Drills

Nanowrimo did not eat my life.  I'm sort of looking for an excuse, but I can't even say I've been busy.  I tend to blog more on the road than when I'm at home.  Must like it here or something...

The book was effectively done at 38k words two weeks ago.  The challenge for Nano is write 50,000 and I'm not sure the book can support that and I don't want to cheat and  write on a second book for the word count... so I'm still expanding with just under four days.  7000 words to go, which is well within reach for one day when I knowwhat needs to go on paper.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the list of chapters thus far:

Introduction

Evaluating Drills

OS: The One-Step Series

OS1: The One-Step

OS2: Four Option One-Step

OS3: The Baby Drill

OS4: Slow Man Drills

OS5: Dance Floor Melee

OS6: Frisk Fighting

OS7: Environmental Fighting

OS8 The Brawl 

B: Blindfolded Drills

B1: Blindfolded Defense

B2: Blindfolded Targeting

B3: Core Fighting

B4: Blindfolded Infighting

D: Dynamic Fighting

D1:Dynamic Fighting

D2: Sumo

D3: The Hole Against the Wall

D4: Moving in the Clinch

D5: French Randori

F: Fundamentals

F1: Maai With Weapons

F2: Offlining

F3: The Targeting Drill

F4: The Lock Flow Drill

F5: Initiative

F6: Advanced Ukemi

F7: Pushing

GM: Ground Movement

GM1: Roll-over Drill Phase 1

GM2: Roll-over Drill Phase 2

GM3: Roll-over Drill Phase 3

GM4: Roll-over Drill Phase 4

GM5: The Wax On, Wax Off of Groundfighting

GM6: One Up, One Down

GM7: Blindfolded Grappling

PM: The Plastic Mind Exercises

PM1: Animal Styles

PM2: Fighting the Elements

PM3: The Other 

IW: Internal Work

IW1: Centering

IW2: Eating Frogs

IW3: The Game of the Stones

IW4: Lists

IW5: Slaughtering and Butchering

IW6: Ethics and Glitches

IW7: To Save My Children

IW8: The Predator Mind

IW9: The Articulation Exercise

C: Combat Drills

C1: Takeouts

C2: Multiman

C3: Break Through

C4: Bull in the Ring

C5: The Reception Line

C6: Scenario Training

WW: World Work

WW1: The Clothespin Game

WW2: Ten New Things

WW3: Stalking

WW4: Escape and Evasion

WW5: Counting Coup

WW6: Dog Handling

WW7: Global Awareness Exercises

WW8: Legal Articulation

WW9: World Building Exercise

 Should probably add an afterword and I'm toying with an exercise to evaluate training to finish up, but this is the skeleton of the work.

Re-Thinking, Maybe

I’ve written before that martial arts can never be a way of life, not for me. Then I started working on the damn book of drills and maybe I’m seeing it differently.

Of the nine sections, three are almost entirely mental: Internal Work, the Plastic Mind Exercises and Working with the World. What does this mean?

Some catch it intuitively. I think that Maija and Edwin and Kasey know what I am doing even when I am struggling with defining and understanding it.

Here’s what I know:

I live in a world, a big world full of many things. Much of the world is dangerous and almost all of the world is beautiful. You can’t separate the beauty from the danger. You live in the world and, as humans, we can separate from the world… but we can’t separate from and effectively function in the world.

Martial arts or self-defense or what-have-you may or may not be something you do for the dangerous parts of the world. It might just be fun. But at very minimum, in my mind, it must be something that you do with and in the world. Otherwise it is fantasy and separation. At best masturbation. At the worst, unpleasant sweaty addictive masturbation that you believe is exactly the same as real sex.

So it’s critical when learning this (whatever this is that I teach) that you play in and with the world. That you study the world. And because you are part of it, that you study yourself. Not the imaginary self that is constant and true and good. The fluid self that changes when you are hungry. The one that you become when you are afraid or elated. The self bleeding on the edge of consciousness and the self in the cold dark places.

Learn to see. Learn your own mental plasticity and how much you can control that: how much you can choose, moment to moment, who you wish to be.

Touch the world, taste it, smell it. If you ever need to break somebody, it will be one of the most real moments of your life.

How to Read a Book

Asher writes (intermittently, lately) about teaching.  In a recent conversation, I asked him to do a series on how to learn, how to be a student.  Maybe it will bear fruit...

An example:  Once, and only once in my life, did I get a short class on how to read a book.  It wasn't about reading for pleasure, but about maximizing comprehension and retention.

Read the introduction and the table of contents first, then the glossary.  Read the endnotes (all, if they are organized at the end of the book; chapter at a time if they are organized that way.)  If there is a chapter summary or 'discussion questions' at the end of the chapter, read those next.  Skim each chapter noting pictures, reading captions and noticing all words in bold.  Read the sidebars.

Then you begin reading the book.

There is a classic teaching style: tell the students what they are about to learn, teach the material, then tell them what they just learned.  By telling the students what they are about to get, they have a huge head-start on internally organizing the material and identifying what is important.  This system does the same thing with a textbook.

When I was taught this, there was an immediate improvement in understanding, retention and test scores.  And it pissed me off:  Why wasn't this taught in grade school?  Why in the hell did I have to wait for college for a five minute class that improved the quality of my academic life so dramatically?

I want to go in different ways with the rest of this post:

• What I think all students should be taught as young as possible: How money really works; advanced first aid; preventative medicine; the scientific method, experimental design and enough statistics to know when they are being manipulated... much much more.
  
• Other tricks and tips for learning, such as the most basic rule: If you don't know, ask someone who does.
• Throw away comments or short snatches of information that changed life drastically.
• There are things like breathing and walking and living that almost everyone does and very few people do at a conscious level... very few learn to do them really well.  What goes into learning to live well?

Maybe later.  Maybe not.

Off to work on the drill manual.

Notes:

I'm working on the calendar for 2011.  If you want a seminar, workshop or private lessons, contact me.  If you're on my e-mail list, expect something soon.

I did a short talk on Anti-terrorism for a local college Thursday.  Definitely not my specialty.  The good news: I actually have a huge amount of data. The bad news: Almost all of it is under confidentiality agreements and I couldn't use most of my primary sources.

Talks coming up Monday and Tuesday at another local college: one on investigative interviewing, the other on roots of conflict.

Teaching another Savvy Authors on-line course starting November 29th.  This one is on Use of Force policy.  

Suspension of Disbelief

One of my close friends is a writer, martial artist, and is exploring some aspects of teaching. After the con we were discussing, as we are wont to do, martial arts, self-defense and teaching methods. I told her of a recent experience where I had declined to do a drill because it had no tactical use. It would only be ingraining a bad habit.

She said, "Beginning training requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief."

Suspension of disbelief is a term authors use. When you read a novel or watch a movie, you have to participate. Not everything will be correct. If the characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy had had 3 digits of IQ, it would have been a twenty minute movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jet Li fight scenes don't follow the normal rules of physics or physiology. Most horror movies wouldn't work without a cast stupid enough to go into the basement alone and too stupid to turn on the light...

Part of the audience's job is to actively ignore the small problems. When the plot holes become too big or the characters too stupid or (my pet peeve) when the plot hinges on the stupidity of characters presented as intelligent (The remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair") the suspension of disbelief is said to be shattered.

Obviously, every member of the audience will have a different threshold.

Check me on this, because it seems intuitively obvious to me and I can't find a counter-example, which either means I'm right or it is too much a part of my identity and is one of my blindspots:

Suspension of disbelief has no place in a valid teaching.

There are some things you will be taught that you can't test right away. Engineers learn the math it takes to build a bridge long before they ever build one. But no place in that learning process will they look at the teacher and say, "This doesn't make sense" and the teacher won't be able to explain why it makes sense and exactly how it works.

If you have to suspend disbelief, if the instructor has to say, "Because it's better this way" and can't say how or (a martial arts classic) you are told that something that simply doesn't work (like hand blocking an attack from a much larger person) will magically start to work after a few years, one of two things is happening:

1) The instructor has no idea what he is doing. He is simply parroting things he has been told but doesn't understand himself.

2) Or what you are learning is fiction.

Suspension of disbelief has a legitimate function in fiction. If you are required to suspend disbelief, you are dealing with fiction.

Like I said, check me on this. My gut says if I have to pretend things make sense, they don't make sense. I am being lied to.

And yeah, I see other aspects of our society where I can apply this rule.

Cons

Science Fiction cons, specifically.

Cons are not, obviously, my natural environment. Raised mostly without a television. Don't read fiction (much-- a few special requests from close friends). Not particularly interested in dressing up in costumes and my life is interesting enough that pretending to be a dead guy (vampire or zombie) really wouldn't be an upgrade.

But my lovely wife writes and serves on the group that sets up our local convention, Orycon. So I go and, by dint of being published and knowing a little about things that often make their way into fiction (violence and bad guys) I wind up on panels. It's also fun because I get to see friends (Steve and Kai post here sometimes; Bart is always a treat and a few others...) and meet people.

Secretly, I enjoy being the grumpy guy who doesn't read fiction. Perspective.

I have friends here, but I never feel like I fit in. Very much an outsider. That changed a little this time, and that was a big insight: For the last couple of years, Bart and I have been having fun, talking about shared experiences-- two outsiders. This year, Bart brought a special friend and I found a critical mass effect. Two of us are two outsiders... three of us and I started to feel like a separate group. Started looking at the 'others' a little harder, a little less sympathetically. I am far more polite as an outsider on my own than as a member of an outgroup... Good to know, good to feel.

The 'put into words' award: Sometimes you find the line between person and monster when you cross the line. That never makes it right, but crossing the line once is recoverable.

Experimented with a way to teach and explore violence, letting groups of people imagine/create societies to solve problems...and in the process they discovered ritual murder and raiding; war cultures and war for cultures where that is not natural; brainstormed ways to deal with those who become good at war; and decided how to deal with those who broke the social rules...mostly without losing the person as a resource.

Had a very powerful cognitive dissonance at one point: There is a panel about writing across identity lines. Authors are often nervous about writing different cultures, races, genders and classes. They are afraid of getting it wrong, whether wrong is defined as stereotyping or unrealistic details. The people on the panel were good, sincere and experienced. I think I was on the panel as someone who had spent time blending and coexisting with other cultures.

The moderator cautioned newbie writers to actually talk to people of the group they wanted to describe, "If you don't, you are working from things you have only read, which might be second or third hand from other people who have only read about the problem."

Hit me at two levels, the first is that I think this is what has happened in most fiction with fight scenes and crime and motivations and a dozen other things. Very few writers have ever sat down with a bookie in Little Italy...almost all have seen The Godfather, and other movies derived from The Godfather.

The second is that almost every reference mentioned by the panelists was (with only one exception I remember), fiction. Hmmm.

Good time, met some good people. Some time with good old friends. Lunch with Steve Perry. Dinner with Mike Shepherd Moscoe. Kai, Mark, Sonia, Bart, Nisi and some new friends. A few people seen in passing: Mary Rosenblum, Leah, CS Cole...

Very tired.

Old School

I was listening to a song today. It was a bit of a spoof, maybe but the music is good, the vocals are outstanding (Frankie Laine) and some of the words. the song was the theme to Blazing Saddles, and the words that got me:

He rode a blazing saddle

He wore a shiny star

His job to offer battle

To bad men near and far

There was a time when people generally recognized that there was good and bad in the world. People were raised with enough of a grounding that most agreed on the basic behaviors that constituted good or bad. And it wasn't enough to try to understand or sympathize. Bad had to be fought. Wherever bad men did bad things the only hope has always been a good man or good woman who will stand up and stop them. Offer battle. The bad guy may back down, but force or the credible threat of force is the only thing that has ever stopped someone bent on violence.

I have my personal definition of bad and evil. A bad guy will hurt someone to get what he wants. Evil will hurt someone even if there is nothing to gain. It's simple, but it works for me... until you get into the whiny bullshit that hurt feelings are the same as being injured or that someone not giving you stuff is the same as someone taking your stuff away.

But there I go, being old school again.

First Ever Guest Post

Bad Billy G, Bill Giovannucci sent an e-mail with something he'd considered as a reply to an old post. I think it stands alone.

Bill teaches Uechi-ryu karate in Quincy, MA. He's also a nice guy. And laid me out with a football tackle in an Active Shooter scenario a month ago.

Bill Writes:

I’ve always thought most people were crazy, myself included. I don’t think its because normal is relative, but because 'Normal' is obviously not true. It does not exist anywhere else but in our shared descriptions of the world. People will often define their own reality as truth. Entire cultures are constructed around shared ideals, but they are not automatically true, just
a way to convey meaning. Why it happens in people is explicable in psychology I suppose. I’m not sharp there. What is happening though, is a flaw in the reasoning process. Beliefs take hold without ever involving other views and active world experience. We know people can literally think ourselves into believing anything is true.

Our job everyday is to make sense of the world. We are immersed in it with others like us, but each trapped in our own little head. It’s scary. It is not comforting to be acutely aware of that all the time. We seek to assign meaning, to understand and organize all the information in order to connect and perceive ourselves, our world. We eventually learn to trust our created meanings because it is too much work to constantly evaluate the accuracy and nuances of our perceptions. We fool ourselves into thinking we've figured it out all the time.

Two posts ago Rory got me thinking deeply about perspective in this way. That was a popular post. I think the only way to acquire new knowledge is to make sure you never really believe you know everything about anything ...I think Socrates. In this, the things you are certain of are convictions. They will always be passing your active tests because you have chosen to observe your active experience in the physical world. Principles, because they can be recognized as commonalities, repeated and tested are key to granting advantage to your knowledge base. It is dangerous to believe in something if you do not fully recognize its working
principles. But, the more you can find them the more intuitive you become. It will be easier to understand new stuff, to recognize what is valuable to your Way. You know if it is something to take or discard. You won’t be as inclined to hang onto things you don’t need because you know you will be able find them again easily. Perceptions get sharper.

Learning humility probably helps. We don't value or employ that gift nearly enough. People with a healthy degree of true humility tend to have accurate personal realities and other ambitions than claiming righteousness. They keep from losing heir way, unlike those a bit lost inside themselves without real perspective. Other folks misunderstand, or maybe choose to accept personal and shared ideals as true and never perceive contradictions as even relevant.

There are theoretical ‘levels of understanding’. I forget them exactly. We switch between these as we process. If you watch, it is noticeable and noteworthy that most people never operate beyond a certain level of understanding about who and what they are within multiple layers of context. We cannot avoid it because we need immediate usefulness of casual thought. It is easier than the effort it takes to get out there and think of everything from every possible perspective all the time. And, if we do know to do it, it is still work to construct a belief system based on both reason AND active experience. Also, as with physical skills, it is essential to maintain your perspective to be sure it is has not become irrelevant.

On the Table

Maija wins the contest.  I am almost 20,000 words into a drill and exercise manual.  I hate it already, but that is just my normal reaction to my own writing.  It's covering some interesting material, I think, and has more mental exercises than many martial artists may have been exposed to.

Gearing up for Orycon next weekend.  It should be fun, and I'll be on at least one panel with Steve, which is always a blast.  I also have two early morning Fight Club solo presentations and I'm working out a new (experimental) way to get people without a lot of history or experience to visualize different forms of violence.  Motivation, context and goo.

Great news-- One of my LAs (translator) from Northern Iraq has received his special visa.  I'm his sponsor, so Dlshad will be coming to live with us possibly by the end of the month.  I'm excited, but we have to rush on converting K's office to a guest room.

Will be starting to put together the seminar schedule for 2011 by the end of the month, basically contacting people who have expressed interest and seeing who wants to lock in a date.  I expect to do a lot of traveling next year... (BTW, if any readers are interested, contact me.)

Johari Window

This came up earlier. I don't know if the Johari window is still taught in introductory psych courses. It's a fairly simple concept.

Imagine a square. In that square is everything there is to know about you.
Imagine a horizontal bar in that square. Above the bar are the things you know about yourself. below that bar are the things you don't know about yourself. There are a million things you don't know about yourself. Some are obvious: how you will act under pressure you have never experienced; things you have never learned to see. Some bring up some deep denial: all the things you think are cool but annoy others; all the times you are playing to an imaginary audience as you interact in life.
Imagine a vertical line in the square. All the things on the left are the things that others know about you. All the things on the right of the line are the things that they do not know. You deeper dreams and fantasies and history and...

It is important to realize that others know things about you that you do not. Who you think we see and who we actually see are not the same and often the person on the outside sees more accurately. the one on the outside doesn't see the voices in our heads making excuses and creating false explanations and rationalizations. They just see what we do.

So the window divides into four quarters, the relative size of each section different for each person:

The things that only we know about ourselves.

The things that everyone knows.

The things that others know and we do not.

The things that no one knows.

On that level, the quest in life is the same: to open the window and see as much about ourselves as possible. We can't see our own blindspots and it is only through friends (or sometimes enemies) that tell us what they see that we get anywhere on our quest.

Loving and Caring

I've looked for this story off an on for years.  It was right on the edge of the internet age, something I read in the local paper.  It disturbed me much at the time and still does.

Police were called to an apartment somewhere in the metro Portland area.  Neighbors had noticed a smell.  In the apartment they found a baby, maybe two years old, wearing a disposable diaper packed with waste.  Bowls of milk and stale peanut butter sandwiches were on the floor.

The mother, it seems, was afraid her new boyfriend would leave her if he found out she had a child.  So she didn't tell him and when they went away for a weekend or a week, she would put out bowls of milk and plates of sandwiches.  And put on a clean diaper.

She was indignant that she was charged with child neglect, even more indignant at people who said she didn't love her baby.  As near as I can remember she said, "Of course I love my baby.  Anyone who has seen us together will see that!"

I'm going to make a value judgment here: Immature people confuse their feelings with the world.  And feel that the feelings are more important than the physical world.  You feel a swelling chest and your throat gets dry when you see your main squeeze.  Must be true love, so it's okay if you slap her around occasionally. Bullshit.

Feeling good doesn't make an action good.  People who feel pretty damn good about themselves (anti-social and narcissistic personality disorders, for example) leave trails of broken hearts or broken bodies behind them.

It hit me hard in New York City.  Everyone I talked to loved the The City.  They gushed about it.  They told me all the ways it was wonderful.  

Not once did I see a single person, except for me, pick up some trash.  It may be wonderful, but it was filthy, with people throwing bales of advertising leaflets to the wind and puking in the streets.  A lot of people expressing love, no one showing simple caring.  Is it really love if it never involves lifting a finger to help?  Or is it the natural self-centerdness of people who can feel their emotions and decide the feeling is enough.  "I feel love, so I don't need to express it."

Thoughts tangle here-- people who have never volunteered to help in a major disaster but need therapy for that disaster, even though they weren't there and knew no one who was.  People who express a rage about a group or political party, but they express a rage about the other's rage that they only imagine, sublimely showing that they are, at a very deep level, what they claim the other to be.  Is it their righteousness that makes their animosity and bigotry acceptable in their own minds?  Or do they simply not see it?  People who want to be loved and appreciated and feel oppressed when asked what they have ever done that is worthy of appreciation...

Dark thoughts, perhaps.

Self esteem, self love, increases violence in people who are already violent.  Of course, the counter argument is that high self-esteem that increases violence isn't self-esteem at all but narcissism. Tomayto, tomahto.

November 2010

This is looking to be the quietest month in some time.

I'll be at Orycon 32 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Portland, OR November 12-14, mostly doing panels for writers but with some play time.  I'm going to experiment with a new format for getting people who live largely in their heads to envision different types of violence and play with the physical aspects.

There will be another Savvy Authors class on-line, this one on Police Force Policies.  It will draw heavily from a book under consideration at my publisher right now.

Other than that, I'm free.  Which means some relaxing home time.  It also means I'm more available than ever for private lessons and local workshops.  I like doing nothing, but I really prefer doing something.

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

Enough with the business end.  This is the kind of stuff I think about on long drives:

Poetry involves tweaking grammar and convention so that the lines have patterns.  The patterns reflect or complement each other.  This is meter, and it is one of the artistic pleasures of reading poetry.

Rhyming is arranging the poem so that the last syllable(s) of the words in each line or in a specific pattern of lines sound the same.  Alliteration is starting each word with the same sound.

Do people born deaf catch these aspects when they read poetry?  When someone's native language is sign, is there an equivalent art like choosing words where the right hand is in a particular position or location at the end of a line (visual rhyming?) Or tweaking the grammar so that there is a rhythmic visual pattern (meter)?

I don't know anyone who was born unable to hear... and I would love to ask these questions.  That would be a fascinating conversation.

Steve's Street Cred

Steve posted on his blog and I got contacted, blah, blah, blah... Steve and I thought it would be good to use it as a jumping off point for some thoughts. The italic stuff will be mine, the regular text is Steve's original post.

Right off, this isn't a debate or an argument. Like any two people, Steve and I see things differently. We also guess about what the other sees, feels or means. There is a lot of potential for learning in the gap between what the guy outside and the guy inside the skin see.

A bit more on the violence thing. Most of you here will assume that when I post such things about the reality guys, I am talking about Rory Miller and Mac and the other hardcore dudes like that.

You're right. I am. But it's not meant to be derogatory when I offer it.

And I know this. Steve understands and respects differences in perspective. I don't think he could write convincingly if he didn't

A couple thoughts to clarify things ...

I like Rory, and I believe what he teaches is valid and valuable. I've reviewed all his books, given them raves.

This is mutual...except for the valid and valuable, since Steve writes fiction after all... (joke).

I also believe that what he teaches is mostly geared for, and aimed at, people who are apt to find themselves in scuffles regularly. It's from and for people whodeliberately put themselves in harm's way. Soldiers, cops, bouncers, folks who go forward knowing things are about to get active.

No. Not at all. And this is a huge disconnect. The hard-core operators know this stuff. According to e-mails, what they really get from my work is 1) a feeling that someone else 'gets it'. Even within the operator world, it can get pretty isolated. You can be a qualified operator and never be activated. You can be activated and never see trouble...and some people, through luck or inclination or whatever see a lot, and it makes them think. there's comfort when you find other people are thinking the same things.

2) I seem to put things into words that they know on a gut level, and that's comforting too and

3) The words make it easier to teach to rookies.

But pretty much by definition, if I blow someone's mind, they weren't an operator.

As Rory has been all those things and has not-walked-but-run into the room as the shit hit the fan, I might be excused for thinking that's where he likes to play. I think he gets bored if somebody is not shooting at him -- and barely missing.

He has specialized knowledge, worth diamonds to people who need it. As he points out, he does violence for money.

That's a long way from where most of us live. It colors one's world.

Absolutely. I'm not sure if this is the place to express it, but there is no way to get the cumulative experience of violence while living a peaceful life. It does color my world. But the people who won't experience it more than once or twice in their lives will never get the underlying factors, will never even get the adrenaline under control enough to see what happens in so few encounters. Someone who has had sex a hundred times just understands it better than someone who has only had sex once. And way better than someone who has only fantasized about it. It doesn't mean that the lessons can only be understood by gigolos and hookers.

We want him on the wall. We need him on the wall. But on one level, I get the sense that he mostly wants to swap stuff with the other guys on the wall. (You might can add serious martial artists to the teaching pool, in that they are willing to pug in practice, and thus aren't completely against the idea of thumping or sticking somebody, should the need arise. People who could never hurt a fellow human being even in defense of their own lives don't seem to be good candidates for reality fighting.)

Absolutely true... for me. Because I get my learning from other guys who have been there. I really can't learn anything useful from someone who has only imagined my world. So, absolutely, I prefer to spend time with operators. Experienced martial artists, not so much. This may be my perspective but many of the 'experienced' are so choked with delusion that it is almost detrimental to talk to them. Back to the sex analogy, collecting belts or collecting porn aren't that much difference. Thirty years of memorizing centerfolds still isn't having sex. (man, I am going to get so many hits for this post off of perverts doing google searches). There are some exceptions, pure martial artists who can improve my body mechanics, but they are damn few.

When he's talking to guys like me, chair-sitters old enough to be his father, or people who hike a long detour to avoid the mean streets, he has to dial it down. We need to know about it, to be sure. We might need some of it someday, and it'll be worth diamonds if we do. But "might" and "surely will" are two different horses.

This is another disconnect, cause when things go bad it gets binary very fast. If you have basic common sense, you probably won't need it, but if you do (home invasion, workplace shooting, Bonding GMD) you will need it all, and probably at a level greater than I do. For me it is a surely. For civilians, it is a possibly... but if the civilian needs it the stakes and the obstacles will both be astronomical. There is no middle ground here.

Big attitude change from "this might happen" to "whenthis happens 'cause it's gonna."

And that creates an incentive to train smarter, (or, if you want to look at it this way) allows civilians to train stupid and it won't matter a lick...until it kills one or two.

Here's where I keep coming down to it: I can't tell you what it's like to be a soldier, cop, or bouncer, because I've never been one.

I think it's hard for Rory to tell you what it's like to be a civilian, because he's never been one.

Sounds cool, but nope. One of the neat things about our society is that there are no castes. Every cop has been a citizen. Every soldier has at least been a high school student. I was the shy science nerd. Mac was the hippie studying library science at Maharishi Mahesh University. We all, at one point, had our first fights. My training was world-class...and I was largely unprepared. What I do with my teaching, is to try to let people in on the stuff that I didn't get from martial training. The holes that left me unprepared. It is a huge list.

So my classes aren't mostly composed of cops and soldiers. There are a few and I think it has more to do with camaraderie than anything. But the majority are what you call serious martial artists who are just coming to terms with the fact that they know almost nothing about violence. They have spent decades honing a tool to be used if they are ever faced with violence, and they don't know what an assault looks like, or how to see one coming or what the opponents and attacks they will have to defend against even look like. How do criminals get you alone? How is a knife really used? How does a predator find out where to set up his ambush? What's the fastest way to tell a dominance game from a predatory interview? How do criminals get you to lower your guard? What does it feel like to kill or cripple another human? Why do so many people freeze and what can you do? What does adrenaline really do and how do you compensate for it?

So many questions and most people go their whole martial career and never ask them. That's what I do. Cops know this stuff.

Long Ago, in a Galaxy...

When I started in martial arts, there were lots of hints about mystical bullshit. When you got to your blackbelt level you would gain powers that weren't quite like the ones on TV, but really close. So I was told (often, it was one of my obsessions) that all expert martial artists learned to heal as well as destroy... but the people making that claim had somehow never got around to learning that part of it.

There were secret strikes that could only be divulged after your character was tested, but no matter how tested you were it wasn't quite time...and then you might happen to overhear the person withholding the information ask his instructor, and you might even hear him get the same run around. The mystical knowledge wasn't there.

But people want it and they want it bad. People really like magic. And if enough people want something, someone will supply it for money or sycophants or just for ego. And the cool thing about supplying magic is that the people buying it will do all the heavy work, suspending disbelief.

So I was attracted to instructors who not only could do things, but could explain it. If the instructor had amazing skills and his students sucked, he either couldn't teach or was deliberately withholding...and if the instructor sucked and the students thought he was amazing, it was a religion, not a self-defense class.

Brent Yamamoto and Kris Wilder, under the tutelage of Hiroo Ito, are doing some amazing stuff. Stuff that harkens back to the legends I heard as a wee beginner. It's not mystical. It is structure and slaving (in the engineering sense) small motions to big muscles. Applying bone rather than muscle. They are doing the things that the internal stylists talk about, but because they are learning and not parroting, they can apply them moving and even fighting, something I have seen rarely in internal stylists.

And they can teach. Their students are picking it up. Applying it.

My reductionist side wants to take it down even further, but that can wait.

For now, I know two men in the Seattle area, NW Martial Arts in Bothell and West Seattle Karate, who are teaching some of the things that the instructors in the eighties pretended to know.

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Billings, Montana this Saturday. I'll be going through Spokane Thursday night if anyone wants to meet on the route.

A Little Contest

NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, begins in ten days. The challenge is to complete a book of at least 50,000 words in thirty days.

My writer's group will all be on board, and so I will as well, with the caveat that I don't (generally) write fiction.

So I'm kicking it out to you. We'll make it a contest. You suggest in the comments what you want me to write about next. I'll pick a winner and give myself thirty days to write the first draft of that book. If it falls into a category that my regular publisher will be interested in and it holds up... the person who suggested the subject and title will get a signed copy. If it doesn't fit that category, I'll do it as an e-book and e-mail a copy to the winner.

So, since there's a chance that multiple people might want the same subject, you have to suggest a subject, a title (especially since I suck at titles) and leave enough information in the post that I can contact you (or at least give you a shout out) so I know where to send the results.

New Thing

With immense thanks to Steve Perry, I uploaded my first e-book last night at Smashwords.

It's the (much expanded) lessons from the Savvy Authors/RWA class on Violence for Writers from a few months ago. The formatting and uploading were surprisingly easy. The first cover design rocked, but unfortunately I don't have rights to two of the pictures (a friend-of-a-friend's picture from the al-Sadr Hotel bombing in Baghdad and one of a particularly bloody cell extraction)... but my lovely and talented wife came through with a nice cover.

If I get the time, I'll have to add it to my regular website and maybe put a paypal button right here for direct access.

Off to Seattle in a few hours for the two day seminar there. There's still room if anyone is interested. Details are at the usual place.

As Kai kindly pointed out, here's the link to the specific book:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27439

You can read about a third of it.

Nostalgia

I'm going to write the post now and set it to show up tomorrow. I do have a lot to write about the East Coast, but the blog is for me and there is other stuff echoing in my head right now.

Lunch today with an old friend and a new friend. I spent most of it catching up with Sean, listening to the changes at the old agency; the mistakes and politics and much of it, it seemed, was about broken people. Some good news, as always. Good people shine in shitty situations... but others seem to enjoy making shitty situations worse and murkier.

Then I stopped by the range to see another old friend. I should have expected it, but there were many old friends there. I caught them on a break so we were able to talk for a few minutes. The nostalgia hit hard driving home. These are extraordinary men* doing a dangerous, difficult and thankless job. They are the best of everything it is to be a man: intelligent, dedicated, trustworthy, courageous. MR will have his doctorate soon, may have it already, and teaches at a local college... at the same time he has been a father figure to new officers, a tactical operator and a fighter. Each of them is a story like that.

I know these men as efficient fighters; cold, level-headed planners; and good, friendly people. Dedicated family men. Those who have been thrust into the position are leaders. Not managers, but true leaders. Every last one of them has risked serious injury again and again to help others, and often the people they were helping are the kind of people that most civilians pretend not to see when they ask for lose change, or get outraged when they hear of their crimes.

I miss it. I miss the job and most of all I miss these people. If brother was a matter of choice, MP and SC would be my brothers. I hope my son grows up to be the kind of man that BW projects so effortlessly. If I were to be stuck in a room for years with one voice to talk to, it would be MR.

*Just so happened everyone there was male... trust me, the ladies who do this job can more than hold their own in every way.

Synthesis

Pieces of what follows will be from memory, so please forgive if the quotes are not exact.

RJ Nash, in "Condition Black" notes that the most common attack (male on female) is for the man to merely display a weapon, make a threat, and put his hand on the victim's upper arm and lead her away. It sounds so docile, so unlikely. Who would go along with a mere threat? Why wouldn't she simply...

Teja Van Wicklen, of Devi Protective Offense consistently finds the words to make things real: "It's not like screaming and bullying. Guys don't get that. He can hurt her and she knows it, but he says, 'I know you're afraid. Don't worry. Just don't fight me and I won't hurt you. I promise.' And she chooses to believe him even though she knows it's a lie-- an unsolicited promise is always a lie-- but she doesn't see another way."

Teja makes it personal, makes it real. I teach it dry, academic: Predators want you in your social brain. As long as you are being social, thinking you can control or at least influence the outcome by social skills (talking, bargaining, appeasement, flattery...) the predator knows you are both safe and completely predictable. If you are in your thinking, human brain, you might be smarter than the threat. If you are in your reptilian survival brain, there is no limit to the harm you might do. If your attacker can keep you in your social/monkey brain he knows that he is safe.

When I teach that the first hit after you break out of a freeze is done at half power, it is an observation. No one hits hard in their first strike of their first fight, not when they are surprised. For some unknown reason, it is almost always a tentative, half-power, powder puff. Almost more a signal of intent than a strike. I tell students that and caution them against it.

Teja talks of the consequences: "She tries to fight, but that first hit is half power, like you say, more struggling than fighting and he hits her back, hard. She's never felt pain like that and she is afraid to try again... and he says, again, 'Just don't fight me and I won't hurt you.' She has to believe it because it seems like the only chance she has is to believe he is telling the truth."

There are aspects of problems that I can never fully understand. We are all wired differently, all have different experiences. Teja is fast becoming my Subject Matter Expert for women's self-defense issues. Partially because she sees it so clearly but even more because she can explain it in a way that gets through.

A Few Tired Notes

I'm tired. My voice is shot. It's been a long not-quite-three weeks.

Basil Kemble came through with the venue like a champ and turned out to be a very cool young man. A lot of history and insight in a relatively low number of years. He'll be one to watch in the future.

This trip has been a journey on a lot of levels. New friends. New places. Finding commonalities with instructors who I really admire. Finding some new ways to put things into words, thought and action. This-- learning and exploring-- is what life should be, at least for me.

Some of it is a blur. In a sleep deprived haze on a train I wrote almost three pages of notes on the first two weeks. I could write as much on the last two days as well. Almost as much, anyway. Far too much for a single post..and as usual, I forgot to even take my camera out of the bag for the seminar today.

As always, so much we didn't get to...but so much that we did. I think a lot of people got a taste of the things I rate as important: how violence breaks down; that efficiency is the point of training; that they can measure their own efficiency; a little bit of what is in this world...

But no one got more than a taste. The big question, the one I will never have an answer to, is what will they do with the taste? I saw a few learn something, be impressed by the increase (in power or efficiency or tactical use) of a thing, and then go right back to moving just as they had done before. Most adapted, but some didn't and that always comes down to the teacher. How do I reach him? How do I explain to her?

I can argue that the student has responsibility for what they learn, I tell them to take that responsibility and own it... but when I am the teacher the responsibility is on me. Not because this is true, but because it is the only part of the equation I can control...

But what will they do with their taste? Hopefully research and learn more. Question. Healthy doubt. Move for effect instead of approval. Never separate judgment from application: "Just because this will work, does that mean it is the smart thing to do?" Will they keep the precious distinction between knowing how to fight and knowing when to fight?

Jack Hoban was a treat. It was a privilege to join his class in New Jersey. I loved what he said about filling space and seeing space; that technique was the absolute least important aspect of fighting-- many things.

But he taught something that blew me away. Ethics is integral to combat. It's a big section of the next book since if you train without regard for your personal internal beliefs, you will freeze. Force law and policy is the study of the ethics of violence.

A few times in my life in a major fight, I've focused energy as a care taker, tried not to hurt the threat, tried to talk him down in the midst of a struggle. Give him a face saving way to end things without injury. In the middle of a fight it has always felt extremely high-risk. I don't like the bad guy to have time to think. But it has worked very well. For me.

It never occurred to me to try to teach it. Too high-risk, and when it worked I was never really sure why. Jack Hoban teaches it. That in the midst of a fight, you can do what is best for both of you. I thought, for a jail-guard thug, I was relatively compassionate. I'm not even in the ballpark of what Jack is doing.

Cool. New levels. New paths. New mountains.

The Better Half

Once upon a time something very bad was (possibly) going to happen. I called home and asked for my gear bag. Ten minutes later, K dropped the bag off at a potentially unsafe place. She didn’t ask questions. Didn’t ask for reassurance. She never tried to make anything about her. “Call me when it’s over,” she said. Nothing else.

The perfect operator’s wife.

I realized today… during all the cool stuff: the hours, days, weeks and months of training; the fights and tactical ops; the time spent in Iraq and Ecuador… K made it all possible.

Somehow, the house keeps going. The first week I was enroute to Baghdad, the truck broke down, the pump went out that supplies water from the well, the dryer died. All handled. Kids and animals, acreage and small farm, livestock, the rambling house with all the books. K keeps it going. The kids are strong and smart and beautiful. Not my doing, I wasn’t here enough.

It suddenly hit me today that I only know half of the story of my own life. For every thing that I have done or experienced, someone was always taking care of the other half.

Rarefied Air

One of the most disturbing moments in the martial arts is when you suddenly realize that your instructors may not know what they are talking about. It’s not just in the martial arts, I see it other places too… and it’s also not just in my specialized field of real violence.

Probably the first suspicion, years ago, was in my first dabble with karate. It was a very strict traditional system taught by a junior shodan and an extremely cute brown belt at my University. At one point I asked about stances. The instructor said that they clearly weren’t for fighting, they were strengthening and conditioning exercises for your legs.

That made no sense whatsoever. Static conditioning is NOT good training for dynamic action. I didn’t have the words at the time, but I had this horrible feeling that he was just guessing.

The second instant was when I asked why we spent time on kihon and kata when sparring looked nothing like either. I’ve written about that before.

In other fields… recently, looking at marketing for Conflict Communications we’ve had some offers of help. Marc and I are both painfully aware that we aren’t salesmen and have no inkling of the process (there is a definite protocol to approaching certain groups.) It became painfully apparent that many of the ‘experts’ offering help had no more knowledge than we did. Often, all it takes to be a consultant is enough knowledge to make the clients feel inadequate, not necessarily enough knowledge to do the job. Lesson learned.

Then there are many things where the learning curve is extremely finite. You can stare at you navel for eternity, but skill acquisition and knowledge acquisition is time limited.

Do you stop learning then? Of course not. Maybe a better way to say it is that there is a limit to how much you can be spoon-fed. Taking in received wisdom, even from a reliable source (and those are rare in many subjects) becomes mutual navel-gazing quickly. Worse, it can become addictive.

Another conversation with Toby: “I took my first survival class when I was twelve and my last at fourteen. I already knew what I could be taught in a class. I had to go out and test it and think through it on my own.”

Toby also shared his system: go out and test. Try it out. Think it through, brainstorm. If you don’t have enough of a foundation, you pull back and research. If you can’t find an answer by research, then you look for a mentor.

Try-research-mentor.

Subtle difference between a teacher and a mentor, and I appreciate that Toby used that word.

People who have gone to the deep water or climbed the ‘path to the mountain’ have always been rare. Few communicate well. We make up our own individual languages for what we have seen and felt. It’s not a community with a common language that you can be raised in. And even the wisest don’t really know all that much.

It’s a big world, people. If I knew a thousand times more than all of you put together I would still be ignorant of almost everything in the entire universe… and each of you would know about things I don’t know.

Deep water or shallow, no one gets wet exactly the same.

Many paths up the mountain? There are many paths up many mountains. And someone else’s knowledge is at best hearsay to you. Learn for awhile, then play.

Non-Prescriptive

The survival class with Toby was, as usual, pretty damn cool. Good people, a nice place, self-selected new challenges...

At one point, while listening in on the introductory fire-starting class, one of the relative beginners started asking "What if?" questions.

Toby replied, "I don't want to be prescriptive." Given the vagaries of humidity and wind and available fuel, there are no primitive fire starting techniques that always work. Anything he told the student and the student memorized would be wrong in certain conditions. His goal and teaching method is to explain the principles that underlie fire: Fuel, air and heat; Heat moves upward; greater surface area for weight is easier to ignite, all else equal; small lights large; fuel and especially tinder quality...

Sound familiar?

There are limits, but survival is survival. Whether under sudden assault or soaked by a sneaker wave in a cool climate miles from help or warmth, survival only comes up where the normal expectations have already failed. If this situation was a normal social conflict where normal social tactics worked, it wouldn't be a rape or murder attempt. The fact that you are in an extreme situation pretty much dictates that the rules of the non-extreme world have failed or, at least, are in abeyance.

Techniques are prescriptive, and so they often fail. Sometimes they work spectacularly, but whether they work or fail is usually a matter of luck. Your prescripted technique works when it happens to hit the right problem. But we don't get to choose what kind of bad things will happen to us.

If you understand the principles, you can adapt. And the principles for much of violence, from how and why it happens to the physics of knocking someone down, are things we have dealt with on some level all of our lives. Sometimes it seems that training deliberately divorces what we do every day, our natural movement, from what we do in training. It implies that movement in a fight must in some way be 'special' and that almost always reads as 'unnatural' and often in practice is stilted, stiff, weak and jerky.

Even when prescriptions work, like in medicine (arguably...sometimes) they are based on diagnostics. If you can't understand the problem, you are unlikely to make the right choices. Survival, again- hypothermia is loss of heat. Fire, food and warm liquids generate heat. Conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation, respiration and elimination lose heat. When you know the problem and recognize you are in the situation, you can derive what to do.

Assault survival- if you recognize the situation, especially early, you have options... but if you misjudge the type of assault, especially the social/asocial distinction, your choices will backfire. And if you don't know the principles of assault dynamics, you put a 50% element of luck on top of whatever built-in possibilities of failure your solution has.

Non-prescriptive. Thanks, Toby. It's a nice way to think about it. Every so often things get clearer for what I am teaching. Diagnostics and principles are the core.

24 and Counting

In the last twenty-four hours, I've:

Gone for a long walk in a strange city.

Driven one of the ugliest cars ever (Scion).

Practiced wakizashi versus katana--live steel-- while completely hammered.

And explained practical maai better than usual.

Rolled with an Israeli bodyguard.

Got exposed to a new fitness system that seems made for grappling and shooting.

Compared entry tactics with a former AT specialist.

All in all, the way a day should go...

Student, Teacher, Explorer

"I don't know why he's taken me under his wing. He has lots of senior students, but for some reason he's really connected with me. I'm getting things they aren't."

Bear with me here. Said in different tones by and about different people, this could be a big red flag... but this was a special case and it got me thinking. Just speculation coming up, a possible way of looking at the world and training.

There are students and teachers. That can be a job description or a personality type. Either can be limitless horizons or can lock you in a box. In martial arts, it is far more likely to lock you in a box.

It doesn't have to be this way. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be this way, but it seems to wind up here far more often.

In martial arts, the student personality is weirdly passive. They train, which is good. Some follow fads and some latch onto instructors and follow them, but in either case following is the operant word. They collect techniques, they worry about moving right and when they get under pressure or get tested, they try to do what sensei would approve, not necessarily what would work.

If your hackles go up and you say, "Not me" or think that I am painting with too broad a brush, think about this: I've spent more study hours in martial arts than I would need for an MD. Far more than I would need for a business degree. The people who get MDs and business degrees spend countless hours studying real disease and real business. Outside of cops, in all the seminars this year when I asked if anyone had spent a single day in their years of martial arts training studying how real criminals really attack, one hand went up. One.

Memorizing assault statistics (the percentage of rapes conducted by strangers; robberies in daylight versus dark) is not research. It is trivia. They call it trivia for a reason, it is trivial. How an attacker holds a knife, range and terrain considerations, developing distance with or prior to assault...

So students follow a lead and in too many the parts of the brain that should be going, "This doesn't make sense, if I was a bad guy I would never attack this way," somehow turns off, and martial training in its way becomes as mentally passive as watching television.

And there are teachers. Some people start martial arts from their first day in teacher mode. They want to understand and explain. That's good. It's very good, usually. (Some do it for ego. They want to be in a place where people call them 'master' or some other silly title.) But most do it for love...and like many people that love a thing, they don't want it banged up. In a physical object that makes sense, sometimes. You don't want to break a Faberge egg.

On the other hand, martial arts should be about as far as you can get from a Faberge egg and you can't really understand something without taking it apart. Much less something physical and visceral and about conflict and contention... you can't understand it to any depth without road-testing.

But to this particular teacher personality, being sure is the hallmark of a good teacher and any test risks doubt seeping in...

That creates a need for a critical third type in martial arts. The explorer. This is what the instructor mentioned above sees in my friend. Toby will listen, he will learn and absorb...and then he will test it. Sometimes at great personal risk, sometimes just with common sense and doubt. The skills he picks up will not just be learned-- they will be put in situations where they will succeed or fail or expand. (That is a huge problem with preserving arts: sometimes in the road test you find out not that they were less than you feared but they were bigger than you imagined, and that means that you never understood them at all. Humbling.)

Toby's teacher, like many extraordinary (as opposed to merely good) teachers, spent most of his training life as an explorer. Not just learning everything he could, but risking and testing and sometimes failing. What comes out of failure is often more compact, useful and truer than what went in.

So he sees Toby and he shares more, because the student and teacher personalities don't get it. They don't understand the awesome power and freedom of doubt. They think that training is about answers and proficiency and safety, and the explorers see it as about clarity. Answers are dependent on questions. Proficiency can (read "Deep Survival") hamper adaptability. In a world with a 100% death rate safety is and always has been a complete illusion.

The explorers get a lot of shit, but they are the ones who will carry a living thing into the next generation.

The Big Scenario Training Post

This should probably be a book, honestly. Maybe an e-book. I'll keep you posted.

Scenarios are an attempt at what Tony Blauer calls the constant search for the best fake stuff out there. All training is fake. If you are learning to send people to the hospital and people don't GO to the hospital, every rep of skill is combined with a rep of a bad safety habit. That's just the way it is.

At the most primitive level, scenario training involves bad guys in armor and a cluttered/realistic environment. The armor lets the student unload. The environment either lets the student be creative or points out that they aren't creative and their brain is stuck. But that's primitive, because it still deals with the problem as if it were one of physical skills.

So here are some points:

1) Scenario training always has a purpose. This is an explicit purpose, and one chosen in advance. To face a common or deep fear. To force a student to keep fighting. To help them see a developing situation. To test their legal judgment or tactical awareness. To find the little part that still thinks this fighting like a comic book-- that little part will get them killed.

2) The best purposes are tailored to the student. If I know you can fight, I will test whether you can tell when to fight. Whether you have the capacity to run when it is prudent. Whether you realize that crashing out of a ring of threats to escape is a qualitatively different skill than defeating a threat. If you have given me a clue that you have doubts about your ability to injure, I will put you in a scenario where you have to unload...and I will describe, probably graphically, what you strikes would have done had I not been wearing armor.

3) It takes good role-players. Through a mask, the role-players must be able to show the difference between an inexperienced and hyper-adrenalized mugger and an old con who has done a hundred robberies. The students should be able to glance at you (in full armor) and get a vibe that you are young or old, male or female or whatever you need to project.

4) The role-players have to be sensitive as well. Not in the "I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings" sense. Screw that. Part of being a bad guy is taking delight in hurting people at their most emotionally vulnerable points. By sensitivity I mean something that's a little hard to explain without an example. Sunday, one of the students, Robert, just kept moving while I was trying to incite a riot. I could tell by my own feelings that there wasn't enough of a hook there for a bad guy to work himself into the right kind of frenzy. If I had been insensitive I might have escalated it where a real threat wouldn't, and inadvertently punished Robert for a good tactic. That's bad training. Good tactics should be rewarded.

5) You have to guard against 'weirdness creep'. There are a handful of things that are likely to happen. I keep a list of 25 good scenarios with me. For the students, these are cool and new. I've done each of them dozens of times. Role players get bored. So what do role players do? They have to fight the tendency to make the situations more 'interesting' read: weird. If I didn't guard against this, we'd have scenarios with trained ocelots and laser-guided sharks.

6) The debriefing after each scenario is a special skill. The student should do most of the talking, not the instructor (DO NOT use a group of students to show off your own tactical intelligence. Primarily, because it is useless for the student. Secondarily, because no matter how many times you have trained the scenario, when the shit hits the fan for real, you might do no better than anyone else. Accept it. Grow up.) Thanks to Peter Breton, who sent an awesome e-mail about his own scenario, I'll be looking at these from both a tactical (including legal) and a strategic level, something I've usually glossed over in the past.

7) Don't do too many scenarios. Like the first black belt test, only the first scenario really shows you what the adrenaline will do. If you put someone through four or five, the last few are run like a game. The novelty wears off. A peer jury helps a lot. Having friends who you have to convince that you did the right thing puts some social pressure (and the attendant neurohormone cascade) on the student. But it still turns into a game. My ideal rhythm is one scenario in the morning probing for weaknesses and a scenario targeted at those weaknesses in the afternoon.

8) Knowing it is a scenario makes people do unnatural things. Confronted by a Monkey Dancer in a bar, leaving is sensible. People leave in a scenario who don't leave in real life (and people step in who wouldn't in real life). That is stuff for the debrief.

Above all, be safe and learn stuff.

Damn

Boston is special.

The second day of the seminar went really well, and each time I learn more about how to present scenarios. That would be a whole huge post, maybe a book. Lots of scenario trainers work a scenario to test or draw out martial skills. That's a very different, limited animal than scenarios that test judgment and global awareness.

Anyway, the scenarios were a blast in a nightclub with a full bar and pool tables and restrooms with diamond plate on the walls (that can leave a mark). We had the privilege of Jamie, an experienced bar manager, explaining how he read the line when checking IDs at the door, mirroring timing and the flow of adrenaline... good stuff. Excellent fighters from Chris Dammann and David Weiss' crew, who took the drills and ran with them, increasing intensity and making stuff their own. Exactly the way it should be.

Bill Giovannucci's hero genes came out. That man needs to be a bodyguard when he grows up.

It's been a great weekend-- nargilah and cannolli and brawling and talk; philosophy and tactics and teaching. Pushed some buttons, which is important in scenario training, and found a few more of my own.

Then, to top it off, randomly ran into Dave Castoldi while looking to get some equipment. Wound up practicing knife defenses with one of the Grand Old Men of Small Circle Jujitsu in a store... that was pretty damn cool.

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Added Kasey's blog to the bar on the side. He's the complete package, with dan ranks in traditional, classical and sport arts as well as street experience (enforcement and SWAT). Plus, he's a blast to have a cigar with.

Big Mess

I like messy. That's good, because messy is the natural environment of life. We don't become humans in pristine test tubes but in liquid-filled icky wombs. Some people learn facts in well-ordered classrooms, but it pales besides the applications that they learn in the wind and weather and interference of the real world.

Life is messy. Conflict and violence are supremely messy-- and I'm okay with that. When you try to learn how to deal with violence (the essence of messy chaos) in the pristine setting of a training hall, you're missing the point. You (or your instructors) limit the chaos so that the solutions are cleaner and clearer so that you will feel more certain and safer. That's wrong. Hugely wrong on many levels, because the heart of violence is in the mess.

If we have seen, time and again, some of the world's most well trained martial artists in a real fight rolling on the floor throwing wild punches, where is the value in pretending that doesn't happen? What about getting really good at rolling on the floor and throwing wild punches? If you are going to go all cave man anyway, why not become the Michelangelo of cavemen?

Which isn't to say that there is anything wrong with martial traditions or techniques. Most work just fine... but only for the person who has adapted to the chaos and fear and adrenaline. If you are in denial about those, not only will you fail in accessing your awesome martial arts skillz... but you won't even succeed in fighting like a coordinated chimp.

But in that chaos, if you accept it and then embrace it, are an infinite number of tools and opportunities. The world is a big place and full of many things. Almost all of those things are gifts if you learn to see them and use them. The cluttered floors and cramped spaces of the real world are obstacles and shields and striking surfaces, if you embrace them. They are hazards if you ignore them. The wild attack pattern, whether of a drunk or someone trained differently, are easy to misdirect if you use them... and pathetic excuses for getting your ass kicked ("He attacked me wrong!") if you do not.

Even failure: once upon a time I was demonstrating a headlock escape on Andre Scott. Dre was a bodybuilder, enormously strong, an effective and well-respected sergeant...and the technique was totally ineffective. What I had been taught didn't work with a body-builder who 'posed' and turned his head away. So I had to look at what was right there, and what was obvious in the mess was faster and more efficient that the trained technique.

IF you can work with chaos, IF you can work with variables, IF you can see what is in front of your face and adapt to it, you can do amazing things.

If not, if you insist that the world conform to your sterile training, you will likely fail.

Messy is fun. Embrace the mess.

The Living Room

Sitting in the Living Room, a restaurant/bar in Boston. It's on the edge where the North End meets the waterfront. It's dead quiet this time of day, rocking at night. A good place to sit on a couch, drink coffee, and get some work done.

David sent me the galleys for "Facing Violence". Almost done today. Some quibbles with words and punctuation, realizing how much more I know about some of this stuff (especially legal articulation) than made it into the book... That's fine, in a way. Makes the seminars more valuable.

I very much like the section on avoidance and de-escalation, particularly dealing with dangerous ground and cultures or subcultures where you don't know the rules. One of the people who read an early draft shared the other day that the section turned out invaluable in a certain country in Africa where he was working. Book won't be out for seven months and it may have already saved a life. I'm pretty pumped. I did my happy finger dance.

Later tonight, meeting friends at a Narghila bar in the University District. All-day classes tomorrow and Sunday. The scenario day looks full. Right on the edge of too many. Hoping we don't get walk-ons, because I hate turning people away. Note to self: Scenario days shouldn't have the location posted.

Still plenty of space for tomorrow, however, the 'easy' day. Several are repeats as well, so I'll work in more of the advanced stuff I'd planned for Sunday. It should work out well.

K had a brilliant idea. Her belly-dancing classes have usually been set up as a limited days/weeks/hours class for a specific period and a specific purpose, e.g. a Monday and Wednesday nights from 1900-2000 for eight weeks (16 hours) to learn Algerian Tribal Dance Basics. Something like that.

It works around a lot of the issues I have with long-term training. It makes it easy to be modular: Eight hours for Conflict Communications. Four hours for violence dynamics. Menu of building-block classes at one hour per item. Specific immersion classes.

The idea deserves more thought, but it's something I could see doing as a regular thing. Take advantage of the good parts of dojo training while avoiding many of the problems.

Needs more thought.