We were seated. Standing, it would have been accompanied by a slight step forward with my left foot.

"An inside joke?" Kevin guessed.

Hardly.

There's some stuff that I never saw until I did it- things that have been taught for ages in older martial arts that have been laughed at and lost in more modern times.  That's partly okay.  The snake circle above looks like something out of a bad movie.  If you were to make the action sparring it would look like the stupid circling and posturing from a seventies martial arts flick (I've been sick for the last week, so I've been watching a lot of those.)

But dirty, close and ugly, the technique is completely different.

When a threat is at bad breath range and slams something towards your stomach (fist or knife, if you take the time to look it is too late) that snake circle parries  it across his body, comes up under the elbow (to give away one of the biggest secrets, there is a point on the elbow where you can control a threat's entire body, often without using your hands) and the circle continues, controlling that elbow as you take the threat's face and (using another leverage point) lever his head back beyond his point of balance. When it works right, he is forced to fall straight back without being able to move his feet.  Very hard on the spine.  When it doesn't work right it still controls the weapon hand, the spine, and breaks his balance while leaving you a free hand (as well as knees and feet).  That's kind of useful.

The X-block also gets a lot of heat in certain circles.  It's not a good sparring technique.  It's a big obvious move that leaves your head wide open.  It pins your weight forward. There's no finesse to it.  But up close it has a lot that you want from a quick emergency technique:  All gross motor skill.  Fast. Covers a wide area (aiming takes time, precision takes more finely skilled motor muscles).  Works on most linear or rising attacks- foot, fist, knife... even a gun draw.  There is a big clue here. A lot of things that are stupid for sparring or dueling have elements that make them good for assault survival.

There are problems.  Too many people throw their hips back when using this technique and too few have been taught to transition out of it while closing, but it gives you a lot of options, usually including getting behind the threat easily.

There is another move that looks like a bad imitation of a bird's wing.  Worse, a bad imitation of a city kid's imaginary idea of what a cranes wing moves like. The one I'm familiar with is done with both hands simultaneously.  It looks a little like the reverse of the snake circle, the thumb edge of the hand leads as the hand makes a circle from the same side hip, to the navel (then little finger edge leads) and then up to finish at shoulder hight with the wrist bent like the snake's head and the fingertips cocked out about 45 degrees from the body.  (Someday, I'm going to figure out how to post pictures here.)

Silly looking, but I wonder how many times from both clinches and punches I've come up under the threat's arm like that, forcing it across his body (and sometimes over my own head) and wound up with my hand exactly in that position before I grabbed the upper sleeve or collar and yanked him off balance.

Just be cautious before you discard something that doesn't work in your context.  It may be perfect when you need it.

Shift

There has been an internal shift lately.  It's been a long time coming, something I expected, but for the first time I'm noticing what it feels like at the moment when the world shifts.

A few years ago a lot of very intense things came very close together.  It was a lot of hard, deep experience.  It left me feeling very separated from other people- I couldn't expect them to understand the world that I see and live in.  It was completely alien to their experience.  At the same time, I remembered living in their world, but didn't see it from the same place.

The sense of alienation was summed up when I was looking for a new martial arts instructor and he started talking about "application" and "street practicality" and violence, and I got a feeling like an artist was trying to sell me a painting of my home and he had never seen it.

The sense, for the last years, has been a feeling of poking at the experience.  Thinking and writing about it, exploring it.  I knew that it would settle, that I would be past that treacherous zone where PTSD or "psychological scarring" or other self-important labels were a danger when the events ceased to be events. No longer things I did or things that happened to me, but simply part of who I am.

I've done this before. I've made that transition before, many times. We all have.

With age or experience or sensitivity or an increase in my navel gazing time, I felt the click.  The first thought that showed a transition had happened.  It was simple and profound.  KJ called me up to ask for some input on a seminar and my first thought was: "Why is he calling me? I'm nothing special."

Nothing special.  I can make the list- I know the difference in sound of tendon or bone snapping; have talked down psychotics without even a common language; taken point on an entry with a severed ACL; drunk chichu with a reformed cannibal.... intellectually, I know some of that stuff is rare.  It just doesn't feel rare or special anymore.  My default now is to converse from the assumption that everyone else has similar experiences.  Ho hum.

Neither side of this transition is or has been intellectually correct.  The experience is not normal; at the same time it never really turned me into anything unique.  Both were feelings, impressions. Maps of the world.  

This transition feels healthy.  Like it might be a good springboard to push another edge of the envelope.

Scientifically Validating Experience

I don't have a fever, which feels strange. Soon it will feel normal again, but for right now it's a bit odd. And I'll miss the dreams. Somewhere around 103 degrees the dreams get very interesting.

Epistemology is a really interesting concept and a useful tool to analyze cultures, people, opponents. It is the study of how a group or a person comes to believe that things are 'true'. In some cultures, tradition is truth.  The night ascension of Mohammed or the midnight ride of Paul Revere are simply facts.

In martial arts, the epistemology can get really weird.  People have a need to validate their skills, but are rarely sure how to safely do so.  We can't line up ten thousand slaves and strike each one on a different point and see what happens (though in one kwoon I was told that this was exactly how their  vital points chart was derived- an unnamed Emperor experimented on 10,000 slaves.)  So do you take that story as truth?  If you do, can you then take the conclusions, the list of effects, as truth?  Maybe. Depends on your epistemology.  Can you 'experiment' or 'pressure test' in the ring or the octagon?  Sure, you can experiment anywhere you want.  Doesn't mean the experiment is valid, however.

In our culture, generally, we feel more comfortable if someone in a white coat with a PhD after the name gives us the green light.  Not always- the scientist has to agree with what we already believe or he will be accused of "selling out to big business" or being a "tool of special interest groups" but generally, we like it when scientists confirm what we want to believe.

My degree is in experimental psychology.  Psychology has drifted very far from scientific rigor on a lot of points, but one of the best things about that course of study was some extensive work in designing experiments, analyzing experimental design and the number crunching once the results come in.

So I see some of the martial arts instructors and (especially) entrepreneurs who claim valid and deep scientific backing for what they teach... and it's largely junk science.  Sometimes the experiment didn't conclude what the martial artist claims it did.  Sometimes the design itself, though published, was fundamentally flawed.  Sometimes it was 'entertainment science' like the National Geographic "Fight Science" where apples are compared to oranges.  Often the person using the study never really understood it.

The weirder part is that it doesn't really matter- it's all for comfort anyway.  The guys in white coats won't be anywhere in the area when you need to apply your skills to keep crawling for one more day.  Some of the conclusions work, even when they back them up with junk science.

Huh?

Yeah, because that's the way this stuff works, that's the way people work.  You talk to enough people, especially combat veterans and you hear things- "I was so scared I shit my pants!" "I couldn't remember how to pull a trigger." "My fingers couldn't work the bolt on my rifle." And you start putting things together.  This scared, this happens.  More scared, more happens.  Sometimes the martial arts instructor/entrepreneur (now a martial researcher! Yeah howdy!) does a study, often with no training in how to do a study or an experiment.  More often they start looking for research that supports their points, probably reading only the abstracts and not able to understand the actual experiment itself. So we have martial research on the effects of fear derived from the research based on running on a treadmill- because the researcher was looking at stress and he found studies based on a cardio stress test.

It doesn't matter because the researcher started with a good conclusion. Fact: the more scared you are the shittier you perform.  That is enough to start improving training.  Getting studies to back it up is largely window dressing.

But it can matter once it is established and starts to work the other way.  When you start extrapolating from junk science or irrelevant, poorly understood experiments and drawing conclusions from those.

One case, not related to MA because every MA case I know has the potential to hurt a friend's feelings:

Our local paper published a study a few years back about hunger in our fair state.  It had shocking and glaring conclusions that one in fifteen people right here were at grave risk of starvation. WTF?  I know some of the poorest people in the largest urban area.  If not for meth, the obesity rate would be astronomical. No one is starving to death. I was raised as a poor kid in the poorest part of the state. No one starved to death.  You would be hard pressed to find anyone who had starved to death, ever in this region who wasn't an elderly shut-in.  So I looked at the study.  Ever waited until a paycheck come in to do your grocery shopping?  That puts you at extreme risk for starvation.  Not for missing a meal, or living out of you cupboards, but starvation!!! Ever smell a restaurant and not go in because you didn't have money with you?  That's grave risk of starvation.  Buddy, you won't make it through the night.

The questionnaire was that poorly designed.  In and of itself it was a joke, just a tool for some folks to get worked up who wanted to get worked up. Relatively harmless.  Except people who either never read or couldn't understand the actual survey started throwing money at a problem that didn't exist.

They feel vindicated.  As far as anyone can name, no one has starved (other than shut-ins) in our fair state since the study came out... of course, no one did before, either.

Triggers and Stops

An author (and very nice lady) once said, "The only reason people ever resort to violence is out of great fear, great anger, or great desperation."  I smiled my snotty little grin and said, "I do it for money."  That might have gone really badly, but Jayel was wise and it became a talking point for a long time.  We both learned a lot.

Jayel is a good person and insightful.  I have no doubt that she did some deep soul searching and knew that she was capable of violence (a step up from a few friends who deny even that) and knew what her triggers would be- extremes of fear, anger and desperation.  It's a good insight.  It gets problematic when you assume that since those are your triggers, those are the triggers.

"I do it for money."  Not really.  Sort of.  Absolutely.  I deal with conflict and violent people as a profession.  I do get paid for it.  Far more often than not, I get paid for talking them out of making me use force.  But the force option is still always on the table.  As a job, though, it changes everything.  I can never use force out of anger.  If I use force out of fear or desperation (outside of an ambush) it almost always means that I let things get out of hand, or took chances or didn't see something coming when I should have.  So Jayel's triggers are there in me, but my triggers come into play at an earlier, professionally chosen time.

Violent people raised in a violent subculture have different triggers.  If you have seen the logic of violence- the first to attack the hardest wins- and have never been socially conditioned to see any moral problem with violence your trigger might be simple convenience.

If you have been conditioned to believe that certain tabus (the color of a bandana, someone saying bad things about your mom) must be dealt with violently or it will endanger your status with your group, your triggers for violence might be a complex web of social rules invisible to others.  That's a form of fear, too- the fear of being cast out or just losing status in the group.  I'm not sure it qualifies as great fear.

Fear, actually, is the primary preventative of violence.  For normally socialized people, a conscience is enough: fear of feeling bad, fear of disappointing parents and mentors and loved ones.  They would understand if you were forced to violence by great fear or desperation and maybe even forgive you for a great and justified anger.

Most of our violent criminals and even our low-level hustlers were never socialized in this way.  For normal people the concepts of guilt and shame are givens.  To learn that there is a large subculture without these feelings is jarring.  If you want some academic corroboration, pick up Fleisher's "Beggars and Thieves".  Personally after years of listening to criminals it took a long time to realize that outside of attempts to manipulate people I never hear them say that they "felt bad" about something or express any real sympathy at all.  Compassion is simply a skill used to find weakness in a potential victim.  When they do express sincere regret (talking to themselves or within their own groups) it is always for consequences to themselves.  Not for widows or orphans or scars that they have created but for time that they might serve.  Things they might lose.

Most prefer intimidation to violence because it is safer.  You stand a little too close and keep one hand under your jacket and ask for some money, you might get it.  The guy says "no" and looks like he's ready to fight, no harm in walking away.  You intimidate and the guy gives you money, that's panhandling.  There's an ordinance against aggressive panhandling, but that's at most a ticket and hard to prove.  You use force, and if a cop happens to see you that's robbery.  It will probably get thrown out: just claim the guy pushed you first and the money fell out of his pocket, but you still might spend some time in jail.  Which is okay, sometimes.  Worse, you use force and the guy knows what he's doing and you could get hurt.

When groups of people with that mindset are concentrated, as in the penal system, it would turn Lord of the Flies really fast if not for the officers watching, but they can't watch everything.  Groups form and one of their primary purposes is to provide a threat of retaliation should someone attack or cheat or steal from a member of the group.  The combination of fear of retaliation and fear of the disciplinary process is what limits the violence in jail (and jails/prisons are far more violent than most neighborhoods yet far less violent than they would be without this).

That's a huge and interesting divide between the population of citizens and criminals.  Socialized people need fear or something similar to trigger an act of violence.  For the criminals, fear is generally the only thing stopping them from resorting to violence as a first option.

C is Back

C is without doubt my favorite violent schizophrenic.  At his worst, he smears himself with his own shit and attacks anyone who comes near.  At the mid-level he walks in circles, never making eye contact with anyone, every muscle tense.

He was my 'project' for a long time. When he started 'decompensating*' I'd get a call, "Sarge, see if you can talk to C.  He's about to lose it."  So I would walk in long circles with him, usually not talking any more then he did.  He eventually started talking a little and then a lot.  One custody, he shared a goal with me. He wanted to work in the jail kitchen.  That probably doesn't seem like a big goal to you, but for him it was huge.

He had to work his way from Severe Mental Housing to Mental Housing to Mild Mental to General Population and then to the worker dorm.  That meant that his behavior had to continually improve until he wouldn't 'ping' the radar of the other inmates in custody at the level he was going to.  He had to stay on his meds. He had to consciously watch and modify his behavior. C took it very seriously and we wrote a contract, which was actually more of a list of things that he needed to learn how to watch: a cheat sheet for faking normality (and are any of us normal? Is there a difference between faking normal and being normal?)

The problem came in the transition from Mental to Mild Mental.  I was talking to him every day.  He seemed to be doing really well.  At the bi-weekly meeting of the Mental Health Team I made the case for moving him on... it was soundly rejected.  I thought he was doing better. Everyone else thought he was losing ground fast.  I made the case at the next meeting and the next... it was imperative that he didn't get the idea that we were manipulating him.  He had to learn from this that controlling his behavior worked- it got what he wanted.  That goal setting and planning worked.  It would be a huge disaster, and play nicely into some of his paranoid delusions, if he came to believe that the people who had developed rapport with him had only done so for our own purposes, to make him easier to manage.

I made the case again and one of the deputies sighed. "Sarge, he's complaining about bugs everywhere.  We can't send him to Mild, much less General, if he's seeing imaginary bugs."

Crap. "I'll tell him," I said.  So I did. I went up to his housing unit and told him that as long as he was seeing things, we couldn't move him.  Maybe a medication change...

No.  He was adamant.  There really were bugs and no one would listen to him.  I sighed. 'No one listening' fell right in with the paranoid aspect of his schizophrenia. "Show me." He brought me up to his cell.  It was crawling with little maggoty bugs.  The only cell in the whole jail.

Sometimes the bugs are real.  It was a good lesson for all of us.  Everyone had seen what they expected to see and stopped looking when they saw what they expected.  He made it all the way to the kitchen and did a good job until his release.

C is back in custody.  He's looking really good, keeping himself clean, holding a conversation. I even saw him play cards with other inmates.  Is he better or faking it? Does it matter?

*Mental health has almost as many cool euphemisms as law enforcement.  They don't say "Getting worse" or "Going off the deep end" the use "decompensating".  And restraining someone by force is a "physical intervention strategy."  Cool, huh?

Nikki Valentine

Most people's dark sides are pretty pathetic.  The evil that people imagine is sometimes great, but everyone imagines an open season on loud people or people who stop and block aisles in warehouse stores.  Few actually do it.  Then those who do are sometimes shocking in their...patheticness.  If that's a word.  More often than not the people who kill are whiners, needy and entitled.  Not getting what they want is a great injustice and they will do anything, without regard for others, to fulfill a desire.

This hit me in terms of tragedy today.  I was asked some weeks ago if I had ever loved someone so much that it made me cry.  I answered, without really thinking, that I had forgotten how to cry long before I learned how to love.  It probably sounds like a 'tough guy pretending to be deep' platitude. Sorry.

I remember the last time I cried and why.  Things today brought that memory very close to the surface.  Mirrored it too well.  So the memory was there and I poked at it... and it wasn't so huge a tragedy.  Remove the fact of living it and it is a very small story.  It wasn't "Where the Red Fern Grows" by any means, or "Brian's Song".  But, really, written with less skill would "Where the Red Fern Grows" have been what it is?  The story is small- a boy and a dream and his dogs and love and loyalty to the edge of death.  A small story, except to the boy, and to all the people who became that boy for a few hours while reading that book.

Goodbye, old girl.  I'm glad you had one last good spring.

Spinning Plates

Everything is quiet right now.  The last batch of training is finished and the next two phases aren't things I'm certified in so no more multiple extra shifts for a while.  The book theoretically went to the printer on Friday after a... I want to say marathon or epic editing session, but actually the editor made it pretty smooth and easy.  It took some time and most of the prep work on my end was done in a state of near exhaustion, but it went well.  The two other big things are pending, waiting.  Waiting drives me nuts, but it is a big part of life. The key is to do other things.

So I can relax, work on other projects. Maybe even bring this blog back to the more interesting subjects like bad guys and brawling.

Before I do, in this dead space, a couple of questions if anyone has input:

1) The publisher wants a list of organizations/reviewers who might be interested in the book.  Any ideas?

2) For some reason when I publish to the blog the first (or sometimes several) paragraphs are fine, and then it squinches down so that it is no longer double spaced. Any idea what is going on?

Death Poetry

A long time ago, with his kind permission, I posted some of Drew Rinella's poetry here.  A few days ago, Drew let me know about his websites, one for poetry and a new one for "stories".  Drew puts his heart in his poetry and laughs in his stories.  In the stories I see the gangly, sometimes goofy kid who walked into the garage dojo to learn some jujutsu.  In the poems I see the man who fights death and doesn't look away.

His blog had links, mostly people who do what he does. Some days that's holding a physical body together for just a few more minutes.  Somedays it is making hard choices while people scream and bleed. Some days it is making a little old lady feel a little less scared.

I followed some of the links.  Not poetry, not officially.  Just some stories about the job and lessons learned and fears faced and hope delivered.  Most people who get involved in Emergency Services don't write.  The ones that do often have a power.  I don't know if it is the intensity of the experiences one finds on the edge of death or a comfort and comradeship that I feel. They have stood over their bodies and I have stood over mind and we each felt what we felt.  Not so alien or alone when I read these stories.  Try this one

I know people who write poetry and sometimes describe themselves as poets who have spent their entire lives trying to write something with the depth and power of some of Drew's stuff.  I can barely read fiction because so much of it seems an inbred string of cliches with no connection, no comparison to the emotion or intensity of a real life.  I may be wrong, but I don't feel that a shallow life can produce deep poetry.

Synergy?

Synergy is a fun concept.  Sometimes the forces of the cosmos come together and linked things happen that could not have happened by random chance.  Coincidence takes on a feeling of intention.

Whatever.  The human mind is a fun toy and works hard every day to find patterns and make sense.  With tens of thousands of occurrences every day that touch your life in some way, is it any wonder that you will naturally focus on the five that seem to fit together?  More of a wonder, perhaps, that things that feel like synergy don't occur more often... but they do, of course. They just don't count unless you notice them.

Your mind can be set, also.  You can choose to look for blue things and your eyes will pick them up.  When you buy a new car you are often surprised by the number of cars of the same make, model, and color that you see on your commute. Surely there weren't that many yesterday... but there were, you just didn't have a reason to notice them.  In the same way, when you decide "No more of this! I'm looking for that!"  That will suddenly appear everywhere.

So I don't need synergy to explain things... but sometimes it feels good to feel special.  In that crazy busy week with the book going to new (to me) places- final edits, a talk with the publicist-and other things squeezed in (which I may not be able to talk about for a bit) two contacts out of the blue:

1) Been asked to write a peer-reviewed article for a martial encyclopedia and

2) Something wacky involving Hollywood. Someone in Colorado evidently thinks I'm pretty.

The first is solid.  The second I seriously doubt that I have the time, but it is intriguing as hell.  It would be very cool to talk to people from that world and see if they are as completely out of touch with the real world as their products tend to be.

Chaos Addiction

Chaos is addictive on a lot of levels. Once you get past the fear and uncertainty it can be kind of fun. The adrenaline rush of surviving, of being the one who walks away, is simultaneously intoxicating and serene and profound. There are few things that give as powerful a sense of accomplishment as going into a situation of deep and dangerous chaos and making it safe and right. There is nothing that makes you feel as special as deliberately advancing on a situation that everyone else is running away from.

Dealing successfully with chaos strokes your ego, increases your awareness, deepens you appreciation of everything and gives a trickle or a dump of neurotransmitters that feel pretty nice. Is there any wonder that there are adrenaline junkies out there?

The downside, of course is the nature of chaos. There is no scalar: "I am 9 units effective and this problem is 8 units bad, therefore I will win." Easy problems or at least things that should have been easy go sideways. You might be a 'ten' but I would reliably bet that you have some skills that are much lower, and you don't get to pick what skills you might need.  If you play the game long enough and hard enough, you will lose.

(And here's the essence of the Chaos Game: potential infinite variety of problem faced by a nearly infinitely complex person. At one level, if skills match problem, fine. But at another level humans can develop skills in extrapolation: "I don't know jack about X, but I'm really good at Z and it's only two letters away. Can I use my Z skill for the X problem? How?" Even though your skills are finite, your ability to play with and mesh and rethink those skills approaches infinity.)

And that skill- adaptability and extrapolation- gets really addictive.  You start to see problems in a different and clearer way. (There is a trap there, because almost every bad decision comes from someone who thought that they were seeing things more clearly than others.)  When you see problems in this way you can solve things in a way that looks effortless.  It feels effortless too  and that is part of the addiction.  It can spiral.  There is a fine line between feeling special and feeling like an outsider.

Some very successful people glitch on that feeling and meld back into the herd or burn out.  Some revel in it, and that can become another reinforcement.

Addiction has some bad connotations in our society.  Rightly so IMO- dependance on anything, whether a drug, a person, or a government program is giving up a piece of your autonomy, what Kai calls agency.  Anything you need from another person, any responsibility for yourself that you voluntarily relinquish is a piece of your soul that you are selling.

Chaos addiction differs because you can't delegate it.  The deeper you go the more you must rely on yourself.  It pushes you to be better.  Depending on the level and type of chaos it forces you to focus and to relax; to be strong and determined and also flexible.  It forces you not only to see your mistakes and weaknesses but to face them and fix them.

In other ways, though, chaos doesn't differ from other addictions.  Like anything else, the better you get at something the more challenging the things you try to take on just like a drug it can take more and more to get the same effect.  It can be hard on you mentally and physically: there are striking similarities between a thoroughly burned-out cop or paramedic and an old alky.  And you can overdose.  Bite off more than you can chew or get surprised when that level three problem goes sideways and it can be your body laying in the alley with half a face missing.

There are other pathologies here: 

• It is rarer than you would expect, but some few create problems so that they can fix them.  This almost always poisons the agency where they work. 
  
• People who fix problems often deal with peaceful times poorly.  Boredom can mimic depression. Alcoholism rates, I was once told, are the highest in cultures with a warrior ethos that are forced into peacetime.
• Complacency- the one I most battle with- Once you get really good at adaptability/extrapolation it becomes very tempting not to do your homework.  There have been incidents when I had time to research or plan and just walked in trusting I could "wing it".  Successful so far and I never do it when others might get hurt (he tells himself self-righteously, but there is extreme hubris in the presumption that I could know how far the chaos could ripple).

Trying to Write

It has literally been a crush for the last week. Writing has happened in snatches while waiting for other things. Some of those things might be serious and maybe they'll be written about here, maybe not.

Posts started and not finished include one on knowing your audience when teaching; one on progress with the book and one on how two very different things can get to something that looks like the same place- very specific things about how either nature or nurture, either alone can make a sociopath... and how those two kinds of sociopaths differ and how what might change one won't change the other. The two-way action concept and the convergent evolution concepts are powerful, if I can just keep from going off on tangents and stick to the idea.

So, now in the space after an interview and before work (and I'll try to cram a library run and a few more chores in there) I'll finally eat something and have some coffee and post this. While working on an expanded author's bio for the book. I'm thinking of doing it in the form of a personal ad:

"MWM H/W proportionate seeks adventure, new knowledge and insight. Already found true love. I enjoy long sword fights on the beach, spectacular sunsets in my opponents eyes and good scotch."

More to follow.

Busy Man

Galleys are in and very quickly comes a message that there will be one more trade of copies with the plan that the manuscript will be at the printer on Tuesday- so an entire review, last chances and BOOM. Done. Except for all the things that aren't.

Simultaneously I was tasked to design an eight-hour training day for dealing with the mentally ill. I got the instructions a while ago and wrote/designed what I needed to do and delegated the parts I wasn't qualified to write: psychotropic medications; the continuum of care; a catalog of community resources, stuff like that.

As it got close to crunch time, none of the delegatees came through. None. Zero percent. As the date approached, I called them on it. The answer was universal- they didn't believe that the program had management support, that it would help, that the students cared-- they wanted to bag it. Conscious or not, the inactivity was a passive-aggressive attempt to torpedo the program.

(Yes, people. In any large political organization you can expect management to be out of touch. It is our job to hold it together anyway. I know you're tired. I'm tired too. But we hold it together. Us. No matter how short-sighted or even stupid the directives, we hold things together. We make it work. The people who make the bad decisions won't pay for the consequences. We will, either us or the people we are sworn to protect. So we make it work, every day. Just do it.)

They said they would get it done, but they used the same words as the first time. I'm not qualified to write the stuff we needed. Crisis communication? Oh, yeah. Quick and dirty diagnosis? Limits of physical skills? All that. But not the stuff we needed.

So I called in the big guns. I think I've disagreed with and gone head to head with Capt. A more than anyone else at his rank in the agency. But for years I've admired his ability to deal with problem people (he actually has more trouble with motivated self-starters). I called him. He called a meeting.

It was an education to watch him work. He never even entertained 'why' or 'if' but jumped right to 'how'. The very people that were in full rebellion with me were assigned tasks and solving problems before they even remembered that they were supposed to be resistant to the idea. The captain handled it masterfully. Within a few hours, handouts and contact numbers started appearing in my email...

Which gives me two days to design a student packet, polish two classes, create a PowerPoint and get it all vetted and approved. While working on the galleys. And teach a First Aid class. Maybe get some writing done. A workout would be nice. Start learning a language...

Galley Slave

Rhino has made the magical transition from manuscript to book.  That's cool. Received the galleys yesterday.  This is definitely one of the neat "new author" feelings.  It's a PDF file and it doesn't have the weight of a book, but it has the look.  

For the next week (in my copious spare time) I'll be going over it, looking for changes I'm unhappy with or things that need to be clarified.  Books are scary in a way, because they are moments frozen in time.  This book is what I thought on these subjects in 1993-95.  There have been a lot of lessons since then, some entirely new ways to see things.  Growth is good but at first glance, I think the book is fine.  Growth also creates distance and Rhino (Published title will be Meditations on Violence) is far more accessible than a 2008 version would be.

Sometimes...

Sometimes people die.  Actually, everybody dies- but that's not the point.  Sometimes people die and you go over the situation examining decisions and what-if's and sometimes you find the place where something different might have saved a life.  Sometimes that is valid and sometimes it is NOT.  Sometimes the examination is a serious debriefing, professionals trying to learn lessons and find a better way to do a risky job.  Often it is one or more amateurs with an agenda trying to place blame... (and that's not fair. The real mechanism, often, is that someone who they love brought on his own deaths through his own actions... and that's too much, too much love and anger, too much to feel for one dead person. If they can remove at least the little piece about his responsibility for his own death maybe they will sleep better at night.  Maybe they can forgive the dead for dying if they can remove the need to forgive them for what lead to the death.) The amateurs will go to unbelievable lengths of twisted logic to believe that they have found a way.

There was a recent news article that enraged me, and maybe I will dissect it later- but Dave asked about the comment that sometimes people die no matter how hard you try.  A long time ago I mentioned without following it up that if a threat cannot feel pain, it almost guarantees a serious injury.  Those are all connected.

Dave was concerned that it might be personal to talk about.  Less for me, but I have restrictions based on confidences and other things, so this post will probably seem more oblique than most.

The force is over when the threat decides it is over.  That simple. Humans almost always give up.  Unless every long bone in the body is broken or the Central Nervous System is shut down the human machine is still capable of fighting.  The whole point of pain compliance (joint locks, pressure points and Taser) is to deliver enough pain that the threat decides to quit.  The next step above that does damage, but it takes a truly horrific amount of damage to make it impossible for a human to keep fighting.  It is some damage + a fear of more damage that makes the threat quit fighting.  The threat quits because of the fear. They quit psychologically.

The next step above this is lethal force. If it is imperative to stop the threat and damaging force has failed, that may indicate lethal force (that is not legal advice).

More often than not (and in almost every case that has made the papers lately and locally) though the officers could justify lethal force, they try to handle the situation at a lower level. Often a much lower level.  One example is "the swarm" where as many officers as they can get pile on the threat.  The idea is to tire the threat out. Use friction and body weight to cause an exhaustion that will do what pain and fear failed to do.  It is dangerous as hell. If you are trying to wrestle and the other guy is biting, clawing, blinding and may have a weapon, it sucks... and I know officers who have been permanently injured trying hard NOT to injure a threat.  Even if the threat doesn't have a weapon all the officers do, and the threat could work one out of a holster and turn it into a bloodbath just by chance.  So it is dangerous. It would be far safer and often justifiable to stand back and use firearms, but most officers are so reluctant to kill that they try this technique.

Usually it works.

Sometimes (look for "excited delirium") it doesn't.  Excited delirium is a condition that most officers are familiar with, but it is hard to pin down exactly what it is or what causes it.  It usually follows heavy stimulant use (PCP or cocaine) but sometimes not.  Often the threat has a history of severe psychiatric disorders, but sometimes not.  Sometimes it is just rage taken to a point that is inhuman.  The weirdest part, to me, is that some of the liver temperatures taken at autopsy, well after death have been higher than the body can withstand without brain damage, so there is something physiological going on.

What presents (and none of these are 100%): is someone who often strips naked, sometimes howls like an animal, attacks almost anything that moves and likes to break glass.  They don't respond to pain.  They fight when any normal human would long have collapsed into a heap.  They shrug off bullet wounds that are clearly lethal.  The ones I have dealt with have gone relatively well, but close friends have been involved in instances where a relatively small threat was literally throwing (in one case eight, in another five) officers around.

And that's the thing, Dave.  Because sometimes the threat just suddenly quits and you get handcuffs on and start to take a breath and realize that he isn't breathing.  He didn't give up, his heart gave out.

At great personal risk the officers addressed the threat at a lower level of force than they could have justified and he died anyway.  In the end, to the amateur debriefers, it's all the same.  If they hadn't fought so long and so hard, the poor boy would have lived.  They should have done something else.  What?  Taser?  But all of the cool tools that come under fire- Taser, VNRs (Vascular Neck Restraints, the fancy word for a hadaka jime), ankle to hand restraints, even OC tend to be used more often when you need the edge.  You need the edge most of all with excited delirium.  As seen from the liver temperature, some of the people in ED are on the fast track to death or brain damage anyway. 

 Here's the thing- it's possible that a certain percentage of these cases would die anyway, even if they never came in contact with an officer.  A rough analysis shows that the percentage who die in custody hasn't really changed with the LVNR and when the LVNR was removed from many agencies; when hog-tying was common and when it was discontinued; when the Taser and OC were introduced.

There's an international study working on in-custody deaths right now.  It may be years before they have solid numbers, but then we may have an answer.  Until then, the amateurs with an agenda will blame whatever tool or tactic was used, completely ignoring the fact that the officers had no choice about getting involved and risked their lives trying not to use deadly force.

Flush

My wife worries about me when I'm alone.  I rarely sleep ( being around people is about the only thing that seems to make me tired. With complete solitude I can go on 1-4 hours sleep every 26- and that's weird in itself because it seems that my natural sleep cycle is set to a 26 hour day). I don't eat much or often, just when I'm both hungry and not absorbed in something else, which makes perfect sense to me, but since it comes out to eating once every other day (plus whatever I graze as I hike along) she worries.

Then she finds out what I am eating (currently a ramen noodle soup with leftover ham and kangaroo) and worries more.

These tendencies don't come out much around people.  Left to myself I eat to refuel or for fun, and cooking is more fun than eating.  Sleep is a form of time travel for when there is nothing else to do.  Around people, it's different.  There are meal times, and people seem to get seriously grumpy if the schedule is off by much.  Social eating- which I understand, hospitality was a big piece of my family's moral culture- but people over time do notice if you don't eat and act concerned, which leads to caring conversation, which makes me tired.  Or they act hurt if they notice you aren't eating with them.  So I eat and I smile.

Conversation for conversation's sake is a grind. When there is something to talk about, I enjoy conversation.  Even debate and arguing, but especially exploring someone else's mind: What do you think?  What do you believe? Why? How does that affect this?  But conversation just for it's own sake, just for bonding is an effort and makes me tired.  If I spend time in your presence, I already like you, OK?  There is no need for mutual babbling to confirm the fact. C'mon.

Half a day alone today and I could feel the psychic human gunk of a very long week flushing away.  That's good. Now I'm going to eat my kangaroo (seriously, how could you have an opportunity to eat 'roo and turn it down?)

Mr. Rubber, Meet Mr. Road

Before I came to this job, I'd studied a fair number of things in a fair number of styles. I'd sparred a lot and loved it and excelled at it: everything from non-contact kumite to full; boxing; kick boxing; grappling (mostly under judo rules); no rules (with and without weapons)...

(One caveat- I have never trained both full contact and no holds barred at the same time. I have serious doubts about anyone who claims that they have. To put it in perspective when I was training true 'no holds barred' in classical jujutsu at light contact I averaged one broken bone and two dislocations a year. There is no way I could have gone a week with anyone who was decent without suffering- or inflicting- a crippling injury.)

Many years ago I asked a karate instructor why we practiced kata and kihon when we didn’t use any of the moves in sparring. It wasn’t anything like 'fighting'. He didn’t have a good answer.
Four years later after wrestling with a street fighter under a roulette table in a casino I drew a shaky breath and said, “Shit, that wasn’t anything like sparring!”

The casino security gig lasted a little over a year before I went back to college. I learned a little about criminals, a lot about intimidation and presence and talking people down. There were only a handful of major fights. The big lesson was that someone who really knew what he was doing could pull off things that a hot young martial artist couldn’t make work.

College and military after that, and then the Job. Corrections. Direct supervision- constant face to face contact with the inmates. No weapons, always outnumbered and expected to maintain control. I went six months without my first fight, and then had three in a week.

This last post in the series is kind of a cheat, because most of this blog is really about those lessons. The things I learned and am still learning. The things I thought I knew that didn’t hold up. The things I still hear all the time that are the martial equivalents of talismans and wishful thinking- or equally incorrect the dire predictions and certainties.

Some of those:
• I had always believed that there was always a way to avoid force. I hadn’t been naïve, I knew that there wasn’t always time to find the way, but I believed it existed. It wasn’t until I met two kinds of people that this faded.
• The people who should be on the front lines of training information were largely ignorant of some of the basic elements of survival fighting.
• I’ve been the rookie who almost got killed because I tried to rely on “academy approved” technique. I did what I had to do to win and learned a lot about skill and cognition under stress.
• Sometimes people die, no matter how hard you try to not hurt them.
• There are physiological and psychological conditions that negate everything you know about what X will do to a human.
• Dynamic and live trainings are a far cry from chaos.
• What you don’t know can hurt you.
• What you think you know that is wrong is worse.
• Doing things efficiently is easier than doing them inefficiently and efficiency is situational.
• Fight to the goal- this means you have to be taught to see various goals, pick the right one and work towards that. Fighting to run is different than fighting to stay and you can’t do both.
• People are rarely beaten. They give up.
• The more levels (tactical, physical, social, psychological…) you can work on the better you are.
• A short fuse can do more damage by surprise than skill (one of the most dangerous people I know is not dangerous because of his skill, but because the triggers that will explode him into violence are so easy to hit that he would explode long before I was even considering the threat.)
• The lessons from a raid or entry do not translate into self-defense and counter-assault.
• The lessons from dueling don’t apply to either (this is a hard one, because people, including me, become so enamored of their fighting skill… but it is nothing like surviving an assault, so totally unrelated that it is hard to put into words.)
• There are rules in a street fight, subconscious rules that can trip you up if you don’t see them and you can exploit if you do.

This entire post is a cheat, as my lovely wife pointed out. Each of these lessons has one (or dozens) of stories behind them. It is unfair to encapsulate it as bullet points in a single post, to treat it like a 'thing that is true'. But this isn’t about the bullet points, this is about the process: the person I was when I began this journey; the martial artist I was trained and forged into; and now the officer that the environment produced. The collision of three worlds, in a way.

I’ve seen a lot of different fights and a lot of different types of sparring, but it all boils down to that insight shaking and out of breath under a roulette table.

No Memory

A short break from the series. Last night an inmate walked up and asked if I remembered him. Six foot three or four, at least 240 pounds. I told him no, sorry. That surprised him. Evidently we fought fifteen years ago. He was looking at thirty years and had nothing to lose. He said he remembered how calm I was, that I kept giving him the option of the easy or the hard way and, being young and bull headed he insisted on hard.

Still no memory. It was fifteen years ago. I remember some fights from that era, significant ones... but I'm not sure what it takes to count as significant any more. We talked and he walked away. I turned to Mark, the deputy, "I don't remember it. How screwed up is that?"

"We've been doing this for a long time, sarge."

Yeah. Over fifteen years. I have a rough estimate of the number of uses of force I've been in, 400 or more. Most of those weren't epic. I remember clearly only a handful. Occasionally I find an old report that details blood and fast decisions and I have no memory of it. The ones I remember are important in some way. Things I learned, mistakes made, miracles sometimes.

Feeling a little old right now.

Martial Beginnings

I’d read and dreamed and played at martial arts (not watched- no electricity meant no TV, there are large swatches of popular culture that are mysteries to me). Played with every weapon that I could make or fake. Invented patterns. Worked on speed and form from books. At this particular time Martial Arts was considered the way to become a complete human being.

So, when I got to college I signed on with the first MA class I could find. It was luck, but it was awesome and set a pattern for the rest of my life: I chanced into Judo and had the privilege of being taught by a former member of the West German National team and a USA Nationals champion. They set the bar for what I considered good instruction. I’ve never stayed with an instructor of lesser quality and I’ve walked out of many classes taught by people with national reputations who simply didn’t meet my standards.
The other luck aspect was judo itself. No mysteries, no mysticism. Clean physics, good timing and superior conditioning. There are many things judo doesn’t incorporate, but there are very few bad habits built into the system. Unlike almost every martial art, I’ve never had to unlearn an aspect of judo to use it in real life. The school was extremely competitive, which drove you to the limits of your endurance. It was also very traditional. Within the school we were taught that weight classes were a mistake in overall training. Small people can and do beat big people, but not by fighting like they were the same size. (Years later, as a 154 pound sankyu I went to a dojo where the smallest person was 200 pounds. I threw or tapped everyone in the dojo, including the owner’s nidan son until I got to the owner- who simply picked me up and choked me out at arm’s length).
I lived, ate and breathed MA. I would skip classes in the morning to sit in on the other two judo morning classes as well as take the one I was scheduled; then work out with the judo team three nights a week. Most of the time I did Shito-ryu karate or fencing on the off days and TKD after judo. The shito-ryu guys were very good, very precise and demanded perfect form. I didn’t like it at the time and did it purely as a matter of discipline (and because one of the instructors was really cute). I loved TKD and had no idea how lucky I was to meet Al, who not only taught me how to kick but when NOT to, and wasn’t afraid to apply it with knives at bad-breath range and taught me how to take a full-power strike. On the weekends and in the afternoons I would work out heavy fighting with the Society for Creative Anachronism.
After college and in-between, I played at every thing I could. As a very typical and arrogant young martial artist, I’d been toying with blending all I was good at into a single system. My first exposure to Jujitsu (Danzan-ryu) had it all blended, but the instructor was a piece of work. He spent more time trying to convince me he was a “true master” than he did teaching. In the end, though I liked the system, I stuck with judo.
Judo was my home, and still holds the glow of a first love, but then I ran into Sosuishitsu-ryu and Dave Sumner. Sosuishitsu had the integrated blend that I wanted, but centered around a ruthlessly effective mindset. The system matched my experience with real violence. The instructor exceeded my expectations of what a teacher and a fighter should be. In my first week he took my forte, judo, and showed me three entirely new ways to put someone down. Not new techniques, new principles each of which could lend itself to dozens of techniques.
I still played, dabbling in karate and arnis and muay thai and kajukenbo …everything. But Sosuishitsu was my home. For depth and efficiency I haven’t seen anything close. Honestly, I’ve been drifting martially (not combatively), since Dave retired.

I’ve always had extraordinary instructors. I didn’t waste my time with:
• The guy with three black belts who had created his own system- I dropped his assistant instructor with only two months of judo training.
• No interest in wrestling- I got challenged by a kid who saw my gi. He’d been a state champion wrestler in high school. I strangled him unconscious in a few seconds. When he woke up he insisted that he “won on points”. Whatever.
• The jujitsu instructor who spent more time explaining why he was a ‘true master’ (?) than teaching. (Actually, I stayed with him for a couple of months- the system was really good).
• The other jujitsu instructor who cut his own throat with his knife defenses and didn’t know it.
• The JKD/Muay Thai guy who insisted I was doing something wrong because I was hurting him through his pads and said to do it his way because it hurt less (more stories with this bozo on request).
• The guy who claimed advanced ranks in about nine arts but wouldn’t let his students work out with the judo club next door.
• The group that said previous training may make it hard to see the purity of their truth.
• The guy with the sloppy footwork and bad stick work who claimed advanced titles in things he couldn’t pronounce.
• The guy who claimed to have won a Pan Am gold in a year it wasn’t even held (by charter, the Pan Am games are held the year before the Olympics).

So, in those different paradigms: I’ve been a serious competitor; a training fanatic; a traditionalist; an MMA guy before there was such a thing; a weapon guy; the devotee of an extraordinary instructor (and very lucky in that he didn’t tolerate any cultish behavior- he wanted men who would stand up, that’s what training was for); I did dojo arashi and parking lot challenge matches. Martial arts was a huge part of who I became.
Then the rubber met the road.

From There to Here: Background

This is going to be a short series- where I started and went and am…  There are stages that people go through- martial artists, cops, everyone who grows and matures.  Some of these are paradigm shifts, profound changes in the way you look at and relate to the world.  The thing is, before a paradigm shift, you can be pretty sure that you have a good handle on things.  You “know” things.  After the paradigm shift, not so much.  You still know stuff, but you also know that the stuff that you “knew” before was dead wrong- or maybe not, maybe just limited, blind in a way. Do it enough, have enough “knowns” exposed as myths or guesses or wishful thinking and you become skeptical of your own certainty.  That’s a necessary stage.  Without it, it’s very hard to open your mind to other people who have had different shifts than you and have much to share.  It seems that a part of the human condition is an inability to acknowledge that your “it” or “truth” might be an old and primitive stage to someone else.  A necessary step, but an early one.

Background: born in a thriving community with extremely intelligent parents.  My father was a contractor, road builder and blaster; a former army (Korea era vet) and Golden Gloves boxer, a bar brawler and a legendary tough guy (he once sat politely through a dinner party with a crushed foot, unwilling to disturb the guests until mom saw the blood oozing from his crushed steel-toed boots). Also an alcoholic with little time or patience for children who did actually teach me to swim by throwing me in a river and telling me I had no choice.  Mom was a former ballerina, fencer and gymnast, a yoga teacher and a legendary barroom brawler in her own right.  Both were raised pretty hardscrabble, by parents who made it through WWII and the Great Depression.

Hunting and camping were family events.  Bike riding in the desert, exploring caves and climbing were things I did alone or with a small group of friends.  Somewhere in early childhood I got the habit of being the first to do the dangerous things.  Not because I was brave.  I wasn’t.  It was just easier for me to deal with the risk of being injured or killed than it was to deal with the possibility of watching someone else be injured or killed 

Then the move.  Since the world was supposed to end we became homesteaders on a good-sized piece of land.  From the time of twelve on, I was raising and killing most of my own food.  Mom and dad did a lot of the butchering and dressing, actually.

I was pretty sheltered before this.  My old school had been very progressive and I had been trained that I was a pacifist, a higher order of being.  Being transplanted into a school in a town of 210 that averaged one murder a year (not counting the serial killer who was arrested while we were living there); where a good high school fight involved upward of four broken bones and a “fair fight” involved a confederate wrapping a coat around the victims eyes and throwing him to the floor where the fighter would be waiting to kick until the victim stopped moving…

It was an experience.  My early exposure to violence was that a moral and righteous truth was meaningless to anyone willing to use violence and must be backed up to be real at all.  That ‘fair’ was a word that ignorant people used and evil people twisted.  That no adult cared.  That no one had a solution.  That a righteous rage could overcome numbers and strength, but at a cost.  That plans disappeared when you felt a boot slam into your face.

It made me quick and alert and strong and quiet.  It made me capable of being harsh. So the first paradigm shift from this was that, “Violence is the last resort of the ignorant,” was a platitude that people hide behind and it swirls into mist when the violence is right there.

There was another paradigm shift too, a moment when I was very scared and had been told I would be killed and I decided and acted and watched a big (man? boy? Fifteen years old at most but 220 pounds, at least 130 pounds more than me) on his knees trying to scream and making no sound. I’d slammed my fingers into his throat and he couldn’t breathe.  I still remember his eyes sometimes, and sometimes I let my mind play with “what ifs.”  What if the first teacher there had not been a medic in Vietnam?  What if charges had been pressed.  What if.  The possibilities make an abyss. 

Enough on violence.  There was a spiritual side to it too.  I spent more hours alone in a year than I imagine many do in a life time.  This was the essence of my spiritual training: If you have a question, go into the desert.  Don’t eat or drink. You will get an answer or you will die.  You will always get an answer if you have the strength.

And meditation, constantly.  It became my normal mode NOT to have any voice in my head.  I lived in a constant state of what some consider a fairly deep meditation.  I vision quested on my own (fastest on record, since I fell off a cliff on the way to the place I had chosen and got the whole experience in the second or so of free-fall).  I considered, and still do, taking lethal risks as a form of religious sacrifice: Do you want me, Sif, Tyche, Athena, Odin?  Have I failed? Here’s your chance.

This was the ground-work.  Before I had an opportunity to study martial arts my spiritual grounding was solid; I’d seen enough violence to have a perspective; I had parents who set (by example) a very high bar for competence on all levels; and I had the work ethic that gets formed by cows that have to be milked and hay that has to be brought in.