Drinking the Koolaid

“They drank the koolaid” is our shorthand for martial artists who have displayed even low levels of cult-like behavior. It is a reference to Jim Jones who took his little cult to Guyana and convinced them (forced them? Some? All? Who was there who lived and can tell the whole story?) to drink poisoned grape koolaid. It offered them a chance to go to the next world as a unit, I suppose.

There are a few words I have to explain here that I may not use in the common way- bias, prejudice and bigotry.

Bias is just a statement of preference. I like steak better than cauliflower, as do all right-thinking people. Jamieson’s Irish whisky better than Bushmill’s and Ardbeg scotch better than either. I don’t have a lot of trouble with biases.

I don’t have a lot of problem with prejudice, either. We all pick up clues based on appearances about what is likely to trigger our biases. I expect a green glass soda bottle to have something citrus in it, not a cola or root beer. I prefer to not eat at a restaurant that smells bad from the outside.

In human terms, I don’t like stupid, lazy or rude people. I just don’t. Those are some of my biases. My prejudices, however (and I try not to show it, that would be rude) are that I expect slow people to be stupid, obese people to be lazy, and loud people to be rude.

It’s not always true. It is true often enough that it is reinforced.

However I know and cherish people who have triggered all of my prejudices without proving them out.

Here’s the thing- prejudice only becomes bigotry when you cling to your belief in the face of facts. When you treat someone as if they are lazy or stupid when they have proven that they aren’t, that’s bigotry. These are my personal definitions.

It is related to the talismanic thinking in the martial arts.

We all have our preferences, biases. I’m an infighter. I know people who like grappling; who like striking; knife guys; gun guys; people who work out in pristine white pajamas and people who work out in their work clothes. It’s all good. Just preferences.

Then there are prejudices-e.g. “sports martial arts are better for streetfighting”; “grappling is the most practical”; “winning at (insert your contest of choice here) is the best way to find out if something works”; “the guys in white pajamas don’t play hard”; “the guys who wear camo are bad asses”; “older styles are more real”… These are just beliefs that people have about what constitutes a valid clue. If you have been paying attention, have both an open and a critical mind, you can use your prejudices to quickly narrow down the field and choose something you are likely to be happy with. Generally, that’s cool.

It becomes a problem when facts cease to matter. Actually, only a problem for me.

For most people, martial arts is about fear management, not danger management. It is a way to feel that they have “a pretty good chance” or that they can “take care of themselves”. It’s about the feeling, not the ability.  So becoming blindly dogmatic, absolutely certain that your Purple Lotus of Screaming Death Style is the end-all and be-all vastly increases your fear management. It makes good sense, from that point of view, to ignore those annoying little things called ‘facts’ and even to shut out experience- in extreme cases, even your own experience. So it generally really isn’t a problem for the koolaid drinker himself (and no one seems to be able to call it koolaid while they are drinking it). It’s only a perceived problem, and only for me, because I look at it through that dastardly danger-management lens.

There are levels of koolaid drinking. People who believe that their master has a scroll that is older than the native country’s written language or that their unarmed style was designed to fight mounted warriors. Those are pretty extreme.

It’s a group thing, too. Martial arts (and other specialized societies) create tight little self-reinforcing communities. Sometimes it is formal- the hierarchy specifically discourages dissent. Sometimes it is informal with the students banding together to protect the integrity of their fantasy.

More later….

Principles and Drills

Jodan uke. The upper block. We practiced doing line drills. Uke would step in with his right foot as we stepped back with our left. His right hammer fist would come crashing down in a big circle and we would punch our left arm up at the right angle. His forearm would slam into ours and, if the angle was right, glide off. Then he would step forward with the other foot and everything would be repeated on the other side.

There were a lot of things that went into a proper upper block. The arm was punched up, not raised, which delivered more power. The palm side was snapped forward at the perfect instant to drive the ulna as an attack into uke's arm. A bad angle made a bruising contest of power, the perfect angle could glide a baseball bat without bruising. Minimal bruising, anyway. A good snap could open up his whole centerline.

Then, one day when I was bored or tired or something, I did it wrong. In line drills I blocked the big right downward hammer fist with a right jodan uke, cross body. Most of the same stuff happened except it turned uke's entire body, made him lean slightly and I was on his flank, halfway behind him. I owned him. Playing around, it was even better when I didn't step back. Closed the distance. Hmmmm.

Chi sao, or sticky hands, is primarily a sensitivity drill. You face your opponents, wrists touching, and try to tag each other (I have a gift for oversimplification). The cool thing is that if you can maintain wrist contact you can tell not only what your opponent is doing but what he is about to do. Without turning it into a strength contest, you can 'steer' his attacks to safe zones.

Just for fun, next time you play chi sao, take a half step forward and apply the skills to his elbows. Not only can you control his attacks, you can control his entire body like he was a rag doll. If you don't piss away the principles you can even bend and fold someone much bigger and stronger. Don't take my word for it. Try it.

Lastly, referring back to an old post.

There are a lot of connected principles here. It is easier to steer a moving object than it is to stop one and the threat in a fight tends to be a moving object. Maximize your leverage and utilize structure- and know, in a body, specifically where the leverage points are. Get to a dead space (love that rear flank) or force the threat to present it to you. Learn how much you can control without even using your fingers. The whole body is connected, if you can control the threat's elbow, you can control his feet (when I use the phrase 'core fighting' I'm talking about using the connection through the spine and hip and shoulder girdles to influence or control part of the threat's body by another part. It's fun.) Lots of things work better at closer ranges than they are commonly taught.

Something to think about.

You Learn Stuff When You Write

Sorry about the long break. I've been doing quite a bit of writing, just not here. A handful of people have asked me to look at their ideas, which always turns into a dialogue that teaches me a lot.  

Two other things though 1) A friend (Marc MacYoung) mentioned that he was working on a problem, a big problem in self-defense: the freeze. What is it? Why does it happen? When doesn't it happen? To whom? Are there different kinds? What can you do about it in training? What can you do about it in the moment?

In a lot of ways, Marc and I think a lot alike. Too much alike, IMO, to usefully collaborate most times. In this case, I had been looking at the question from a higher magnification than he had.  That little twist, one of us (Marc) looking at the social dynamics surrounding the freeze and the other (me) looking at the different freezes I had experienced or debriefed other on... a lot of connections came together.  Can't guarantee that we've broken the back of the puzzle but it looks more solid and far more useful than anything I've seen on the subject.

2) I started writing something for the blog that I've been thinking about for a very long time.  The deeper I wrote (with some insight from an entirely unrelated off-line discussion with Asher Bey) the more I became aware that the problem wasn't what I thought it was. Well, it is, but not in all cases. There are two entirely different ways to get to a very bad place, except one of the paths isn't bad. Except when it is.  Cryptic, I know, but I have a little more to write and then a lot more to organize and cut before I can post it here.

I'm also toying with yet another writing project. It would be fun. Useful to the right people, and would piss off the people who think they should get it, which I am immature enough to find very funny.

Other Basics

This is some bedrock stuff- not 'what I think' but 'how I think'.  IME, most of it is pretty common in people in high risk professions even when they don't have the words to articulate it. Possibly some of my disconnects (I feel strategy is fundamental, others belief it takes a background in physical skills to grasp) come from this bedrock.  So here goes, an incomplete and fuzzy list since sight is the hardest thing to see-

1) Goals-backward. This is taught specifically to most emergency leadership. Drop me off on a desert island and I won't start by going through my pockets to see what I have. I'll list what I need first (shelter-water-fire-food), then check resources to match needs, then gather or create resources to fill the rest. I am also one of those kids who found story problems much easier than the same problem presented as a formula and always found mazes easier to work backwards.  Fighting with a clear idea of the goal- to escape, to prevail, to restrain to... is both more efficient and less likely to escalate to something excessive. 

2) The Art of Advantage.  A practiced sense for vulnerabilities- in balance, position, targeting, but also emotional and logical. Been doing this for so long that I am not sure if it is a 'taught' thing or simply a 'permission' thing. But it takes some deep restraint. To even play with this and not destroy your life you have to understand deeply that defeating someone else is not the same as winning. Knowing how to hurt without knowing when and who is dancing on the edge of evil.

3) Reframing. The ability to look not just at different answers but at different possible meanings for the question. An aspect is to know what the real question is.  

4) Context. This is a hard one under stress because your SSR triggers both a visual and mental tunnel vision (that's also why true environmental fighting usually takes experience as well as practice). But sometimes, often (and this is more true with a predator who has moderated his own SSR than with a kid in the Monkey Dance) you can affect what the fight is about. Change the perception of the value of the goal (Ever listen to "The Winner" by Bobby Bare?). Change the perception of risk (Kris' "You guys should probably know the front desk has already called the cops.")

5) Connected thinking. Everybody does this but not everybody does it very well. Everything you do affects other things. Almost everything is connected. The more deeply and subtly you see, the more you can affect things in relatively distant space or time and with relatively little obvious action. One place where I take this is looking at the source of information and then looking at their motives. With practice, if you are objective, you can predict the drift of bias.*

6) Continuity. What you are dealing with in this moment began long ago and will have effects, intended and unintended, long into the future.  The past is for research, the far future for prediction and an attempt to mold, only the present and the near future for planning and action. This works two ways. First, avoid getting caught up in a past you can't fix. How a particular criminal became a violent criminal is an academic matter. I might use it in the future to help another kid not become a predator, but when someone is trying to stomp your head against the curb that is so NOT the time to try to figure out if it was due to potty training or not getting breast-fed. The other side: how you deal with the immediate problem will affect future problems that can arise. Treating symptoms is rarely the same as treating causes.

7)Simplifying the problem. The ability to take all this and cut it down in an instant to an immediate problem with an immediate solution.

I need to emphasize here- almost every good operator thinks like this, but they don't think about it.  It appears complex, maybe, and in words and explanations, it probably is.  Just like no one thinks about the rules of grammar when they are actually speaking in a native language, no operator is consciously extracting a web of past and future. 'This came from here and is going there.' You just see it because it is the way you have learned to see. When you make an error, you re-evaluate and move on. If they have practiced, and this is rarer, they can articulate how they knew 'x' was about to happen, but not all of them can.

* Predictive power is the only way to evaluate your skill in a lot of this.  If you are wrong consistently wrong you have misjudged their bias and must look at your own.

FROM CLAUSEWITZ:

I wanted to open this with a big paragraph about how I don't usually write about politics and that this isn't referring to anything specific. Read it for yourself.

“Plundering and devastating the enemy’s country, which play such an important part with the Tartars, with ancient nations, and even in the Middle Ages, were no longer in accordance with the spirit of the age.  They were justly looked upon as unnecessary barbarity, which might easily induce reprisals, and which did more injury to the enemy’s subjects than the enemy’s Government, therefore, produced no effect beyond throwing the Nation back many stages in all that relates to the peaceful arts and civilization.  War, therefore, confined itself more and more, both as regards means and end, to the Army itself.” Carl von Clausewitz "On War" pp383  Anatol Rapoport translation

So- this is the basis of the concepts of proportionate force and attempting to limit civilian casualties (cf Israeli warnings to neighborhoods about exactly when and where they would strike.)

This seems obvious and right, yet what happens when you face an enemy who deliberately uses your feelings, beliefs, protocols, customs and laws to harm you and conserve his own strength?  When he deliberately hides his firing positions in civilian areas, or hospitals or schools?

It’s a great soundbite- once you have the media on your side you can be confident that they will not show the damage or bodies of that you have inflicted, but they will film in loving detail the shattered bodies of the children that you used for a shield. You targeted bus stops, but you were never so evil as to target schools...and yet you hid your weapons in schools and fired from them. No matter, roll the cameras and show the broken children and cry for restraint.

Very neat, very effective, but it presages another sea change in the art of war. It is time for a different spirit for a new age.

More from Clasuewitz- paraphrased. For a time, war was seen as a political thing involving mostly the cabinet and the army. With the rise of the French Republic, everyone felt that they were part of the State, not the subjects of a State. War became everyone’s business and we wound up with the entire weight of a nation on the French side versus only the army and the politicians on the other. Wherever Napoleon met this old way, he crushed them.

Not until Spain had its citizen’s insurgency; Austria made the extraordinary step of activating many of its citizens for war and Russia deliberately followed the Spanish lead- only then did the Grande Armee begin to lose.

Someone said (and I wish I knew who) that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

So we live in a country where most citizens have never served in the Armed Forces and some citizens openly show contempt for those who do; where people vote as if the primary purpose of the government were to ensure that the voters have enough possessions; where decisions about war are made not by the popularly elected legislative branch (as required by the constitution) but by the largely appointed executive branch… have we regressed to the model described by Clausewitz? Tradition (policy, procedure) and equipment against people? People adapt very fast, bureaucracies less so.

And so another point. Winners always lose. The problem with being a winner is that there is little incentive to get better and the previous losers and people that feel they are going to lose have nothing better to do than to harness all of their creativity, all of their resources and study the winner for weaknesses.  They eventually find a way… and the erstwhile winner cries that it wasn’t fair. ‘They’ changed the rules. Changing the rules is one of the best ways to win.  And winners are terrified to change the rules that they have won by in the past.

We are in the midst of a sea-change in international conflict, even a change in what international means. That’s not true. It’s not ‘the midst’. The change has happened. I am not even sure that we are trying to play catch-up or trying to adapt in any meaningful way.  Rules that were taken for the very highest of ideals are being used by ruthless men to make better men seem careless or even vicious.  One group is fighting, or trying to fight, against ‘armies’ and reduce, even eliminate harm to civilians. The other group is deliberately blurring the line- no uniformed armies, civilians exploited to perform military functions including acting as shields, no nations to conquer or negotiate with in many cases.

Eerie parallels with the world that Clausewitz described. The old ways did not survive the crisis of Napoleon.  What will change now, and who will adapt?

Interview

Got interviewed. To myself I sound like a bumbling, nasal idiot. Both of us were dead tired and it was done over a computer from across a sea... anyway:

My interview(s) (plural, it was supposed to be 40-60 minutes and we wound up gabbing for about two and a half hours):

http://warriortraditions.libsyn.com/

And Dr. Keogh's website.

Basics

Here's a problem.  Martial arts are usually taught from a tool- or skill-based perspective.  What are the basics of your system? Strike and block? Nage-waza and Osaekomi-waza? Irimi and shomen-ate? Block-check-strike? The long form?

Learn a technique and play with it for awhile. Learn a second technique and play with that. Put them together and play with the combination... when all of these techniques assemble into a system it turns out to be a tinker-toy construction incapable of doing a job or supporting weight. In the martial arts, this is where the instructor steps in to explain the 'advanced aspects'.

That is so, so wrong. The advanced aspects, too often, are principles and strategy.  These are the true basics.

Every real system has some things in common: they evolved in a specific environment; they addressed a particular type of threat; and they revolved around a strategy that respected those two facts.

Given that these are the central essences of a system of self-defense or combat, why are they considered advanced?  These are the basics of the basics. the things that make everything else make sense and, possibly more importantly, if something doesn't mesh with these core values it doesn't belong. Splitting your strategy weakens everything. (Theoretical example- if the core strategy of your system is to pull someone close and strangle, where does pushing away fit?)

No matter what you incorporate as physical basics- footwork, power generation- make sure your students understand two things from day one: 

1) The problem the system was designed to deal with. One of the most popular systems around was designed for the sole purpose of beating Japanese karate in karate tournaments of the 1950s. It is masterful at that. My system was designed for medieval emergencies. It wouldn't work well in a 1953 karate tournament. If the focus is on self-defense some time has to be spent on how criminals think and act and how assaults happen. You must learn diagnostics before you can apply the cure.

2) The strategy chosen to deal with the problem. Different strategies can deal with the same problem, that's fine. Mixing strategies or adding techniques to a system that are incompatible with the strategy just create confusion. Trapping is an aspect of controlling the movement of the threat. It is feasible, maybe critical, for a strategy of "Control the arms to create an opening". It isn't compatible with a more brutal "Close and do damage" strategy. Techniques or types of techniques should only be added to systems if they serve the strategy.

This doesn't mean "don't go out and try new stuff." One of the things you need to prevail is something that I can only call 'clean'.  Just as mind, body and spirit have to be in accord, strategy, tactics and techniques have to work together. If they are at cross purposes, the entire structure is weakened.

Strategy and threat assessment are basics.

Most of the Time

Communication is never pure. Steve points out that everyone brings their own axes and there is no guarantee that they are really listening when they are grinding them. He has a way with words, that writer.  I see it in reviews of the book (I haven't done this enough that I don't bother to read them) and it is amazing what people have chosen to read. People who have never felt my fa-jing assume that I only do or understand 'external' styles (hint: you want to see some awesome internal power principles, play with a world class judo guy. Odds are he can explain it better, too.  Oooo, is that sound I hear panties twisting?) Despite a quarter of a century, most of that in the most traditional of the traditional, I have contempt for traditional training. Or so I have read.

Everybody is wrong pretty much most of the time.  On complex issues, anyway. There is a default assumption that if two people are arguing one is right and one is wrong.  The more complex the subject (say religion or politics or violence) the more possible answers there are. If there are a million solution, then 999,999 of them are wrong. Or at least not as right as the other one. Or at least not as right for that particular person... and you add another layer of complexity which from one point of view makes all the answers "right" (but it becomes a pretty weird definition of right) or all the answers wrong.

That's OKAY.  We are just people stumbling through life. We don't see everything, we don't know everything. Most of the things (like religion and politics which are classic for 'the less you know the more rabid you tend to be' syndrome) aren't actually that important. Yeah, I said it. Even assuming that the purpose of religion is to make people more civilized (and I don't think it is) I haven't seen a religion or the absence of a religion that accurately predicts the morality of the person I'm talking too.  What conservatives and liberals believe about each other is harsh and dogmatic, but they way they actually act and think are not as different as they seem to need to believe. Just my experience. Go talk to someone you disagree with. Better, listen to one at least as smart as you are.

Anyway, there's one of these big things that has been popping up lately- a growth and truth thing and reality thing. I'm going to be vague here, because I don't want to talk about the thing itself- that is usually pointless. You can substitute "martial arts mastery" if you want- something that is rarely defined well, may mean nothing but a lot of people have a lot of identity invested in the quest.

There are stages, maybe, or definitions, but at the highest (non-faked) level I have seen it is very ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, that many of the searchers dismiss it, "A martial arts master in blue jeans? Preposterous!" One of the things that when you grasp, you become very concerned for the searchers because it both isn't anything like their image and it isn't fun, or happy or comfortable.

They describe it though, even if they have never seen it. They are sure of what they will be when they get there. They measure others by how closely they fit their mental image of what a "martial arts master" should look, act and talk like.  This isn't Disney- someone who is at that level can choose to become an ice cold murdering sociopath at will.  A choice. Then switch back.

That doesn't fit with most people's image of kindly Master Po or whatever.

Of course, like everyone, I could be wrong most of the time.

Waste Not, Want Not

Going over the fiction I wrote for nano and I have to cut two pieces. They just don't really fit.

So, hey, I'll post them here. Just some introspection from the main character:

Bad guys.  The best definition that I ever heard was, “My team are the good guys.  The other team is the bad guys.”  It’s simple and sometimes you need a simple way to look at the world.  I usually prefer the law enforcement term “threat.”  It’s dehumanizing without a value judgment.  It’s immature to require your enemy to be less than you.  I can kill someone who I profoundly respect.  The reason that they need to be killed has nothing to do with who they are, it has everything to do with what they are doing.

So I like the term threat.  I am stopping what they are doing, the ability to do harm that they represent.  Stopping the person is incidental.

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Get this. People do not commit suicide because of the shitty stuff that happened in their lives. They commit suicide from thinking about it too much.  Being alone? Generally bad, unless you stay really busy.  Alcohol and opiates? Bad time for depressants.  Uppers, a little coke or meth? You start to think that you need them to have a normal amount of energy and in a little bit that becomes both true and not, because you wouldn’t know a normal level of energy if it bit you.

Danger and Fear

Martial arts, combatives training, is part of my risk management strategy. I have spent the better part of the last two decades in close proximity with people who regularly use violence and intimidation as tools to get what they want. Most of this time has been spent unarmed and out-numbered.  I need to manage a certain level of physical danger.

Every skill I acquire, every new technique or idea hits a very clear filter: will it make me safer? Will it increase my chances of getting out of a bad situation intact? I honor tradition, but I don't really care about it- a single family in Japan has kept a tradition alive for over 350 years that has been the core skill of my close-quarters survival. They have my deepest respect and gratitude, but it was the effectiveness, not the age or lineage that earned my respect. Get it? Same with wisdom and athletics and anything else.  They are cool, but not what I need from my training.

The thing is, in my risk management strategy I am managing danger. I get paid to do stuff where stupid people, people who don't pay attention and people who are simply unlucky get hurt.  This shit can be dangerous. I work my ass off to minimize that, predicting and preventing every contingency I can... but any martial skill I develop is for the sole purpose of not being the one zipped into the body bag or waking up in the emergency room.

Most martial artists are not managing danger- they are managing fear and that is an entirely different thing.

Steve Barnes, in his wonderful introduction to "Meditations on Violence" writes:

"... legions of young men swamped martial arts schools all over the world, seeking to be strong, to be brave,  to be capable-- to, in other words, deal with their fear that they would not be able."

I think I could write pages about fear. I don't respond to it the way most people do, though I used to. Most people acknowledge fear as a bad thing and will do a lot to alleviate the discomfort.  I don't usually bother.

Fear isn't real for me. That doesn't mean I don't feel it or that I like it. It simply means that I've had joints popped and small bones broken and an eye gouged and concussions and compared to those, fear isn't real. I have a definite need to avoid the damage, avoid the danger. Fear is just white noise in the background and sometimes a tool.

For most people, fear is a stimulus, a negative stimulus, and they will do what they can to alleviate that negative stimulus. Any animal would do the same. But since fear is mental, it can be alleviated mentally.

You need to be able to do things to mitigate danger.

You only need to think you can do things to alleviate fear.

Compare a blackbelt that took two years to earn in a non-contact system and a blackbelt that took eight years where you had to fight five blackbelts full contact in succession and beat half of them... they alleviate fear just the same. They don't mitigate danger the same.

Note this- danger can only mitigated. There will always be danger and no matter how hard your training is, how realistic, if you are confidant you can handle whatever you will face, it has become a talisman, just as delusional as an easy blackbelt.

Confidence is the result of fear alleviation. It can never be known as over-confidence unless it is tested and failed. If one stays away from danger, the talisman, the confidence, the alleviation of fear are all good things.  If a strategy for dealing with fear alone runs into danger... it's probably just as well that the hindbrain steps in and shuts things down.

A danger management strategy shouldn't lead to confidence.  The more you know about danger, the fewer answers there are. Words like 'always' and 'never' have a way of disappearing from your vocabulary. Confidence is a short step, at most, from complacency, and complacency is the number one killer in danger zones.

Elements of Risk Management

First, "Five Dragons" got it. D was the 500th post on the blog, DI the 501st. I was starting to worry that no one would get it until DIV, which would have shattered my illusions about your general brilliance.

This is a lead-up to something I want to write later, so there may be a few things that seem unconnected. Bear with me, my subject (violence) is pretty complicated.

When we first created the Tactical Team, Ron (who had the vision) was very explicit about the team's purpose. It wasn't just to win fights or wear cool uniforms or feel special or even to maintain or regain control. The team was intended from the beginning as a tool of risk management. Risk management, simply, is handling bad events. Bad stuff happens. They are called bad stuff because the consequences are painful or expensive. Sorry if that seems too simplistic, but this is one of the areas, like much of violence, where people complicate the simple stuff and simplify the complicated stuff.

It's not called risk prevention. It's not called risk mitigation and it's not called risk stomping. You manage risk. The first step to managing risk is predicting all you can. If something is predictable, it is preventable, as Gordon Graham likes to say. This means understanding as much as you can about how things go bad. Learning your vulnerabilities. Knowing your environment. Studying how things have gone bad in the past. If you don't know what to look for (or refuse to look) you can't see bad stuff coming. If you can't see it coming, you can't prevent it.

And here's the first semi-unrelated but crucially germane tie-in: I constantly hear martial artists talk about "the tool box" and acquiring 'tools' or skills. I almost never hear them talk in  any informed way about how violence happens. They try to acquire a complete set of mechanic's tools without the diagnostic skills to tell a blown transmission from a flat tire. All the tools in the world are useless if you can't tell when you need them or which ones to use.

An example. Gordon breaks things down into "High Risk/Low Frequency" "Low Risk/Low Frequency" "High Risk/High Frequency" and "Low Risk/High Frequency".  If something is not risky (and that can be a relative term) if it's not dangerous, there isn't usually a need to spend a lot of your training time on it (we're talking survival skills training here).

So the LR/LF and the LR/HF aren't serious risk management problems. It's also true for HR/HF stuff. If there is something particularly dangerous that you do every day, you probably don't need to train on it much. The fact that you have been doing it daily for a while is a good indicator that you know how to handle it.

That means leaves the rare nasty stuff. That is where you really need good, solid training. Training is necessary when experience is rare and stakes are high.  This is, or should be, intuitively obvious. Yet if you break down most martial arts training, the time is spent on relatively LR/HF stuff: Monkey Dances and dueling. Stuff you can walk away from if you keep your ego in check. Those are extremely low risk on the continuum of violence.

(Unfortunately when many instructors drift into HR stuff- weapon defense, multiple opponents and ambush survival- the lack of experience really, really shows. Often it is fantasy and sometimes suicidal.)

So- Prediction. Prevention. Train for the dangerous.

Then mitigation. Sometimes you get blindsided or overwhelmed. No matter how bad you are at risk management, there is one common denominator: if you get nailed it will be by something you didn't see coming, unless you are stupid, ego driven and on some level a willing participant. If you are not skilled at risk prediction and prevention, the trouble you get may be relatively obvious and easy. If you are skilled...

Laurence Gonzales in "Deep Survival" makes the observation that given enough time, bad stuff will happen and systems will fail. The more that is predicted and prevented, the rarer it will be, but it will still happen. One of the side effects of skill in this arena is that when it goes bad, it will be pretty damn weird.  It makes for great stories if you live.

Mitigation boils down to prioritize your losses and what you will protect. Think the 3 P's in order: People, Process, Property.  In a major disaster it means that you get everyone out safely before you even think of saving knowledge (e.g. computers, secret documents) and only after those are protected do you even consider saving stuff. In personal encounters with violence, you do whatever you have to do to get (yourself and/or others) out alive. That is more important than pride, more important than preserving your reputation. Those imaginary things are far more important than your wallet or your car.

Training for violence then: Prediction. Prevention. Train for the most dangerous. Keep clear priorities so that you can adapt when the first steps fail. Practice all those steps, especially adapting.

It's not as hard as some people make it sound. And it's fun.

DI

Do The Math

Here's an example- closed fist strikes to the head.  I know, personally, five people who have been sent to the hospital for broken hands after closed-fist strikes to the head. A total of nine incidents (two of them were not fast learners).  One of them had been a trained amateur boxer. How many people have I known who needed medical treatment after receiving a closed fist strike to the head? None. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Falling and hitting their heads? Yep. Being directed into a wall or piece of furniture? Sure. Head butting? Both accidental and deliberate. Even slaps (I didn't go to the hospital but should have, dizzy and puking for almost three days) C did, with a ruptured eardrum as well as a mild concussion.

So is it a good technique/system whatever if you are far more likely to be injured by using it than the bad guy? (BTW, two of those people have permanent disability.)

Another example, "In the old days a good day just meant everybody made it home alive." Trouble is I know exactly how many people died doing that job. Then there is the math- if good is better than average and good means no deaths and nothing more, than an average day involved deaths. He was probably trying to sound tough to the rookies, but he just wound up sounding ignorant to anyone who had either done the job or could do simple math.

It's a beautiful day here- windy and sandy with a sky that looks like polished steel.

< onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkXkmisb2y9Wra7Ed_xo9d1i51Dokyxhk5WEjltyTEqLCGyd7UI7hNS_XoAF_FSlE5nY6xeWMFZSDZy5PPYWM5xBW3sDZS4cq2kxNinWVe5EpsDQZFlFOCwm2G50N2BkA33ob9oA/s1600-h/steelsky.jpeg">First picture upload!

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I was going to explain enlightenment- you know, "abiding non-dual awareness" today. Maybe later.

Instead, Chris called me out on sophistries.  Told him we should save it for a long talk over a beer, but he just couldn't let it go. It's sad, really. ;)

To recap: It started with my assertion that to mindfully learn to crush throats is incompatible with compassion; that learning violence to increase your peaceful nature is an oxymoron.

Chris pointed out that compassion extends not just to the threat but to the people you are protecting.

I said that sounded like a sophistry, and a good subject for a long conversation- with beer,

Ta-dum... Chris said a sophistry would be pointing out that compassion means "suffering with"... and here we are.

This really should be a long, rambling talk with lots of time to make sure that we all agree on the common ground and take care to see when meanings diverge blah, blah, blah. Nope. This is a blog, so it's going to be a monologue. 

 

First using words they way they are defined is not sophistry, it is simple communication. So there!  Glad that's out of the way. On to the meat:

People do what they are going to do.  When they do it, they usually have a very definite reason.  Simultaneously, they also have a lot of excuses and beliefs and 'shoulds' and accepted perspectives and bullshit running around in their heads. None of these are the actual reason for the action, but we/they often believe they are.

If you are going to take the bad guy out to protect yourself or your family, that's a perfectly good reason. You don't need any more than that.  But if you have trained under some myth of a "compassionate warrior" one of those bullshit stories running around in your head will be that what you just did (broke a bone, snapped a joint, concussed a brain) must, in some way, have been an act of compassion.  You can just look at the guy laying on the ground screaming, puking and bleeding and have a pretty good idea the compassion wasn't for him... so you convince yourself that compassion for the people you saved is just as valid and you can hold on to your compassionate warrior badge.

Chris is right to point out that compassion means "suffering with" (I would have held it at just 'feeling with' but he's right).  You can't suffer with everybody. The best example is the way some teachers, counselors, medics or just friends can really be there with you in the dark times.  I have never seen anyone exhibit that level of compassion to more than one person at a time. Part of the power lies in the focused personal attention that it requires. When someone tries to feel for everybody and everything, it is indistinguishable from angst (which I privately call 'emo whining bullshit paralysis'). 

This deep attention is also critical in combat. I don't always have to be completely in the (head, heart, spirit, motion, whatever it is, all about him) of the threat, I can also (and prefer to be) completely within myself, totally in my action.

So, in the moment of delivering damage, you aren't thinking about the people you are saving. If you aren't thinking about them, you certainly aren't 'suffering with' them.  This is why it smelled like a sophistry to me- it sounded like the words someone would tell themselves to keep a label.

Protecting people is reason enough. You don't need to pretend that you were doing it with a certain type of emotional involvement or for a separate reason that you have been told is "the warrior ideal." (Not you, Chris- see the next paragraph to know what you stepped in).

A level deeper- someone wrote recently that training for fighting was exactly the same as training for enlightenment.  That turned my stomach (and it was probably why I threw in the original line.)  I have my own definition and understanding of enlightenment. It is not warm or fuzzy or particularly comfortable. Taking my understanding off the table and going with the  enlightenment-lite (ala Yoda or Kwai Chang Cain) of mindful awareness and compassion...

If you are studying combatives, martial arts, what have you, you are learning to break a person. Let's up the graphics a little: You are practicing techniques to make a human being scream in pain. To stop them from breathing until their brain cells start to die. To make organs bleed and limbs snap so that they never work again. You are studying the art of manufacturing cripples and corpses.  This is not compassionate. Pretending that caring for others counts as compassion against this is just whistling in the dark.  This is why they are incompatible with enlightenment-lite: in order to pretend you are studying violence compassionately or for compassionate reasons, you must choose to not think about this truth- you give up mindful awareness.

(For my definition of enlightenment it doesn't work either because you can't artificially learn truth. IME.)

But, it can give you the confidence to walk into the places where the deep truths are a heartbeat away. It can become a step, it can't be the entire journey.

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Enough on that. I owe Chris a beer if I'm ever in his neck of the woods.

I also owe Bobbe a Chimay (is that the really nasty, sweet trappist beer?) for the best review of the book ever.  Sorry about page 90.

Also Scott (or coffee, if you don't do beer) next time I'm in San Francisco just for the line "He talks to us as if we were a bunch of girls sitting around in our nighties at a pajama party."

Lastly, a beer (or coffee, or scotch, whatever. Something.) for the first person who figures out the title of this post. (Payable when I am in the winner's city or he/she is in mine).

Domination, Weak Personalities and Weirdos

This all started with violence and dominance and good comments that were just a bit off but all seemed to be connected at a level I couldn't quite access.  Here's a try, just thinking out loud.

First thought: Violence is about dominance. Dominance (a very big thing with many levels) is the primary; violence a tool to achieve it.  There are so many ways to dominate others that are lacking in violence or only offer the faintest hint of threat- but they still are an attempt to force someone to submit, to show not just respect but acquiescence. The passive-aggressive co-worker who stalls production or grumbles just out of hearing is just as coercive as any other kind of bully, only too insecure to expose himself to the risks attendant with just saying his heart. There is no such thing as a peaceful protest- just under the surface is the threat that this mass, these numbers could turn into a mob if they do not get what they want, and skillful protest organizers know that their power comes from fear and they use it.  It is a very dark thing to watch people march and scream for peace and love.  "Political correctness"- threats of litigation and disciplinary action under the guise of compassion and tolerance.  And what is this tolerance where any ethnicity (or creed or gender or orientation or...) is encouraged but only one opinion is allowed?  The essence of the entitlement mindset is "I should have the power to do anything I want, that's freedom, but you should be prevented from responding in any negative way because that is oppression." Reverse it and obviously the math doesn't work.  It can be a very free-hearted, smiling evil. 

This dominance is dark stuff and subtle and pervasive.  For some people it is darkly addictive, too.  To make someone else do what you want is power. Whether the coercion comes from whining or claiming a victim status or passive aggressive bullshit or naked violence it is power.

We all sense this in some levels. It's possible that one of the attractions of martial arts is that it might promise a way to navigate this mess.

Someone once said (George Mattson?) that people join martial arts schools for self-defense but they stay for other reasons.  It may be a notch deeper than that.  With it's hierarchy of ranks and traditions and rituals for dealing with dangerous physical action (how do you hand a sword to a warrior?) It seems perfect for making the subtle, shadowy dominance game distinct.

Does it work that way?  Not so much.  If you really want to learn how to navigate the world of dominance hierarchies I suggest you join a highschool football team.  The very hierarchy and obvious aspects of dominance in a dojo simplifies the picture, much like the violence in a dojo is simplified to be understandable.  Here's the first connection, Mike's question about the weak personalities that are drawn to the MA (and don't get your panties in a twist. Not everyone who does MA is weak and there are many good reasons to study, so obviously I'm not talking about you.) (Steve, you were right when you said no one ever recognizes themselves when you write them into books. Weird.)

Just at a physical level, and there are some of these, you get people who want to learn to be tough guys, but do it in a way that doesn't hurt.  Looking at it from this desire to understand dominance, I think there are many, many more who want to face fear without feeling any. They want to learn to deal with danger in a perfectly safe environment.  They want to take on the dominance voluntarily so that there is no coercion in it.

Many martial arts attract people who want to have their cake and eat it. People who believe that they can learn to deal with violence without ever feeling pain or fear; or that they can learn the deepest secrets of life in one of the most artificial environments on earth (taught by a guy wearing the underwear of another continent and century). And, compassionately, do it all without hurting anybody else, either.

Worg wrote about the weirdos in martial arts, some of whom develop high levels of skill. My first reaction was that we don't know each other's definition of skill, but that's not necessary. That idea goes right here. All of those things in the paragraph above are considered simply immature to people who have to work for a living.  Things come with prices. Things are attached to other things.  Most people (fortunately) have never had to think that surviving an attack probably involves dealing with pain and fear, but if it comes up it seems obvious enough.

This 'specialized immaturity' is drawn to martial arts.  It's cool for a number of reasons- most people know relatively little about martial training and they assume (or simply never thought about it) that the practitioner is in to pain and danger much deeper than most really are.  It is one of the few places where this kind of immaturity can get recognition and even subservience from others- have you ever seen a martial artist who you personally know couldn't fight a gifted fourteen-year old preen when someone said, "You're a blackbelt? Man, that's awesome. A guy would have to be crazy to fuck with you."

It's also self-reinforcing. As long as everyone in the little MA community plays along (and they aren't playing, they really believe they are doing something great) you earn the respect of your peers, too.  So, Worg, it's one of the few environments where this mindset actually has the opportunity to develop serious skill.  It's not always the skill they think they are developing, but it's okay.

There's more going on in some cases. At high levels or in obscure or imaginary arts, the practitioner can just make up what 'good' is.  The hierarchy master/student thing has led to pretty serious brainwashing in some cases- literally where the techniques only work on students of the person demonstrating them. That's sad.  Funny from the outside, but sad, too.

Still haven't quite pulled this all together.  More to think on later.

Teaching, Perhaps

Thinking about teaching and martial arts and fighting and what I really believe.

Martial artists are among the worst teachers because most have so much untested ego vested in it.  I read something interesting lately that compared martial arts to the S&M/B&D scene.  The difference being that people into bondage and stuff are aware of what they are doing to each other and have safeguards built in.  They tend to be very explicit about boundaries.  They deal with the power dynamic right up front.

There is an often unrecognized power dynamic in martial arts. The sensei/student relationship, especially with some of the weak egos who are drawn to martial arts (more analysis of that on request) is ripe with dominance. Everyone recognizes this. Where else in America would it be socially acceptable for one person to call another 'Master'?  But there are some more subtle threads in this as well.  Conflict is about dominance. Sometimes for one participant it is about survival, but even there the threat is trying to dominate. Don't read a value judgment into that. I like numbers and surprise and scary-looking equipment because if I can dominate psychologically there will be no need to dominate physically, and physical domination is where people get hurt.

In a martial arts class, stripping away the window dressing, you have one alpha male (who may be an alpha only in that one context) attempting to teach others how to be alphas.  You should be able to see the problems with that and predict some of the outcomes: the teacher who wants tournament winners but savagely 'demonstrates' on students who are doing well against him; instructors blindly imitating what they think a 'wise warrior' or 'man of knowledge' would look, act and talk like; the pretending to spiritual secrets when physical skills start to fade...

If you are an alpha teaching someone to be an alpha, you cannot keep your position and be successful as a teacher both. The math doesn't work. That may have something to do with the arcane hierarchies that are invented.

Fighting is also hard to teach.  It is about breaking people.  You can dodge that as much as you want, but the essence of a martial art is how to do damage to another human body. The problem is that if you actually break people, you run out of students.  You have to teach fake stuff and you have to teach a lot of fake stuff to safely acquire the real stuff.  Then you have to keep the real and the fake stuff separate in the student’s heads. Then they need to be able to access the right stuff, the real stuff, when they need it completely disregarding the fake stuff that they learned it with.  That is not an easy thing to teach.  Really, really hard in fact.

It is even harder if the instructor doesn't really have a clear idea of what he is teaching- obedience and respect (what I think most parents really want when they sign up little kids for lessons) are exactly the wrong mindsets to instill if you don't want your children victimized.  Mindfully learning to crush a throat is incompatible with compassion- no matter how hard you visualize or how deep your meditation on your skills, if the first time you break someone's bone or make them scream it bothers you, you weren't honestly mindful- practicing violence to acquire a peaceful nature requires a willful blindness. Practicing violence to be safe enough so that you and others can live peacefully is an entirely different matter.

To top it off, and this is entirely from my point of view at this stage in life, most instructors don't teach right.  Not necessarily poorly. I mean that they are neither teaching what they think they are teaching or what the student is expecting.

Some teach like it is a product:  "I have a skill, I must give you that skill.  That is teaching."  I don’t see it that way any more.  That mindset winds up in one of two similar places.                                                       Either:

1) A rigid precision where a perfect technique looks and feels a specific way. Hell, I don’t move the same way or even think the same way in different fights.  What makes a good punch a good punch is a huge mash of power generation and distancing and target prep and conformation that you only have partial control over.  Rigid precision is neat because you can work for decades on minute details and always feel like you are progressing.  It’s just that applying it to fighting is like measuring something with a micrometer that you need to bulldoze. It is sharpening a sledgehammer.

2) Trying to clone the instructor.  You will never be me.  You will never fight or think the way that I do.  Sorry, but that’s the way it is.  My duty as an instructor is to get you to fight better than I do. To survive and win in situations that I might not and I really don't give a damn if you look like me when you are doing it. If I try to clone myself in you and you don't have my strength or speed or will, I am dooming you to fail. It's a flawed platform.  Unless you are extraordinary in your own right it won’t work (an extraordinary student can make great progress despite a shitty instructor).

To me, the teaching process isn’t a commodity.  I have little to give you.  Learning is growth.  Teaching is guiding growth.  That is all.  I need to work with the student as they are and lead them to the place that they want to go (ah, the place they want to go? Or the place they think they want to go? Or the place they need to go- usually three different things.) Even if they have a talent I lack, as an instructor and strategist I should be able to teach them how to exploit it and build on it.

This works at the apprentice level or with private students.  I love doing it with seminars because it just becomes a big “here’s something to think about and play with for a year or two” and benefits everybody.  The dynamic can be awesome.  But what I like to teach could never be a system without becoming a product.  Once it is systematized there are things inside and outside the system.  There becomes a right and wrong way.  Not, like in real life, grades of effectiveness from, “Damn, that was sweet!” to “So, I bet you’re feeling pretty stupid right now.” (That's the verbal scale, the physical ranges more from 'nothing happened' to ...some pretty horrible stuff. A coffin for yourself is not the worst possible outcome.)

Most of the people I work with are serious martial artists and most have some deep damage (sometimes damage they have been trained to think of as strength) from that.  Healing is growth and can be learning.  It’s very organic. 

It’s also not for everybody. Sometimes the expectation of what the relationship should be really gets in the way. If you really want Master Po or (who was the guy in the Karate Kid?) you probably won't be happy with a smart ass in boots who keeps telling you 'you already know how to move' and 'sailing through the air is fun!' and 'what were you feeling when you did that?'

Deep learning is growth. It's not about increasing information- what you know- so much as changing who you are. Sometimes, often, you can't even articulate what you've learned. It bypasses a lot of that verbal level of your mind. A student and I sat down with a notebook once after class- she’d mentioned that she always brought a notebook and never wrote in it because there weren’t any words.  Sitting down and looking for the words it was over two pages. 

That’s not the kind of teaching that people are usually used to or like- but the part of your mind that thinks in words is somewhere between useless and counterproductive in a fight.  It’s not you anyway, it is just some words in your head.

So, I’m not teaching here.  There are a couple of people I roll around with.  Growth may happen. It’s all good.

Friends

As long as I am in an airport, waiting for a connection and with time to kill, it looks like a good day for a double- not martial arts or crime, just stuff. Feel free to skip it.

My lovely wife scheduled almost every minute of my free time for the R&R so an amazing amount got done- there was even a little rest and relaxation.

Orycon was critical. Exhausted, (only saved from jet lag by my secret method of not sleeping at all before I fly) and booked.  Mark and Kai- two of my favorite humans; the Steves, both of whom extended some human understanding at a great time. Jim and Andy were far more mellow than usual and let me play fourth in one of their endless debates. Carol and the third Steve, thanks for keeping K sane. Mary can teach you more just sitting in her vicinity than some professors. New people like Bart. Many more names I will forget or never learned or...

Coffee with Mac and visits with Mike. R&S and that branch of the tribe made it up to visit. Kris set aside a class and Lawrence dodged meetings to snatch a few hours of talk (and both gave great advice on the big question- what next?). Colleen- shukran.

A short trip into the old workplace brought out some friends I have sorely missed- and Kurt made sergeant too. Good choice.

There are more I missed. Most of my friends have very busy lives, sometimes interesting bordering on hellish, which is part of why I like them. Next time.

Velvet Hammer

There are two things I love about PDX, the Portland airport. One is the free wifi. The other is Coffee People.  Coffee People used to be a chain of coffee kiosks in Portland that made things like Black Tiger and the Depth Charge. My favorite was The Velvet Hammer, a rich espresso cinnamon mocha.  They did milkshakes, too, some with gritty powdered espresso beans. Very nice.

Despite the fact that Coffee People's product was better in every way to a certain chain that shall remain nameless but has the initials STARBUCKS, they pretty much died out. Except at the airport.

A really good coffee can take some of the sting out of saying goodbye. A little, anyway.

I think these long (deployments? missions? aah- absences) absences would be easier if I didn't love my family. That's probably obvious, but it doesn't work out that way.  The people who have the hardest time with the separation live with this fear and mistrust of what their spouse or children might be doing.  In that sense, it is much easier for me. I miss my family, but I don't worry about them much. The usual worries that bad things might happen, but no worries that they might instigate badness. It's not in them.

But still, I miss them. Some of it is the greedy missing of not having someone to hold at night or children to pounce or people to share stories with. Some of the miss is deeper. My children are turning into extraordinary people very quickly right now.  I am jealous of every second that I miss.  My wife is making great strides personally and professionally.  That's part of the rub and part of the depth of our love- I also like them an awful lot. If there was no blood or marriage tie, no years of shared experience I would still be fascinated and work to be friends with this incredible little group of people.

That's pretty cool, but it makes it hard to leave.

Even though it wasn't hard to leave. Leaving is moving and as long as I'm moving it's pretty easy just to do what needs to be done and I don't really feel the musing and maudlin emotions that hit me later.  Like now, sitting in an airport.

Territory

Again thanks to Steve-

"Sound suspiciously like you are saying not only is the map not the territory, the territory is not the territory, either ..."

Not at all, but this is huge.  If we needed examples we could draw them from tracking or martial arts or social contacts or anything, but this is really simple and doesn't need that.  No one sees everything.  The world is too big and each instant of time is almost infinitely complex. Even if you could process the whole range of colors, sounds and smells simultaneously, you still couldn't see behind your head or hear the noises beyond human range.

In the same place, different people look at different things.  Two very good observers can see the same event and point out entirely different suites of critical information. How they observe, their styles, are often habits and can be trained. This is good.

The territory is the territory. An obstacle is an obstacle, but whether your first inclination is to look for a way over, around, under or through is largely a matter of how you look at the territory.  

There is value in learning different ways to look because some problems are easier to solve from a different perspective than your regular one. I was a very visual learner.  That is still there, it is still a tool, but there are situations, particularly close-quarters fights where kinesthetic thinking -touch- is superior. Faster, more sure. I can tell you how to move someone to the weak side of their base and draw diagrams and demonstrate, but once you feel it as sort of a 'gravity hole' it is obvious and everywhere. 

There is a side effect/bad thing that gets thrown in here and it is something that I write about a lot.  In this post I am talking about accurate observers and tools for them.  Be very aware that some people (I think most, in certain circumstances) are not observing when they think they are. They are treating their plans and preconceptions and templates as data. They believe so strongly that X is the way things happen that they will respond as if X were happening when Y is.  This isn't limited to "you guys" or amateurs or martial artists.  Everyone brings something to the table- sometimes it is experience and some times it is knowledge separate from experience and sometimes it is folklore masquerading as knowledge.  The only defense against this is to let it go as soon as you realize you are wrong.

E.G. If you knew X was going to happen and it didn't, let go of that belief and find a way to survive. You can reconcile shit later.

Otherwise, though, experience and knowledge add to the process.  They are how you choose what needs to be looked at and how you interpret what you see. Some people work hard on being exposed to enough different things to help with interpretation.  That's great.  I've seen far fewer who practice different ways to see.  There are huge gains to be made when you learn to see things that are invisible to you now.

Changing Views

When you look at a rock, you see a rock. Except not really. You are seeing light in the visible spectrum bouncing off the rock and triggering some cells in your eye which translate...
Philosophers can argue about whether what you see is really the rock or not, or whether the rock exists and they can eventually drown in the bullshit that they generate. That's not where I'm going here. The visible spectrum gives you some information. Touch gives you some information and the information may well be different than sight. Same with taste. Same with different lights. Same with touching moving weight versus static texture.

How you look at things are models.  The model, the map, is never the territory. Maps (it is getting harder to use words sometimes- the map, the vision, the expectation, the construct, whatever you call the thing in your head that you deal with) are useful, they are not real.

A good friend, someone I admire very much, said he would love to train with me.  It tickles me, because I'd love to train with him, and also because he is the 'perfect student'-  he's done the years to get technique and movement down and would be ready to play with the things that are intriguing me- that's one of my weaknesses as a teacher. I'm selfish and want to learn: classes wind up being something more like exploratory playgroups than anything else. I'm okay with that.

My mind started racing right away, and this is the part I want to share.  Once you strip down techniques to what they are as opposed to how they seem, there's maybe two full days of techniques.  Everything there is to know about jointlocks takes about an hour. Maybe two for take-downs. Timing, targeting and weapon conformation for striking is pretty simple. Power generation can be done in a couple of hours depending on how well they get the feel of some of the bone/structure or internal types, but the big high-gain systems are easy. Another hour, maybe, for contact/response ambush survival. And on and on, moving bodies on the ground and standing...

It seems like a lot, but it also seems like short shrift. To someone who has spent years studying a locking art and still gets surprised by new things it can get taken as an insult that 'everything' can be covered in an hour. It can, though. It's just a different way to draw the map.  The advantage of working with a really experienced martial artist is that he has already done the thousands of reps and knows this stuff.  It then becomes a way to get a simpler and more stream-lined concept into his or her head.

That's background. This is what I would like to play with- starting from just a mixing it up sparring/rolling session:

• Just go for it and break it down- techniques and tactics. Did you have a strategy? Look at how critical reflexes and conditioned specific responses are here.
• The exact same thing, but think of it now as energy coming in, not fists. Instead of manipulating a body, manipulate the energy. See what this makes easier, how you have to think and not think differently.
• Oh, by the way- talking about manipulating bodies? You've been moving your fists and feet. Now move his. Own him, make everything he does part of your plan.  When you get this for the first time, it makes you giggle.
• Find and exploit the dead space.  There are active and inactive parts of his body- can you get all or part of you in the inactive spaces, find the areas where the active parts aren't?
• Point of action. Almost everyone is naturally drawn to what is going on. Sometimes your best opportunities are nowhere near the struggle. Move your attention away from where it is drawn.
• Start to bring in the third factor- environment. Start playing with walls and tables and clutter and found weapons. Frisk fighting, where you maintain the full sparring/rolling mode but are also going through his pockets looking for weapons you can use. (Somewhere there is a picture of a guy named Steve- we'd been doing judo newaza and I suddenly sprung away and he tried to follow but he couldn't since I'd used his obi to tie his elbow to his knee. It was pretty funny).
• Some of this is easier blindfolded.

That's just playing from sparring.  There's more: Violence dynamics, how and why fights happen. The patterns, what to look for. Longitudinal violence- where did this really start and where will it end, if ever? Changing the question- is this a fight because I decided it was going to be? Because the threat did and I'm blindly following? Can I change that decision?  Changing the context- similar, but much broader- if the fight is about X can I change the value of X to something not worth fighting over?

This last is the big part because fighting is not about physical skills so much as it is about people.  This man has a lot to teach me about people and I would love to see the synergy of the two of us playing with this stuff- and playing is the key.  It's the best way, IMO to learn deeply.

Costumes and Jewelry

There's a lot going on right now- with a lot of travel time and transitions. Middle East desert to rainy (but beautifully clear and windy yesterday) Pacific North West. Too little time alone with family, followed by a huge weekend (three days, about nine hours sleep) at the Oregon Science Fiction Convention- Orycon.

There will be more to write about that soon. There are good friends that I seem to only see there and some to whom I owe great gratitude for short talks. More later.

Costumes and Jewelry. It's been said (a lot!) that whenever an agency sets up a Tactical or Negotiations Team, the first order of business is to design a new patch. I never really understood the impulse but I saw it, fairly frequently, and whenever the gear guys (and it's usually spearheaded by the guys who are into toys) started talking about a new uniform or patch or badge or making challenge coins I would shut it down by saying, "That bullshit is just costumes and jewelry. What are we going to do about training?"

Just walking down the street, there are people wearing clothes and people wearing costumes. You have a 'swoosh' on your t-shirt, it's a pretty good bet that you grabbed a t-shirt that fit. You're wearing clothes. Every single thing you wear has the swoosh, plus maybe some jewelry, it's probably a costume. If the colors match, definitely a costume. More subtle, but you will find people with signature clothes- always wear black shirts or BDU pants or a specific hat. It's only subtle for people who don't see them every day.

It all boils down to identity. Your identity, who you think you are (and in many cases that has very little bearing on who you actually are) comes from somewhere. Maybe it is like writing fiction. Good characterization involves some depth- action and history and different ways to think and relate to the world. That can be a lot of work to write. A signature hat and a few stock phrases are much easier. Two dimensional is easier to write than a real human. Is it easier to live, too? Safer?

Do people do this to themselves? Becoming a cowboy means eating a lot of dust. Hard work and long hours in shitty weather. That's without the hours of practice it takes to become a Doc Holliday with a revolver. Much easier to just buy the hat. Marine BCT is TOUGH. Much easier to shave your head and get a tattoo... some of which are outside of regs, anyway. Want people to talk about you? Doing something amazing is hard and often dangerous. Growing a huge mullet and then slicking it back with fistfulls of grease also gets people talking about you (saw this in the airport. OMG it was funny!). Sure, they aren't saying good things, but they are talking...

I have my own tendency to go the other way. I have a duster that I love- it's warm and dry and I love the feeling of it flapping in the wind and, were it ever to become important, I could conceal a freakin' cannon under it... but it looks so much like a costume, draws so much attention that I rarely wear it. When I first started teaching seminars I wore black BDU pants and a black polo shirt- Mac had suggested it as a good cross between stuff that looked professional and stuff I could move in. The first time I heard students refer to me as "the man in black" it was time to retire the clothes. It wasn't my intention, but it had become a costume. My aversion to costumes (and my fetish for functionality) is possibly just as much a glitch as someone else's need for them.

Are costumes bad? Maybe. If you have a message and they get in the way of the message, if your students are talking more about what you wore than what you taught, yeah. If your boots are shiny and your rifle is dirty, yeah, it signals some messed up priorities. If the costume is something you hide behind- "if I dress like a tough guy people will respect me" yeah. Tell you right now, when you walk into the gym tatted up and chewin' and strutting, people are thinking 'punk' not 'ooh a real man!' they are just too polite to say it out loud. If you are relying on your costume to send a message that you can't with your words or actions, it may work for you but from my point of view it's false advertising. It becomes very bad when you start to believe your own bullshit.

NOTE- this is not about the Con. People dressing up for fun is a whole different animal- FUN, that's the point.

Perfect Moments

Something I wrote during the long period when internet access was limited:


A few years ago, in Boston out walking with Jeff and Sioux. It was early spring but the sun had been shining and it was warm but with the fresh rain smell. We were walking through Little Italy, a little hungry, and the owner of a restaurant (wish I could remember the name) corralled us and brought us in. The entire front was open, for the first time that year, he said. The restaurant was empty, too early for the dinner crowd, light Italian music. We had a bottle of wine that wasn’t on the menu, something special, the owner said. I had proscuitto-stuffed veal.

Smell of rain and sunshine, sweet music, good friends, good wine and food. There was a lull in the conversation and it hit me, body mind and soul, that this was a perfect moment. Absolutely content, there was nothing else that I wanted. Every nerve and muscle felt completely at peace. A perfect moment.

Yesterday I had another, drinking cardamon tea and eating flat bread with cream cheese and jam in a noisy, crowded office. A gun strapped on, speaking only a few words of the language and only three people there spoke mine. Thick choking dust. No music, no wine… and it was perfect. A feeling of peace as deep and profound as the wildest battle-joy.

Numbers

40 reviews on Amazon so far. Not bad.

Kami talked me into doing Nanowrimo this year (see how I blame everything on her?) I think the actual conversation was more like-
Me: Should I do nano this year?
K: If you want to.

So it is her fault. I can rarely bear to read fiction and now I'm writing the stuff. It's a typical action adventure psychothriller magic realism erotic cross-cultural love story. 27,197 words as of today.

Single digit number of days before I board a plane for a brief trip home.

The Truth Will Set You Free

Kris Wilder is putting together a new book, tentatively titled: "The Deeper Questions: Why We Train in the Martial Arts." He kindly asked me to write a section for it. I finished writing it and I am afraid that most people will see it as dark and depressing, but it isn’t. It, like many truths, is a key to a wonderful freedom. There are a handful of hard truths, very real, very powerful things and it seems that most people’s lives and civilization itself is often a sad and desperate attempt to make these truths less true.

The most famous? Possibly, from the Buddha: “Life is suffering.” Or, my favorite paraphrase, from The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell something.”

Maybe that’s a big truth and maybe it’s dark and maybe it’s scary, but it is profoundly liberating. Getting handed a shit sandwich with life isn’t that big a deal… but the idea that it’s not normal, that the sandwich of life is supposed to be roast beef with bacon and cream cheese lightly toasted with brown mustard… The little cry baby belief that it is personal, that it is about YOU, the illusion that the universe knows or cares who you are…that’s the part that hurts. The suffering, if it is that, lingers in the gap between the expectation and the reality.

Most humans through most of history have had a pretty rough deal. You don’t see it in America much (no matter how hard you try to convince yourself that the country is awash in poverty and homelessness and violence- the math doesn’t work when the greatest health risk to the poorest Americans include complications from obesity). We are programmed, it seems, to think that our lives are hard, and they are. But only compared to an ideal that never really existed. Things, stuff, money, don’t mitigate suffering (though they can mitigate pain or deprivation, but those aren't the same) , they just focus your imagination on different things to suffer about.

I’m trying not to talk out of both sides of my mouth here. There is real pain: tasers hurt. Old bone breaks and medically installed hardware hurts in your joints when things are cold and humid. You will lose friends that you love. But most of the suffering comes from elsewhere, from an expectation that joints aren’t supposed to hurt or that friends are eternal. That is the difference between grieving and wallowing. Both are about you, but one is honestly about what you lost and the other is about what you thought you had a right to keep.

Accepting this truth and a few others allows you to live…more? Harder? Better? It allows you to love harder because you are busy loving instead of whining that things aren’t perfect and love is ‘supposed to be perfect’. It allows you to play and learn getting better every day instead of wasting time and emotion trying to figure out how good you are or if you are ‘good enough.’

What do those phrases even mean? What is a ‘perfect love’? What would it look, feel, taste, like? It can’t be both perfectly smooth and exciting. And ‘good enough’? For what? To who? If you ever perfectly achieved it, then what?

Most of the big truths are like that: the totality of the statement is bleak: “Life is suffering.” “You will die.” But each of them is a key. When you quit wasting energy attempting to evade the inevitable; when you quit building a structure of lies to protect yourself from the truth you can live at the level of truth.

Caveat emptor, though. It’s really not for everybody.

The Power of Decision

There are things that don’t translate until you have done it. We all had very clear ideas about what kind of parents we were going to be right up until we actually had kids. You can’t really explain being a parent to someone who has never done it.

I was thinking today about working out. I’ve been working heavily on cardio and flexibility, but honestly it is mostly out of boredom. Fitness is important to survival, even to combat (though not as much as you might think) but for me, in my personal experience… not so much. I’ve taken down bigger, stronger, faster, more flexible people.

How? I just decided to.
That’s such a weak statement.

Sometimes people expect decisions to have power. They tell themselves that if the stakes were high enough, they would never give up. That they could give it one more rep “if I had to.”

They expect magic because sometimes it works. I can pretty much decide what kind of day I will have or how a given conflict will end. But it’s not the decision. It’s the sensitivity to hundreds of variables that I missed in the past and paid for. The ability to change the question in the process of seeking an answer. The ability to know the difference between what is true and what I think is true or what the threat thinks is true.

And the price. This alone may be why crunch time comes to failure so often. If you make a hard decision “I WILL take this guy down!” it’s probably going to hurt. Some decisions hurt a lot. Some cost far more than a sensible person is willing to pay. When it’s just words in your head, “I’ve made up my mind!” it is easy to forget that everything comes with a price. When you are paying the price, sometimes in pain and blood with the decision not yet done, it’s easy to change your mind. Which is pretty much the opposite of making a decision.

Decisions, for most people, never really go beyond words in their heads. They aren’t really decisions about actions and consequences so mush as statements of belief and self-worth: "I would never stand by for that!" But most people do stand by when things are risky. Who stood up for the people sent to Auschwitz? Even when the risk is not physical or not present. How many people just watch Kitty Genovese be murdered?

Statements of self-worth in the comfort of your home are worlds away from the actions and the risks of actual application.
Once you have made decisions at this level, though and in your soul understand the price and have already paid it, decisions are a different thing. They carry weight and power.
But it is completely different than just saying the words.

Character

Reading a mass of stuff right now. Clausewitz' "On War". I've tried to plow through it before but it is dense. The pattern is that I read it and the sheer quantity and quality of information; the concepts he was able to put into words that pure theorists never get; the connections between what he saw in 18th century big war and what I've seen in brawls, blows me away. But the density: between the language, the amount of information... when I catch myself skimming without really understanding, I put it away for a while. I think I will be able to finish it soon.

Also reading a collection of Hadith, and working on the Arabic script (where I have discovered that if I go slow it sticks, but if I try to memorize three letters in one day I lose five). But the lettering is beautiful and I can sound out (approximately, the short vowels are omitted) most of what I see around me.

And "The Unthinkable" by Amanda Ripley. I think it will be a good companion to Lawrence Gonzales' "Deep Survival."

The point- there are a bunch of subtle things that I have found to be more and more important over the years. I've written about concrete thinkers and how they have trouble dealing with force issues and why inexperienced people try to get too much information (or rarely too little); they often don't clearly understand when they should be planning and when they should be moving.

That stuff. In Clausewitz he talks about character. He talks about some pretty specific traits and I've bookmarked a lot of the book. But one of the things he talks about is that in a battle, you have no idea what is really going on. You have reports, but you have no idea how reliable those reports are. The more information you have- and check this, some of the information will be good and some will be wrong and you often have no way of knowing which is which- the MORE uncertainty is inherent.

Clausewitz uses the word 'character' to, in essence say: some personalities are okay with that. Those personalities won't necessarily be great or even good generals, they will make mistakes. But the ones who aren't good with that, who maintain denial that big decisions (or, in personal combat, quick decisions) happen in an information fog, they are effectively paralyzed.

One way to train around that is scripting- 'x means you do y' which is a very good, very reliable system- except that when it fails, it tends to fail catastrophically. And it can be used against you and...

It also, IME works differently at different levels. Magazine changes and immediate action drills can be scripted. Small unit tactics are awesome when they are drilled. But the actual actions, what you are going to do when you get shot at, has too many variables to script. Larger scale group activities increase chaos which increases the role of luck, and adaptability becomes one of the key character traits in a leader.

Clausewitz states that of all human endeavors, war is the one in which chance plays the biggest role. It's big in fast, close ugly stuff, too- and one of the things the aggressor tries to minimize. One of the things that you limit when you are winning and you introduce if you are losing. Managing chaos- that's a deep subject.

Character. I'm only a little way into "Unthinkable" but already it has come up. There are types of people who die and types who survive. For all the allegations in the news, the people who stayed in New Orleans when Katrina hit and defied the evacuation order were NOT disproportionately poor or disproportianately of any ethnicity. They WERE disproprtionatey old. They did not like changes to their routine (as if 5 feet of water wasn't a change). They were inflexible.

How fast you flip out of denial might well determine if you live, and it reflects Clausewitz' writing on war and my experience with bad guys. Flexibility as a character trait. Ability to act with minimal data, as a character trait. Ability to jettison a plan as a character trait. Comfort with unreliability as a character trait.

We see our character, our personality, as 'who we are'. Amanda Ripley points out that very, very few people have ever seen themselves in a major disaster and have no idea about their own 'disaster personality'. So that aspect changes.

The question for me- I see these traits as critical skills. Physical skills are important too, but you need these traits (and some more I will have to list someday) in order to access those physical skills. Can these be taught as skills? In psychology, some of the basic personality traits are considered very 'robust' meaning they rarely change much. Do these fall into that category? Is that category a truth or a convenience? How do you give or awaken these in someone who may never have felt real fear and give them permission to act?

Doing It Wrong

I see the flash of steel and I close, automatically, x-blocking low, keeping the arteries and tendon side of my forearms on the safe side, using the contact to pivot to the safe place off his flank. The near hand stays in contact, I am actually controlling his weapon arm with a touch behind the elbow. Left hand slips up fast to take his chin and through his chin his spine while my knee flexes to pop his knee….

“No, no, no, “ The instructor says. He demonstrates once again- a telegraphed swinging thrust coming too big and from too far away, snatched out of the air with both hands. Done at full speed and power there is a good chance that both of his thumbs would be dislocated without stopping the thrust.

A bad start to a bad finish. These are level four techniques for a level six situation. Iffy wristlocks when lethal force would be not only justified but prudent. Are we stupid, slow or monolinear? No, of course not. So why pretend the bad guy is? Because he must be for the techniques to work.

I’m in a bad mood anyway. I want some pain. I want to feel some impact. I would like a couple of guys in armor so that I could unload just a little. I get like this sometimes- craving something real, even negative as long as it is both intense and real. I want to be slammed into walls and slam back, stand toe to toe with someone bigger and stronger just to prove that the normal subtle stuff I put him down with last time was choice- I’m willing to play big boy games with big boys, too.

Yeah, I get like this sometimes. It will pass and I will be my usual mature and low-key self soon. Maybe in the morning.

Mud

Since I arrived in country I've heard dozens of stories about the rainy season mud. It was prsented as the horrific, epic, man- and truck-swallowing morass of goo.

It's nothing. I mean it's mud and there's a lot of it and it's thick. If momma told you not to get your feet wet, you'll get in trouble. It might be a good idea to leave your shoes outside...but it's just mud.

Which got me thinking. People aren't used to mud. A lot of the people here, outside of camping or mountain biking (both recreational activities where you take the weather into account) probably have spent most of their lives on pavement and in places engineered to draw excess water away. It's not that this mud is special, this is just the most serious mud they have seen.

Cue the music and fade to flashback: Where I was raised it was a mile and a half to the nearest stretch of pavement. It rained there sometimes and between the dirt roads and the animal enclosures and having to tend a garden (deep rich soil makes for deep rich mud)we got a lot of mud. We drove in mud that was slicker than black ice and pulled vehicles out that were buried up past the axle.

One of my best memories is of a varsity football game in Spray, Oregon. Spray played in their rodeo arena. It was their homecoming game and there had been heavy rain the night before. The entire football field was deep, thick, nasty horse and cow shit mud. It was the funniest game I ever played- we were only able to move in slow motion and at the same time we couldn't stop. It was hilarious and we had the added bonus of ruining Spray's Homecoming by stomping them. Take that, Rocky!

Mud here is mud, no doubt about it. There's probably a ghastly amount of fecal matter in it, too. But it's just mud. For the fantasy writers out there- this was normal: slow and uncomfortable and slippery and things getting stuck.

Mud and chaos and blood and stuff- the regular stuff seems epic if you are seeing it for the first time. Sometimes we don't appreciate the distance that civilization has managed to keep 'normal' away.

200 years ago if you had a sibling, it was a less than 50% chance that you and the sibling and the mother would all be alive at adulthood. People write and whine about the trauma of losing an elderly parent when, in most of human history, few got the chance to be elderly and by the time that became a problem you would have washed and prepared other corpses, people you knew and were related to.

Same with violence (I really hate not having my library here) an anthropologist working in (melanesia, micronesia, indonesia or polynesia) was impressed with the peaceful tribe he was studying, since he hadn't seen a murder in the months he had been there... until he started asking and found that almost every woman in the tribe was a widow whose previous husbands had been murdered. Same with war- how would we deal with something like Sekigahara today with 60,000 killed in six hours hand to hand?

Sorry, off the subject of mud. But the principle is the same- normal measured by your experience can make things seem epic that are just normal. That's the way it is. Not much pavement, no storm sewers and you get mud. Mud is slippery and dirty and you can get stuck in it. The epic thing isn't the mud, it's a society that has been able to bring itself to a place that people are shocked and horrified by mud.

It's a very good thing. Just a little weird from my point of view.