Weakness

This is one of the Twilight Zone posts. There is some weird stuff that goes on in the world and sometimes you just notice it, but sometimes you get a glimpse at a pattern... and sometimes someone gives you a clue.

I'm reading a book- not that unusual. But this one puts forth the premise that the body can sense things that are bad for it (ranging from toxicity to malevolent thoughts to negative people) and one of the body's reactions to that is for the muscles to go weak. It's hitting very high on my BS meter, hence no title and no recommendation in the post.

But...but... there is a phenomenon and you can see it in martial arts and real combat and conflict and a lot of places. It is a basis of some of the 'martial magic' or 'kool-aide' drinking set- you know, the stuff that only works on students who have been trained for it to work or the "no-touch knockouts" that require a detailed explanation before they will work. They don't work on people who don't know they are supposed to pass out. Stuff like that. But there's also another level. It's still a trick, sort of, but the kind of trick or ability or force that you can use on people in real life and sometimes in real combat.

A lot of it feeds into the concept of zanshin. I don't want to explain and quibble over definitions. For my purposes zanshin is an effect of internalized experience. The effect shows itself in a determined focus and it can be sensed by other people.

• Internalized experience: people who have been through a lot of shit and absorbed it are different than people who haven't.
• Determined focus- a fuzzy way of saying that they have learned to act decisively and with everything they have and are.
• All but the most oblivious people can tell who not to fuck with.

One example is the "no touch block" which works pretty reliably, but there are some people it doesn't work on and you can sense who they will be.

Another one is the body hardening techniques that Kris uses and demonstrates. They work pretty well and he can do them moving, which most of the "internal arts masters" I've had the opportunity to work with couldn't. But where he will let big strong people hit him, I notice that there are people he won't invite to test it. I'm not even sure that he is aware of it, but they fall into a certain pattern- big is fine. Strong is fine. Multiple black belts are fine- but the cold vicious and crazy, even when they are acting nice don't get the chance.

I have made people feel weak just by standing close to them and smiling. Grappled with people much bigger and stronger who couldn't seem to apply any of their strength.

I said this was twilight zone stuff, so here goes: the book speculates (actually states, unequivocally) that dangerous and toxic substances and even thoughts cause an immediate and measurable muscle weakness.

What if a person can develope the zanshin, the presence, to cause this weakness at will in another human being? (Or to strengthen them, it's all the same) What if these demonstrations of toughness are actually an ability to weaken someone else by becoming an elemental danger?

Don't get hung up on it. Any post that mentions the twilight zone is for wild speculation. So much could be explained by this- all the victims that said the attacker looked at them and they couldn't move; all the victims who struggled instead of fought. How fear makes you stronger most times, but in some interpersonal conflicts seem to make you weaker. My success at some stuff that, crunching the numbers, I had no right to walk out of (like today. Cripes.)

I've felt that weakness and know that if you fight anyway, you can recover. The weakness is an illusion that falls away if you can survive long enough to do it. Does it relate to permission? Does the human animal sense that this person is higher in the monkey hierarchy (read more zanshin) and it would upset the tribe to win?

This is at best a half-formed thought, but that's why I blog, to poke at stuff outside the narrow confines of a single brain.

Vested II

The days are long and full and lots of the nights are spent writing reports. Last night I had a rare chance at a "no time limit" internet access, so I went for it, dead tired and all. End result is that I wrote only part of what I intended. Here's what got me thinking:

We all believe certain things. I'm not sure whether belief is on a scale or binary. I think it is binary- one either believes in a specific god or doesn't; either believes that a specific political decision was good policy or self-serving corruption. I don't see a lot of people believing sort of in a god or that a decision was mostly good policy but partially corrupt. But maybe they do and the language just doesn't express it that way.

But people can certainly be more vested in a belief than other people with the same belief.

I was talking to a man the other day and we share a lot of the same beliefs and concerns. We have a similar vision of what a good life entails and similar concerns about how aspects of civilization endanger that vision. The obvious difference is that these are just things I believe and these are part of who he is.

(It doesn't matter what the belief is- whether he wears hemp and birckenstocks or boots and knife and compass, there comes a point when it is a costume, a person crying out "this is me, this is who I am.")

So that was the obvious aspect- how others will see you, identify you. If you are too vested it seems irrational and your opinions, right or wrong, are easy to dismiss. If you don't vest in your opinions (and I tend not to- many strong beliefs have vanished in the flames of real life over the years) you get read very differently.

Some, the self-absorbed, just assume that you agree with them.
Some see silence or a lack of strong opinion as wisdom. Maybe.
The thing that struck me though, is that the strongly invested mistrust people with less investment. As if they expect that being labelled is proof of belief.
It is a test, I think. Trying to find someone to join their mental tribe. Just a thought.

This probably should have been an edit to last night's post.

Vested

"Manage your expectation level," I was advised. Not 'manage your frustration' or anything of that nature. It is good advice- frustration comes only partially from events, a lot of it comes from expectations. What you do is what you do, but the outcome may or may not be what you expect. Martial artists work to limit luck- the floors are clean and uncluttered, the number and type of assailant is generally known- all things I've written about until they make me tired. But in martial arts, in fighting, in life and in teaching you can never control anything completely. You don't get to pick the ending of the story, not even of your story (except suicide, perhaps).
When the ending isn't what you wanted how much it hurts will depend on how much you were counting on your chosen ending. Invested. Attachment. All the same, see?
But you have to deal with the ending you get.

Today was rough. Things have been going really, really well and I was feeling very proud. Through luck or good groundwork done by my predecessors I had avoided most of the problems I had been led to expect. Until today. I asked a simple question and the answer didn't quite work so I asked another and another... when all was done I was a little sick and disgusted and not feeling my usual optimism. (I am an optimist here- I have a deep faith in what individuals are capable of when things hit bottom if they are only given half a chance.)
So I have to decide how disappointed to be. I'll let the feelings wash through me- they are useful, data points in themselves. Then I will get back to work. There is an opportunity for huge growth in this abject failure. I just need to show them, sincerely and persistantly where the growth lies.

This will work. I'll be optimitic again soon.

Thanks, Steve

For the excuse to tell a story. Steve just posted something here that got me reminiscing. Long ago, in my prime, when I was a martial athlete but thought I was a fighter (and thought the two were the same thing), I could do some pretty impressive tricks. At 5'8" I could jump kick a basketball net. I enjoyed sparring two people while handcuffed (loved kicking). If I was feeling froggy I would do ground fighting without using my hands (that's challenging, folks- but the expression on a black belt's face when you tap him is priceless).



I was much older and hanging out at Stan's dojo. Workout had been sporadic with over-time and on-call obligations and shift work so I was feeling old and slow. There was a new kid there. He had a black belt in something else and had come to Stan to fill some holes in his skills. I watched him warm up and I was frankly jealous. Very flexible, pretty fast (bragging again- in my twenties I had ever met one person who could approach my speed. Later, at James Demiles' kwoon I had the opportunity to play with some of the timing machinery he had developed and had tested a certain guy named Lee on... I was 14/1000 of a second slower than Bruce's record in a long punch in my mid/late 30's. Done bragging, for now.)



So the kid was fast and flexible and I was feeling like an old fart, not an athlete anymore, just a dinosaur, practically extinct and creaky... and the kid asked me to spar. Which I secretly wanted. I love playing, and for some reason I like it more when it looks bad.



So we bowed in and he moved... and I knocked him down. And he got up and he moved and I took his spine, and his dead zones and...



Basically, he was moving much faster than I was, but like Steve writes as you get older, you have to get better at some other stuff, and that stuff can be pretty good. Position, properly applied, can overcome some big disparities in size, strength and speed.

Ruthless timing mimics speed- if he is moving fast and I am moving at precisely the right time, the advantage is mine.

Efficiency is a source of speed and power, sort of: If you are twice as fast as me but I only have to move a third as far, I land first. This one sounds off- you and your opponent are at the same distance, so you have the same range, right? So his targets can't be farther away than your targets, right? But they can, depending on how you have been taught to see weapons and targets. An example using generic Mcdojo karate: Uke throws a left lunge punch at me and I parry it to the outside with my right hand. In this particular pattern, uke will then throw the reverse punch with his chambered left fist- I, however will let my parrying hand bounce off the first punch and palm heel him usually about in the orbital socket. Closest weapon, closest target. If he is really fast, it just increases the damage to him. Bonus. Other side of the equation- a tight ugly mix-up- a clinch but looser and dirtier. Almost every time I am in that position, one of the weak points in his knee is less than four inches from my own and they never (so far) see it coming- but there is a definite technique to it, especially if you don't want to cripple someone.

Hmmm. Where were we? Ruthlessness. Position. Efficiency...
Then there is telepathy. Sort of. Simple fact is that if you've played a lot, (with a wide variety of people) most things won't surprise you. People are pretty damned predictable. Don't count on it in real life- be prepared for things to go south- but most of the time you can see not only what is happening but what is about to happen. It's easiest to learn, IMO from blind-folded infighting, but you can get a taste with a staff. Generally, if you make an attack with a staff there are two comfortable directions to move afterwards and one is slightly more comfortable (natural, easy) than the other. Try it, if it isn't obvious- I think you'll see what I mean. There are more variables in a human body but not more than you can handle, most of the time. And people have fighting personalities that you can read in a few seconds and they very rarely deviate from those unless they have an excellent coach or a major epiphany.


NB- This has applications but I am NOT talking ambush survival here. Different animal.

So thanks for the memories, Steve.

Triune II

I am really missing my library. What follows is from memory, so don't get too upset if I get the names/quotes/sources wrong. I'm happy to fix them when I can.

I think it was in Desmond Morris' Manwatching that he put forth the triune theory of power. He postulated that there are three basic types of power:

The Power to Get Things Done: This is money and connections and political power. The movers and the shakers, the force behind all large change.

The Power to Decide Who is Cool: This is really social power, the power to make something a fad or to declare it passe. To decide who is "in" and who isn't. To decide what matters.

Atavistic Power: The ability to apply violence. Thug power.

He said (and I can think of a few exceptions, but remarkably few) that no one can hold more than one of these types of power. Political players and money men sometimes court Hollywood and are sometimes endorsed by Hollywood, but they never become part of that group. Hollywood could declare Bill Clinton "cool", but Bill couldn't declare anyone else "cool".

Conversely, for all of the actors pretending to know enough about world affairs to express an opinion and the various aid concerts and consciousness-raising events the social power group never seems to actually change anything. Maybe because they miss the fact that feeling about something is not the same as doing something. Hmmmm- and this may be the core concept here: action versus emotion, doing versus feeling. One type of power influences human assessments, the other influences actions.

"Atavist" means "throwback" and atavistic power is a throwback to more primal, violent times and emotions. Thugs, by themselves, don't change anything (Hitler had other people do his thuggery for him) [but this is one of the places I find a few exceptions. Saddam Hussein did change things and wielded enough power to cow an entire nation. He did a lot of that through informants and secret police and torture and rape camps. But he also enjoyed, sometimes very publicly, killing people himself. He was training his sons in the same vein. Vlad Tepisch was another.]

Atavistic power is generally incompatible with the other two types because it is a power to prevent others from doing, not a power to do yourself. Atavistic power controlled by a political animal can clear the way for some major change- but it usually (in our culture) triggers a very bad reaction from the "cool choosers."

Just thinking out loud, here. It's a model I have found useful- it sometimes explains some things. Like all models it may be useful but it is not a pure truth. Play with it.

Guilt

Sometimes, I feel a vague sense of guilt. A co-worker asked about my family, if I was married. I started to gush. It's hard to talk about Kami without gushing. I don't usually show much emotion, but even after all these years and being half a world apart just thinking about her makes me feel breathless and far away and something slightly different and better than human.

"Wow," The co-worker said, "You're really in love. How long have the two of you been together?"

"Twenty-two years."

Yeah. In a profession that sometimes seems to eat marriages like candy. Over the last weeks I've listened quietly to people complaining about their mates, their children. Sometimes angry, sometimes confused, sometimes just bitching. I listen quietly because I don't know what to say. If you won a lottery that couldn't be shared, what do you say to the poor?

Kami is peace and grace and beauty. I am sincere to the depths of my soul when I say that the universe exists for the sole purpose of creating her, and with all of the universe's infinite mystery,wonder and beauty she and she alone makes it right and complete.

Years ago: "They can't promote YOU to sergeant!" the crusty old deputy told me.

"Why not?"

"You've never had a DUII, you don't have a drinking problem. Hell, you're still on your first marriage. You ain't even a real cop, much less a sergeant."

14,000 miles a way I feel closer to her than some of my friends have with their mates ever. We have had more true intimacy holding hands than some have ever felt in their most ridiculous passions and obsessions. We have done amazing things together, but she makes even the simplest things amazing. Only with her have I felt the excitement that rivals free fall combined with a perfect sense of loving harbor.

When I first considered asking her to marry me it was all wrong. In my arrogant youth and stupidity I had seen a plan for my life: if I was absolutely dedicated, absolutely fearless and fought the good fights and if I was lucky enough to survive I might be rewarded in my old age with someone like this, someone I could only dream of.

So here I was, young and I had done nothing much and here I was being offered the gift and dream of a life time. The gods don't work that way. They are harsh and dangerous. It didn't make sense. So I vision quested and had a dream- a majestic woman, a goddess in robes and crown, beautiful but with the kind of beauty that could burn you if you looked at it. She was impatient and arrogant and asked what I wanted. I told her what was bothering me- I had not come close to earning a reward like Kami.

The goddess laughed, very cold and said, "You arrogant little man. You are a reward for her." And was gone. I woke up and have spent the rest of my life trying to be worthy to be her reward.

And so, when someone asks who is the most dangerous person I have ever met, the answer is simply "My wife." Anyone can kill me. She has the power to turn the world to ash.

Data Point

Conversation, end of day trivia, half business, half social. "Do you have plans for the weekend?" "Any documentation that you need?"

Gunfire. In the building. I am moving, putting stuff down, drawing weapon, moving towards the sound... No one else is moving yet, my head is crystal clear and everything is in slow motion. Tactics and odds. Data: Why only one shot? No return fire? Maybe nothing (relatively nothing, suicide or negligent discharge) maybe no one else has unfrozen yet. I feel my partner behind me as I clear room, room, room.

Last room. A weapon on a chair, a badly shaken man. Accidental discharge. Clear the room, make the weapon safe, check for injury. Then leave it to the person who owns the problem.

Return to the office, take up the thread of the conversation: "I don't think you finished what we talked about at lunch..."

Maybe??

One of the big puzzles in self-defense training is the big gap between how we will imagine we will act when the shit hits the fan and our actual performance. A lot has been written on it, a lot of good research and even good speculation. In our fantasies we are cool-headed and courageous, efficient and dangerous. All too often, in the reality, our hands sweat and our knees start to shake and our brains just won't work, not the way we think they should.

Here's a thought from left field:
What if cowardice is a habit?

What if the big mystery is not the gap between fantasy and reality? What if the big mystery is why we expect bravery when we practice a thousand tiny acts of cowardice every week?

Do you know what I mean? All the people that you love but have never said the words to. All the things that you want to try "some day." The big chance that you didn't take because even though you hated it, you were secure where you were. All of the things that you have done in the name of safety, security and comfort no matter how bored or dead it made you feel. The times when you thought "someone should do something" but decided that the someone wasn't you. It wasn't your job, wasn't your problem...and you lay awake that night thinking of what you wished you had done.

Little white lies- my father used to tell me, "Every lie is an act of cowardice. You never lie unless you are afraid of the person you are lying to." You can rationalize your way around it, but it is dead true. All of your little white lies are a fear of how the person you are lying to might react.

Maybe the mystery is as simple as that. Do the right thing. Live hard. Take chances, and take the consequences that go with them. Dare. Don't sit in comfort wishing for adventure. Maybe just the habit of doing the right thing even when it is scary will translate to self defense. And even if it doesn't, you will have done some fine livin'.

Live hard. Live true.

I wanted to add a quick edit:
Have the courage to listen to intelligent people you disagree with. Don't take the easy path of listening to what people on your said claim that the other side says. Find an intelligent person who disagrees with you on an issue you feel strongly about and listen. Just listen. You are strong enough for that.

Writer's Block

Just for the record, I don't get writer's bock. I can always put words down, it's just that sometimes they're crap. To me, anyway. Writing is so many things- recording events and interpreting them, therapy and teaching, sharing knowledge and emotion. I like my writing best when I am excited, when I am playing with a new idea or see a twist in the world that changes everything.

The things that I am finding now are sometimes big, shifting my view of how the world works several paces- and there are very few that I will be able to write about for a long time. I've always been taught that language affects and to an extent controls thought processes, but I have concrete examples now. Examples that some of our 'obvious' insights are culturally derived and culturally controlled. That some of the values we have been taught are universal are demonstrably not. Some of these I knew but until you see it up close, see the effects, and see the indifference to affects that would enrage or sadden you, you don't really know. I knew the words before, I hear the music now.

Here is one I can share, in very vague terms. There are things that we look at from a world and culture away and interpret them through the lens of politics and big money when the decisions on the ground are made much lower on the Maslow's Hierarchy scale. In the United States we see the actions of others, high and low, through the lens of our own motivations: profit, power, acknowledgement. For the most part we have never been in a place where people starve (much less a place where it is normal). Everyone has an opinion, and we express it pretty freely (there are a few places in my home state where a republican bumpersticker will reliably get your car vandalized, but that's about it). In a place where associations and opinions result in murder (unpredictable to you, but far from random) politics and the flow of funds aren't the big motivators that we expect them to be. Simple survival requires a different attitude to what is said and when and to whom.

And one I will write about someday: Violent bloody butchery does not scar the sould of a people nearly as much as a lower level of destruction brought about through betrayal.

So, access is limited, many of the things that would be cool to write are off the table...and most of the rest doesn't feel fresh or fun to write, but I'll keep plugging away.

Sacred Space

Reading "Filipino Martial Culture". In it, Mark Wiley quotes an anthropologist discussing the concept of "sacred space": this is where you go to become something more, where you go to learn things that have a price, things that change you. He talks about crossing the threshhold and it reminds me much of my training in martial arts: bowing on entering the dojo wasn't about religion or even respect. It was a signal to myself to leave the mundane world outside. Out in that world existed relationships and money problems and minor frustrations. Inside this space was pain and sweat and blood and knowledge. Far more important things, far more real things.

There is a sacred space in combat, and in climbing and in, potentially, everything. I don't think the sacred aspect is about risk or even learning. It is about living.

Most people don't pay attention most of the time. How does your foot feel in your shoe right now? What is the nearest human movement you can hear? Whose breath, other than your own, can you hear? What are you smelling?

What makes training sacred is that you cannot do it in the usual mundane haze of inattention. I've seen oblivious students but they rarely last long under a good instructor. When you are learning dangerous things being stupid or being unaware is painful. It hurts and, in my opinion, it should.

This attention is what makes the thing sacred. A moment lived in attention is lived. A year passed in mindless repetition or safe in the comfort zone has only passed. It is wasted.

So it's the goal to live. Simply to live at all times. Dangerous places make that easier, long time spent where attention is required helps to make attention a habit. This habit of attention, in turn, makes the whole world sacred space.

Coffee and Weddings

Yesterday, there were clouds in the morning. Dust and haze are common but these were the first clouds that I have seen in a month- high and thin, maybe, but a shiny white. One of the interpreters said that he had only once in his life seen rainfall in the summer. But it snowed in Baghdad last winter, so anything is possible.

A package arrived- notebooks for practicing script, shirts and workout clothes, and coffee: San Fransisco Bay French Roast. This morning has been a little slice of nostalgic caffeinated heaven.

Having a regret. Missing the family is a fairly solid one- but Kami sent me pictures of Mike and Deirdre's wedding. I absolutely hate weddings, but I am sorry to have missed this one. Mike in a tux. That is power, Deirdre! The bride looked great (as always!). Mike is one of the people I most admire, the man I would adopt as a blood brother if I could and it is great, even in a picture, to see him look that happy.

Not regretting the other stuff I am missing- the dryer and pump both went out and my lovely, smart, wise wife has handled everything deftly.

Triune I

I like categorizing things in threes. Don't know why, just have for as long as I can remember. Others do too, so I'm not alone. Reading about something that I toy with writing about (The Triune Theory of Power) it got me thinking- about fighting, about Meditations, about where I am on this journey.

From a post last May:
I'm no expert. I'm a nearly crippled up middle aged man with some skill, some experience and some mean. But I'm consistently successful against people who are bigger, stronger, faster and/or more proficient than me.

That's the three-part issue. There are three things that make a good fighter: Physical ability or conditioning; technical skill; and the whole mental/spiritual component- the attitude.

When I started in MA, I was a farmboy. I was small and didn't think I was very strong, but I was used to chopping wood and milking cows and bucking bales of hay. The thing about ranch work is that you don't stop when you get your reps in or you feel tired, you stop when the work is done. Milking one stupid, stubborn cow I would go to total muscle failure in my hands and forearms again and again and again until she was out of milk. If rain was possible, you loaded hay until it was all in, no matter how many tons or how hot it was- At less than 110 pounds I was loading and stacking about 3 tons of hay an hour (110x55 pound bales an hour) throwing them up into the truck, jumping on the truck as it moved, stacking them, jumping down and throwing more up.

I was what my dad called "wiry". When I started in judo it was a help, but it wasn't enough. My instructors felt that weight classes had severely degraded the skills of judo, so I almost never randori'd with anyone my size, and there wasn't anybody smaller. I needed and developed technical skill to overcome physical disadvantage. You're bigger and stronger than me? Fine, then I'll be better than you! Hah!

So I've always been physical (I consider my own body my favorite toy and best tool, so I play constantly) but I became a technician. I had superbly skilled instructors and they drilled me on skill. They also taught me tactics and strategy, and those are a subset of technical skill for this discussion. Reading an opponent, finding a weakness and exploiting it or reading the flow of an engagement and guiding it so that it stays in your strong areas are skills. Dave Sumner was awesome at it, and it is one of the strengths of true jujutsu- striking, locking, gouging, throwing, grappling or weapons you could hold your own in any and use the one (or more) that your opponent wasn't skilled in. Or apply a technique in a range that most people didn't think was possible or... If you learned to see the problem broadly you could almost always hit it from a perspective that was alien to your opponent. The more you practiced seeing broadly, the harder it was to freeze you with novelty.

So two of three: physicality and skill.

But there is a third. Call it attitude or spirit or heart or whatever. It is powerful (read Sanford Strong's "Strong on Defense" where he describes situations where attitude, specifically a righteous rage, has allowed victims who were completely outmatched- bigger, stronger, armed predators with surprise- and not only survived but prevailed) and it is also vague (look for the posts on heart and where I try to list all the things that can make one freeze). You see its presence in everything from a mother protecting her young to the radar ping of two professionals. And you see it in the absence, when a skilled, athletic fighter is taken down by an untrained addict who was just meaner, more determined, less civilized.

In some people it is just a reaction to fear, to respond with focused violence. In others it is a disregard of fear and a professional need to get the job done. Sometimes it is anger, a beast inside. In other situations it is civilization or a lack of it, the presence or absence of a leash.

This third leg of the triangle is what has fascinated me lately. I've dealt with it, used it and seen it used, had its absence nearly paralyze me and dug for my own to force me to act. As I've worked on it specifically, it has become largely a tool or technique like any other. Making people feel safe and loved to prevent violence or making them feel afraid and uncertain to prevent violence. Attacking (or just affecting, really) spirits rather than bodies.

In the end, though, I don't think it is more important than the other two legs- it is just less trained, less understood. Because the level of conscious skill in it is so low, any gains can have powerful effects on the whole package. Because those effects are rarely understood or even consciously sensed by the opponent, the effect can seem mystical, bigger than it really was.

Then the fourth skill: the grand strategy of channeling conflict into a physical, technical or spiritual arena. Can you dig it?

"All Is Vanity"

At one time I was pretty sure I had my ego under control. I don't require or like a lot of attention. I don't have a need for credit if I do something good (though it does annoy me if the incident is minimized or someone else takes credit.) I'm happy to be an unknown, sitting in a corner and watching.

Until I taught my first seminar and started reading reviews on the internet. Not only do I have an ego, but I'm downright vain. The book has jacked that up a notch and so, purely to blow my own horn:

Amazon review page. 15x Five-stars so far.

Patrick Parker's three reviews on Mokuren Dojo: 1, 2, 3.

Jake's review on his blog. (And good luck in the upcoming fight, Jake. DO NOT psych yourself out with the waiting.)

Steve Perry, who I think was the first.

The Foreword Magazine review by Lawrence Kane.

The Uechi-ryu site has been discussing the book. The link is just information right from the publisher. The good talk is in the forums.

Yeah, I'll have to work to get my head through the door. Or find a time or place to sit down with some of the old guys (you know who you are) and get a good solid slap of what I don't know.

Thanks, to all of you.

Balances of Power

Knowledge is power, as they say, and information is knowledge. The problem, one among many, is discerning what you know from what you think you know. Telling the difference between facts and beliefs. Discriminating between information, disinformation and 'opinion presented as fact'.

Most people have a pretty stable comfort level for this. Most people assume that:
1) Other people need a reason to lie
2) People are about equal in their desire to share information
3) If information comes from multiple sources it is more likely to be solid

The first assumption falls apart in many of the environments that I spend time in. People who live extremely marginal lives, unprotected by society and surrounded by people they can't trust (most criminals) need a reason to tell the truth. Disinformation is habit. Giving people in power (not just might power, but also ego stroke power or emotional leverage power) what they want to hear is habit. Most of what you have read derived from interviews with criminals (or written by criminals themselves) have been self-serving lies. It just is. If that rankles and feels judgmental, that is a measure of your value system, and an indicator that you do not understand theirs. In that world, lying is neither right nor wrong, it is simply smart.

The second assumption falls down in some very important places and some very important ways. Sometimes the people with the most information are prohibited (by law, policy, or morality) from sharing that information. I am aware of a case of a fairly highly placed person in a certain local government publishing some pretty outrageous lies. The truth was well-documented, but was documented under a work-place disciplinary status. Completely forbidden to be shared. The lies went unanswered. In some venues, information has to be limited because leaks can cost lives. Simple as that. The people who could explain the best are afraid that even a slight, accidental slip could lead to disaster- and so they say nothing.

This absolutely doesn't work the other way, and I am appalled frequently by some of the ignorance freely spouted on subjects that I am familiar with. The more I see the silence of the involved versus the voluability of the voyeur the more grateful I am for the quiet professionals who do the jobs we never really hear about. If you assume an equal desire to share information, the noise from one side will seem truer than the silence from the other.

The third assumption... people confuse different sources with independent sources. Radioisotope decay AND estimated mutation rates and changes in DNA over time AND geological layering AND the fossil record all independently support the concept of evolution. Different mythologies (and nothing else) support the theory of creation. Some of the more interesting pseudoscientific political issues are worth a look: in a few of them (I'm thinking of a specific example for this) you will find hundreds of sources. Those sources will quote other sources, who will quote others... but in the end almost everything goes back to a single opinion- and this guy has been known to quote people quoting him to bolster his argument.

This is a hard one to winnow out unless you are willing to do a lot of research... but in many of the hot-button topics it has had a definite influence. I think because it mirrors what the people who choose a side already believe, and people do not distinguish well between facts and beliefs. Full circle.

Selfish

"I could be blogging this," I thought. Then I selfishly kept it to myself for a bit. Sipping a latte- a good latte, much better than starbucks- in a giant ballroom in a palace while typing on the next book.

The palace- murdering bastards or not, megalomaniacs do some really cool architecture. The Presidential Palace- marble and inlay, hammered gold door, murals on ceilings forty feet high and domed. Isher-style optical illusions that aren't illusions because they are done in three dimensions... very, very cool.

Sitting under the billiards pavillion next to the swimming pool. Drinking cold water and thinking, just thinking.

It was beautiful and there is meaning in that. There is meaning and many lessons in every contrast in this land, in history and its consequences, in what is and what could be. Things I can't write here other than to make broad generalizations because each supporting detail is a story and a human, the very specifics that I can't share.

"Respect the Mud"

"When the rainy season starts, respect the mud. They build four-storey buildings out of it that last for three thousand years. Don't think for a second you can just scrape it off your boots."

Had to share that one.

Got to box and submission wrestle with a pair of young soldiers. It was fun, and they had good heart, but they were playing. Good kids having fun and maybe learning a little.

This is a strange environment. There's a thing called "pinging the radar" sort of a modern version of zanshen. Certain types of people walk into certain places and recognize each other--they 'ping'. They give a slight nod and either say "Hi" (rarely) or choose to leave each other alone.

This is the richest radar environment I have ever seen. There are kids, sure, and a few wannabes, but this is the highest concentration of truly dangerous men that I have ever seen. Very polite, very professional. Not a speck (that I have seen) of hatred or racism or cultural disdain... just some supremely skilled, supremely fit warriors here to do a job. Lots of good guys, some who have gone partially native, friendly and smart. But they don't ping the radar the same way.

This will sound weird, but I have to be careful to put some yin in my aura when I am dealing with people. Americans are often oblivious to the radar. Not so here.

So, respect the mud and tune down the aura. Good lessons for the week.

A Week

Almost.

I've seen sunrise in Kuwait and the half moon over palms in Bagdhad. Drunk Turkish coffee in a small shop and chai made for us by staff. Heat- the sky seems almost white with the heat, not the clear blue I am used to from my deserts. Sand and dust everywhere. And doves in the trees. A formerly feral dog who looks like a large, blonde coyote and now hangs around the base and a skinny feral cat. I enjoy the heat and often eat outside. One of the other rookies thinks I am crazy.

I won't write much, if anything, about mission. The stakes are high for people here and even an inadvertant slip could give away an identity. Which is sad, because in just a week there have been so many stories. So many small precious moments that I am afraid I will forget. Someone once wrote that the ten best stories of all time were lost forever because they were told to patrons of an Irish pub and no one remembered them in the morning.

This is just another example of the envelope I have been pushing all my life. Just as things settle, as I start seeing the world as a normal place, feel an attachment to all other people I'm compelled to run off and learn more about some odd corner of the universe. To learn things that will once again make my friends in their civilized lives seem a little alien and separate. That's not a bad thing, I love them just as much and relish the difference. Besides, if I don't go play on the edge and bring back the stories, who will?

Still getting my routine down- work, workout, read, write, language, culture. I'd forgotten how much time I would feel compelled to spend staying in contact.

What's Going On Here

Wow. For a second there I thought I would have to navigate the whole blog in Arabic.

Almost to the final destination. I've had a few short snoozes since 5 AM on the 4th of July. It's not as long as it sounds, I traveled over a significant number of time zones on the way. I could probably sleep now, but I would snap awake about 2300 local time and screw up my sleep cycle. That's why I don't get jet lag, I just stay awake until local bedtime. It works for me pretty consistantly.

I want to thank everybody for the comments and insights on the last post. That's what it is all about. Some of you feel it more than others- I don't know anything. At this stage training and experience are colliding so hard it seems that the world is composed of questions and exceptions. So this is the place I come to think about them. Sometimes it's a monologue and sometimes it's a discussion.

Sometimes, especially when I touch on the twilight zone stuff, it's a fishing expedition: who else has seen this, who has seen more, what the hell was it, what have I missed?

I haven't taught a regular class in years. The few people I work out with aren't students, just people exploring the places that I am exploring now. They choose me because they think I have something they want, and I choose them because I think they will help me clarify exactly what it is I have.

All right. That's enough egotistical navel gazing.

Does It Have To Be?

Steve Perry wrote yet another comment that deserves a lot of thought. He's right, and it's something I've wondered about myself: (See the August 5, 2005 post on New Ways- I can't tag from this machine) The essence- sometimes when you have done something for a long time, you forget the basics. You can do them, you just forget to explain them, or even point them out. Steve's instructor is really good (extraordinary by most measures) and gets a lot of experienced martial artists who need the shift in perspective that he offers. Ergo, most of his students would be considered very advanced in most schools and the basics are just assumed. When a new student shows up who doesn't know how to hold a stick or make a fist, it throws everything off-kilter. The instructor has to stop and switch gears.

Read the August 2005 post. The essence is that it takes a lot of practice, a lot of reps to get to some high-end skills. Every really good fighter that I know followed this route. But is it really necessary?

At this stage I sure don't know and don't really have an opinion on it. But here is a speculation, a possibility: What if you can skip that step?

Most people can move. Athletic people move well. Fighting is just moving. People already know what hurts and what can injure them. If it's not knowledge of those areas that makes a good survival fighter, maybe it is mental, attitude. Sanford Strong describes some of the survival mindsets that have gotten through truly hideous home invasion crimes. The attitude, the determination to "make this bastard PAY!" was a big factor, a huge factor in survival.

Isn't that natural? What if we are approaching this the wrong way and making a good survival fighter* is not about putting a mindset in but about taking one out? If it is not bequething a tool but removing a leash?

One example from my lovely wife: She is a wonderful dancer. A belly dancer, an exceptionally graceful woman. For years she couldn't and wouldn't dance. She was afraid she would dance poorly, that she "didn't know how." The second she decided to step on a dance floor, get into the music and have fun, she could dance. Classic ballet? Salsa? No. But she could move with power and grace to the music. She was dancing.

What if a huge gain in fighting skill could be made by simply deciding to 'let go'. That's the other thing that all extraordinary fighters (competition too) do. They let go. True, after they have spent the hours ingraining the skills... but is there any reason why the letting go can't come first? Would it allow them to learn skills without baggage?

Intriguing questions.


*Not the same as a competitor. Competition is a test of skill and will and technique and fitness and... Survival can be anything and everything

Layered Precision

It is possible to hit hard at lots of different ranges. The one-shot take out is rare, but it happens. When it happens, a lot of things have to come together in an instant.

Some strikes have a very specific range. Jack Dempsey described the natural power circle for a hook punch. The forearm extends off that line (increasing range) or flexes inside (decreasing) and the power bleeds away. Others are very versatile in range, or so it seems. Change the body alighnment of a jab and you get a "straight lead" which can be a very powerful, very long range strike. At very close range, the short jab can concuss handily with less than three inches of movement.

The thing is, though, that power isn't developed the same way for each of these ranges. To get brutal power in a short straight shot is a combination of structure and "bounce" (really hard to describe- and it sounds stupid, but let your body fall inside the skin and the skeleton bounce). The straight lead is structure and drop step. If you use the straight lead system of power generation, you get jack at super close range and not much at medium range.

Though the arm motion can look the same, power generation varies by range. This is why it is so hard to do serious damage with strikes in a real fight- you rarely are in complete control of the range. Clavicles and ribs can be broken fairly easily, but aren't broken often. In the same way, strikes to the brainstem (and the associated high-percentage areas) should be easy, but they don't happen very often.

Following this yet? To be a successful striker you need to put power in a specific place. That is much easier when the target holds still. The great strikers (I'm thinking sport, here) are not just putting the fist or foot in the right place when it is at the max on the power curve, they are also manipulating the opponent to be at the right place at the right time. personal precision plus the remote control precision on an opponent. That's cool.

The jujutsu solution, of course, is just to hold them in the right place.

Changes

Most of my time spent on military bases was in the eighties and early nineties. There have been a lot of changes. The senior officers and senior NCOs look much younger. I saw a major and a WO3 yesterday both of whom looked barely thirty. At the same time, the soldiers look older. The privates and specialists and junior NCOs are dedicated and serious. They seem far more mature than I remember myself at that stage of life.

Connectivity is a huge change. When I went through basic and AIT or was away, the only contact was by letter or the rare privelege of a long distance phone call. In almost any breaks in briefing today I will see soldiers on cell phones or typing away texting. I will do it myself, later tonight. It's much easier to stay connected, to remember why we are here (and why we want to return) than it was.

The internet, too. Lots of laptops. This blog would not have been possible twenty years ago (it was over twenty years since I volunteered to be a part of this thing that I am only visiting now. Time flies.) E-mail. Pictures. Research. When things settle, videophone capability (the Sci-Fi of the fifties is here- where's my flying car?)

The baseline hasn't changed: The mission. Always the mission. I love that, I love being in a place where there is a job that needs doing. It doesn't have to be a big scary job (though I seem to like those best) but one where getting the job done is more important that political careers or managing image. Processing paperwork or medevacing a casualty, everyone is very serious. Even serious about down time.

It's good. Boring sometimes (but I am almost always bored.) Soon there will be less time for boredom.

Catch Up

So much going on, so much to write.

Beautiful (muggy, sweaty, humid) Washington DC. Not enough time see the one tourist attraction that interests me, the Smithsonian. Just busy. Paperwork. Equipment. Demonstrate ability with a couple of weapons and familiarize with another. Size up the others. Size up the organization.

I'm amazed and a little disturbed about the obsession with money that a few display. It's a factor, no doubt, but I feel my own obsession with the challenge; I try to guess which of my preconceptions will fall in the next years. How different will I be? What will I learn? What do I assume is impossible that will seem easy by the end of the year?

The reviews on the book are good. It's getting discussed on the Uechi message board and Steve Perry was kind. Had the first e-mail accusing me of changing a life. Nice. Powerful. A little scary.

If you have e-mailed me I will get back to you, for some reason I have the internet, can get e-mail, but not send it.

Got to play with Dana Sheets and her students last night. An Uechi-ka with a very interesting mind it was wonderful to finally meet her in person and to get a few hints of things that I can work on for the next year or so- a way to control my breathing; a way to think about motion; an observation about how I move when I fight or throw that I can't seem to do when striking air. Her dojo has a good feel, serious but caring. Her family is wonderful.

Tired. About twelve hours sleep since Tuesday. More things to do.

Lasts

Intimidating jail guards usually doesn't work that well.  The guy was big (6'3" and 275 according to his sheet) not fat- still had most of his prison muscles.  He tried to bully his officer and found himself cuffed before he quite figured out that his shouting and posturing didn't work.  The officer called me to take him to the hole.

The inmate was still angry, trying to intimidate, standing so close that I almost tripped over him.  I turned and started to say, "I know you're afraid but you don't have to stand so close. I'll protect you." He saw something in my expression and stepped back and quieted down before I could say anything.  Too bad, I was curious what his reaction would be.

On the long walk his confidence would come back and he would start yelling and complaining.  It attracted the attention of a couple of escort officers and they followed us to the Disciplinary Unit.  In the cell I took his first handcuff off and he yanked away and started to spin, possibly to strike but more likely in an attempt to provoke a Use of Force.  I stepped in and barely pushed, just enough that his balance disappeared.  A little harder and his head slams into the wall, a little twist and he goes down face first towards the door. But right at that point, he can't move or turn without falling.  I said, "That was really, really stupid. Do not EVER move fast when an officer takes your cuffs off.  If you try it again, you're going to kiss concrete. Do you understand?"

He apologizes. He tells me the cuffs were just too tight.  He's trying to read my expression again and it disturbs him that he can't tell what I'm thinking.

About then I realized what I was feeling.  Sort of a misty-eyed nostalgia.  The words in my head? "This might be the last time that I take down a really big guy. (Sniff sniff) I might never get to do this again. I'm really going to miss this."

Seventeen years on the job has made for a lot of firsts.  This week has been a lot of things that might be lasts.  Most of the interesting ones were averted.  The guy who looked to be  the last Tasering ran like a rabbit for his cell when he saw the response you get when you refuse to cell in.  That's a Catch-22, if you think about it: run and the other inmates call you a wimp, stay and get thumped and they call you stupid.

Teaching an old con how to get what he wants in a non-criminal way.  It's a completely new mindset, but he is trying.

Possible last conversations with violent schizophrenic prisoners.  Last mental health team meeting.  Last time I will hear, "Let sarge talk to him," as the probable answer to a sticky problem.  Last chess game with a murderer. Last time I'll be able to point out to a rookie that the change in flow of movement in his dorm is because of a gang territory issue- and everything in his dorm is his territory.  Last time talking old war stories with people who were there.

The big changes will bring new stories.  I know that.  But the misty-eyed nostalgia is still there, still very strong.  

Two more shifts.

Analogies, Breaking Patterns and Stopping

Steve Perry wrote a comment that needs to be dissected. It's a mix, in that part of it points up the weakness of analogy, part of it uses that weakness but at the core it's a really good question.

First the subject that I write about is violence. People trying to injure or kill people. Not hurt feelings or family disputes or playground scuffles. At the core, most of this blog has been about how evil people use force and how to prepare for a very bad day.

There isn't a lot of experience in this area. Most people reading this have never faced a PCP freak or been ambushed by someone with a knife or been shot at or had a group of people try to stomp them to death... With those few that I know with common experiences, we can talk about it differently. We can talk directly. With those who haven't experienced the clarity or the blur or the rush and who aren't haunted by the sounds and the smells and the aftermath I'm stuck talking around it. We have to use analogies.

Martial arts training is an analogy for violence.
Tournament training (at any level of contact or allowable technique) is an analogy for this type of violence.
Research, also, is an analogy, only a picture. C=C is a symbol, not the molecule itself.
Even real experience in one type of violence is only an analogy for another- what I do leading an entry team is not what a woman surviving a rape attempt does.

When I wrote a long time ago that reason is weak (thanks for bringing this out, Steve. I think I have the words now.) is that reasoning without experience will be based on one or more analogies and can never be stronger than the analogies themselves. Without direct experience, you can't even estimate the strength of your analogy. You take that on faith and wind up with reason based on faith as a first premise.

On to Steve's comment (my comments in italics):

"I had a thought about the idea of breaking patterns. I think i understand your basic idea is not to get so locked into a Way that you can't adjust it if needs be. (Exactly) But it brings up a question about options:

Consider a baseball pitcher. He's on the mound, set to throw. Ordinarily, there's the look if there are runners on base, the wind-up, and the pitch. If, anywhere during the sequence, the motion is frozen and the query raised -- how would you throw a strike from here? then the answer is almost certainly going to be "Just like I intended."

(Here we get into analogy weakness.  The pitcher is playing baseball. He is fair certain he is going to throw the ball.  Probably to the catcher but maybe to third base.  What if he looks to runners on base and sees all the fans storming on to the field screaming for his blood?  His solution for that will have to come from outside the game.  If he looks for a baseball answer to a soccer-riot problem, he won't find one.)

(I also want to break this down a little more.)  If, anywhere during this sequence, the motion is frozen and the query raised -- how would you throw a strike from here? (Break. This is where the sports to fighting analogy really departs from the martial arts to fighting analogy.  The original freeze and think concept is for martial arts.  People can spar and roll at what they feel are very intense levels and no one gets injured.  If you stop them and point out that the goal is to injure, they fight completely differently.  That's a big freaking clue that the analogy they are training by is 'off'.  A closer sports analogy would be to take a recreational slow pitch softball player and have him fantasize that he has just suddenly appeared on the mound pitching in the World Series and Sammy Sosa is coming up to bat.  His mindset, his technique... everything will change.  I want to say more real, but all of these examples are real. Recreational slow pitch is just as real as major league play, but they don't cross over that well.) Then the answer is going to be "Just like I intended."  (Maybe, if you are already committed to the motion.  The trouble is, if you are intending to throw slow pitch and it turns out this was a major league game, you will fail.  But you will fail exactly the way you were trained to fail.  You might find some comfort in that, but I don't see it.  However "Just like I intended." does happen and is one of the little details that keeps giving people hope that they can get insight -and you can, don't get me wrong- from unrelated comparisons.  Many people fail to abort an act when it is no longer appropriate. Unprepared and untrained in switching gears some officers fire after the hand comes out of the pocket before they consciously register that the hand was empty or that the shiny object was a cigarette pack and not a gun.

Granted, at punching range, the striker has more options, but assuming that once action commences, he is moving as quickly and efficiently as he can to take his opponent out, why would freezing and asking the question be useful? (Remember moving right versus moving well?  It gets back to this: if he really is moving as quickly and efficiently as he can to take the opponent out, why isn't the opponent going out? If you are moving efficiently but not getting the job done you may be moving right, but you aren't moving well. Again, freezing and asking the question is not something I advocate in fighting but in training because we slip into fun mode without realizing it and those habits ingrain.)

What else can I do if this fails? might be a good thing to consider (training for failure and recovery is another issue and a very important one), but if I'm already on the way to where I want to go as best I can see -- and why would I be doing it any other way? (Because you aren't. Take any drill you do with your instructor.  Stop him and ask, "If you had to finish me right now, how would you do it?" And see what happens.  I've seen your instructor.  He will have a one-move pretty thorough answer.  Maybe three moves if he is in a very bad situation. And this cries the question: if you can reliably bring a human being to destruction in three moves, why does any drill last longer?) why do I want to freeze and think about it?  (Answered above, but to re-iterate: people training and sparring get caught up in a particular mindset that prolongs the game.  It's fun.  Freeze when sparring or drilling and take an objective look and you will find that you are almost never fighting to the goal.  You may be moving right, but you are moving towards a goal (skill acquisition or fun) that is very different from the goal of surviving violence.  Another weak sports analogy: you can have perfect stance, grip, trigger press and breath control but you also need to check occasionally and see if you are hitting anything.) 

How I would take this guy out from this position is how I'm about to do it. If shit happens, then I'll do it a different way. " 

Admirable, but knowing you are working from a training analogy, how many of your training partners have you actually taken out?  If the answer is less than fifty percent there is something in your training done for safety.  Those safety habits are ingrained at least as thoroughly as any combative lessons instilled.  Thousands of reps of not hurting someone creates a skill at not hurting someone, no matter how martially those habits are instilled.  You need a balance to that effect.  Stopping and looking for the goal -in training- is one way of doing this.

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.