2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perceptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agreement and Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Juggling Unknowns

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretenders

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

When are you ready to teach?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memories and Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Cups of Coffee

Thinking today of an unexpected cup in an unexpected place.

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

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

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

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


******

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

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

A Short Incident

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Many Leveled Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't just dream.

"Where Did You Learn This?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World

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

Wolves prey on the sheep.

Sheepdog protect sheep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dimensions

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Price

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's always a price.

What to do...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bullshit versus Bullshit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Don't Need MY Permission

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

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

So what's stopping you? You.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Permission

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

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

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

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

You have permission to defend yourself.

You have permission to be rude.

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

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

You have permission to act.

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

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

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

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

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

Rory

The Real Deal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pain makes believers"- Wally Jay

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

Matrix, Violence and an Invitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for the Skeleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll see.