Chunks

Home. Good times. Relaxing. Sitting at Jett Burger, possibly my favorite diner. Trucker food with a Hawaiian influence. The girl is going to her state-mandated driving course, so we've been going out to breakfast some  mornings.  It's good daddy-daughter time.


Not a lot of writing since I got home.  A very small part of that has been sending the laptop in for an upgrade.  But that gave me time to think about what I wasn't writing and why.  The words 'writer's block' crossed my mind...and I knew immediately it was a bullshit excuse.


Writing is a job.  It is not waiting for some mysterious force to smack you upside the head with inspiration.  It is a job and you do a job by working. Sit down.  Write words.  That simple.  Writer's block isn't what is going on.  What's going on is an overwhelming mass of projects.  It's like a huge pile of dirty dishes in the sink.  You want to believe that if you just don't look at them, they will magically go away.  But that's not how life works.  You do the dishes.  One at a time.  Until you are done.


The project pile is big.
- Review the Facing Violence DVD.  It's been out for a month and I haven't even seen it.  My publisher wants me to write some nice words and increase the buzz.
- Review the rough cut of the Logic of Violence DVD to make editing suggestions and see what needs to be reshot.
- The producer wants a companion DVD to the Update of the Drills manual.  I think it's ambitious, maybe unworkable, especially in one day of shooting.  There are easier, quicker projects that I think would lend themselves to video better, like, "Everything There is to Know About Jointlocks"
-The collaboration ball is in my court and I am dreading it.  The tight, concise and complete 150 page work that I sent to get some filler stories and clarification came back as a 450 page tome that reeks of insecurity and advertising.  This won't be editing so much as axe work and feelings will get hurt.
- The Curriculum is half lesson plan and half mission statement.  Maybe not for publishing.  It will include:

             Philosophy (teaching and fighting)

             Concepts (how operators think)

              Principles (the physics that make other things work)

              Building Blocks (classes of technique

             Training methods

             Teaching methods/advice

- A manual for Martial artists on how to teach LEOs
- A collection of some of the horrible stories I told my children.  To be published under a pseudonym. Not going to use my children's real names in a book.
- More articles for CCM magazine
- The secret pseudonymous nonfiction project
- Work out the mechanics of setting up 4x week-long intensive courses for next year.
-An on-line writer's course where it appears that they promised the one course I said i couldn't pull off on an e-mail format.


Lots to do.  Have to get on it.  One chunk at a time.

Edges

This is just about edges.  Maybe someday I'll be ready to write about lines.

There is only so much your body can do.  But you can never tell, I can never tell, at least, when the edge is psychological and when it is truly the physical edge.  Take getting strangled unconscious.  The progression, for me, is a rushing noise in my ears.  Then my vision starts to tunnel, collapsing from the side, sometimes with a red rim, sometimes black.  Not sure why.  Then I hear a single high-pitched note.  Then I pass out.

I'm pretty sure that's a real, physical threshold... but I've heard of people going unconscious in as little as three seconds.  And that may not be physically possible.  I read once that during the French revolutions one of the scientists timed how long the head tried to talk after a decapitation and got something like 5-10 seconds. I can't believe any strangle would be more efficient than a beheading.  And I once saw a guy I barely tapped swear he was KO'd... but he always came up with some excuse to get out of any physical training.  I think it was ego defense, not unconsciousness.

We used to do a drill called the "Chinese Chair." The first time I did it only two of us finished a whole minute and neither of us could walk afterwards.  Our coach said of the people that collapsed that if they could walk afterwards, their minds gave out, not their legs.

So, edges.  That edge when you've been concussed and you know you need to finish things now before you pass out.  I assume it's like the edge where you are bleeding out, but I've never lost that much blood.

Total muscle failure in your fingers, but you are 80 feet or more up a cliff and can't go down.  You must finish.  And that was conditioned by, of all things, milking cows.  You don't stop with muscle failure.  You stop only when the cow is done or she will develop mastitis.

The edge where you haven't slept in 30 hours and you get the page.  No way out.  Another eight hours of focused... it's not alertness.  Part of your brain is dead.  But it is a focused determination.  Zombie stuff.

Joe, with blisters popped, exhausted, thirty miles into a mountain hike.  Locked on to the edge, one foot forward, other foot forward.  The whole world just focused pain and repetition.

Belaying as hypothermia sets in.  So cold the shivers can only be called convulsions.  Whole body spasms but the grip has to be tight.

Is pain a mental edge or a physical edge?  Taser felt pretty absolute... But people have learned to function.  Not well or doing anything complex, maybe.  And I've seen two people with the same physical injury, and one was completely incapacitated and the other just got to work.

You find edges, they change.  And they change when you avoid them too.

19 Hours to Home

Haven't been writing much.  Or sleeping for that matter.  Should be home in nineteen hours.  Have to schedule some interviews, get some writing done, review the videos.  And definitely BBQ.  Family time. Create the webpages for Colorado and Nevada seminars in July.

Things I want to write about:

• Debrief the trip.   Met some really cool people, got to do some very cool things.
• Plans for 2013
• Why I avoid groups (just for the record I have only ever voluntarily joined two FB groups, every other one I was named to without my permission)
• Brainstorm a complete curriculum

Still lots of travel coming up.  Need to work on my time management.  Or, maybe, take a day or two and just be.

Big Year

The difference between Baghdad and Athens is when a favorite team scores a point in soccer (sorry, football) in Athens, the banging is from fireworks, not AK fire.  It got pretty loud last night.

It's only half-way through and already it has been a big year.  Counting the US and Scotland-as-separate-from-the-UK, seven countries and two more (possibly three or more) scheduled.  I've been completely nervous a few times: Playing with one of the best sport guys in the world (and his cop buddies); Playing with a group-who-shall-not-be-named.  And, strangely, a pure lecture format. Nervous.  But when we played, it all worked out.  Old man still has a little game.

Found out some details and background on some of the people who ask me back.  I generally don't ask too many questions.  Satisfy myself that the client is one of the good guys and get to work... but people talk when they like you.  Some explicit-- 30 million euros is a lot of ransom.  Some implicit-- you set up a meeting with who?  Who are you really?  I don't need to know...

Loving the travel. Loving meeting the people. Loving getting information out to the people I consider the good guys.  Hoping they are willing and able to adapt the information and run with it and make it their own.  But that's just what any decent instructor wishes.

Life is good.

The Company of Men

I know that sounds gender specific, but it isn't.

In Conflict Communication, we reveal a very simple truth: If you have no friends, or all of your friends are assholes... you're an asshole.  That's the only way it works.

None of us truly see ourselves.  Any thinking person has insecurities.  Every time I teach I hit the wall:  "I don't know this person, I don't know what she will face.  Anything I know is about me in my environment... who the hell do I think I am?  Why am I even..."

But I look at my friends.  The people I can talk to.  The ones who understand and listen and, back when that was the job, would just assume that I would take point.  Not sure whether to put names or descriptions or nothing right here.  There are good guys and (former) bad guys.  Specialists in extremely rarefied worlds.  Tough and smart and skilled.  Women (since I brought up gender) who know more about killing and the price and the lines than most instructors could ever dream. Far more than I ever will.

We share a glass, and we share stories...and somewhere in there we all feel slightly at home.  Because someone can understand and know.  Things that we have to talk around or ignore with others.

I have no great darkness.  Nothing special.  And I am always slightly in awe of the quality of people willing to spend time with me.

It can never be completely objective, but if I want to know who I am, if I feel doubt... the answers are in the company I keep.

Lecture

Two days.  Sixteen hours of solid lecture.  Only one of the audience members was a native English speaker...

It went beautifully.  I can't explain it.  Sitting that long and listening would have put me to sleep.  Maybe because the material is so familiar.  Not sure.  But I am used to mixing the data with the physical application.  It works.  It makes sense to me.

Andraz said no.  "These are tough guys.  They train all the time.  They don't need more of that.  They need to know what they are training for."  I wasn't sure, and that was largely because it was a new idea, outside of my comfort zone... which was reason enough to do it.

Sixteen hours.  More students the second day than the first as word spread.  And all done in a University lecture hall with state of the art AV equipment.  None of which could I run by myself, since my Slovene, even after five days is pretty much limited to 'please' 'thank you' 'good' (although I may have accidentally told a waitress she was pretty while trying to say the coffee was good) and 'hello.'

This picture was before the first day's lecture.  I definitely should have packed the tweed jacket with the leather elbows.

First day was Violence Dynamics and Context of Violence.  Second day was Conflict Communications (including the specialty modules on Crisis Communication with the Mentally Ill and Emotionally Disturbed; and Violence) and "Logic of Violence".  The feedback has been excellent.

Who knew using just words could work?

A.C.T.

Very last day in Israel, Tal brought me to meet Alex and Noah of ACT.  I spent the next few hours playing with Alex.  It was a blast.  And I learned a lot.  The guys at ACT have done something impressive.  I don’t know exactly how (it feels like probably fiberglass rods, flexed and bonded with padding) but they have made training weapons very close to real hand-and-a-half swords, katana, bolo machetes, and knives.  They match the real dimensions, even flex like the real thing.  Maybe a bit light, but Alex assures me they are the exact weight as well…

And safe to go full contact with.  You’ll get some bruises and you definitely need eye protection, but you can go at it as hard as you are willing.  And Alex is good.  He’s been doing this long enough that his ranging is superb, he doesn’t telegraph, and he finds most people, including me, predictable.

I found some of my own blind spots and training artifacts.  That’s why they’re called blindspots—you can’t see them.  Not until they get pointed out.

Years of playing with a boken (I don’t like shinai—too long, too straight, too light-- shinai just feel wrong) has left a habit.  Not only do I pull a little bit, but I slow down about the last third of my strike so I can stop without serious injury.  People who I usually play with don’t notice it ( I didn’t notice it, it wasn’t conscious).  Alex did, and he exploited it ruthlessly.  And it gave him a fraction of a second’s edge.  When the situation was a multiple attack (rarely a combination but more often an attack missed but it loads the muscles for a natural second attack without wasting time) the small pieces of time compounded, and all to the advantage of the guy who played with the most realistically.

Said it before, but making things safe screws up more than your commitment.  It also screws up your distancing and timing.

It’s not real, of course.  No pain or screaming or blood.  And that makes anything you can do in play suspect.  Real sharp thing mean real blood and real fear.  Any safe or toy weapon does not show what you can do, but only what you might be able to do in a world where you are fearless.  Going in on a training knife is to going in on a knife as walking a length of 2x4 on the ground is to walking the same length suspended between 15 storey buildings.

Not the same.  Even if the physical skills are the same, the events are profoundly different.

And Alex had some questions.  What ends a fight with a blade?  He can’t imagine being stabbed and simply not knowing it… but it’s common.  So do you stop the match at a good chest thrust?  Alex reasoned that if the hands are hit, the pain is so intense… but I’ve seen threats continue, completely oblivious, with shattered hands.  Lawrence shared a story in “Campfire Tales” of one of his threats who punched a metal rail so hard that it shattered the bones in the hand so that they were sticking out, and he just kept punching.  No idea he was injured until well after he was cuffed.

For good or ill, the adrenaline in training will never quite be the same as in real life and there is a possibility that any guess will be profoundly, catastrophically wrong.

Great time playing with great people.

A good last day in a beautiful country.

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

Forty hours on a few naps later found me in Slovenia.  Beautiful.  Lakes, mountains.  Great people (Andraz and Lara and Lucas) and great conversation.  And I ate horse.

Then sleep.  Now, sitting on the deck overlooking the Adriatic. Early morning. I’ll post this when I can.

The Frustration of El Halev

El Halev is a non-profit organization in Jerusalem.  It offers classes (various martial arts, WSD and IMPACT) and even counseling and acupuncture.  It is focused on the people who are at the top of the list to be victimized: "...women, teens, children, seniors and people with special needs..."

And the instructors know that population, and know what they face very, very well.  El Halev are good people and they are doing good and important work.  (If you are jaded and wander around their website you will find words that bug you. 'Empower' for instance has been co-opted by so many flakes it is sometimes hard to read.  Just remember that it was co-opted because it was such an accurate expression.  It's not a platitude at El Halev.)

I had twelve hours there and was able to teach two classes...and it wasn't enough.  And that was the frustration.

I'm not an expert in Women's Self-Defense (WSD).  I can't be.  I've never been a woman.  I've never faced the type of violence that women face. Ambushes in the jail shared some similarities, but they were not the same, neither in purpose nor in dynamics, of the violence that women face. The only things that I can really offer are solid information on how the perpetrators act and think and some advice on training-- particularly how to do high-end training safely and effectively.

Teaching most SD seminars, there is very little sense of urgency.  You look over the class and see a roomful of martial athletes and a few old men who carry themselves unnaturally well for their age.  Their victim profiles are negligible.  I will give them a lot of information to help put their training into context.  If a bad thing happens, they will have a better chance, but it is relatively unlikely.

With El Halev students, there is no such luxury.  The people in those rooms are vulnerable.  And the leadership is not only seeking out the people that most need the skills (most martial arts instructors get the people looking for the skills and those are almost never the people who truly need them), the instructors at El Halev are consciously and effectively making a place where the vulnerable feel safe to come and to learn.

Twelve hours.  Eight for students, four for instructors.  It wasn't enough.  Introduction to Violence is a lot of material. Some physical, some mental...but every twenty minutes a series of questions would come up and the answers were in entire programs, like Conflict Communications or Logic of Violence. The students needed everything, the full package.  There was no way to tell what tiny piece of information a student might need to survive.

It was frustrating and scary.  A lot like teaching cops, actually.  Because you know not just that the students will use it, but that they will need it.  The quality of your material and your ability to transmit it will affect who will live, and how they will live physically and emotionally, forever.  I gave it all the energy I had... but it was frustrating.  I wanted to give it all.  Because they need it.  And, if Jill (one of the senior instructors) is representative, the core of El Halev is smart and strong and stubborn enough to take anything I can offer, understand it, adapt it and make it into what they need for their purposes.  And that is the goal.

And there was one other frustration, a personal one:  They had a lot to teach me about aspects of violence I know little about.  It was a community of experts and there simply wasn't enough time to pick their brains properly

Eye Contact

A lot of comments on the last post are extremely valuable.  There is a lot of input on social rules for eye contact and there are profound gender differences and cultural differences.  Your history and depth of understanding will deeply affect how you use eye contact for communication. It is huge.

But it's not just an external thing.  Absolutely, people will read a message in my eye contact.  As Mac has been known to say, "I want them to look in my eyes and see the price of admission."  With a glance, certain people can raise the stakes beyond what all but the craziest are willing to pay.  Different contact, different message.

But eye contact also sends a message to yourself.  The way you look at the world not only affects how you see but affects how the world responds, it affects what does and doesn't work.

In the external/communication analysis of eye contact, you send a message:
Downcast eyes: "I am no threat to you.  You have no need to hurt me.  Please don't hurt me."
Interested look at the face: "You are interesting and I am learning."
Hard look in the eyes: "I am bigger and stronger.  I am the boss here."
Not looking, but not downcast: "You are not the most important thing in my world.  You are no threat to me."

In the internal world, the same levels of eye contact do something to you as well.
Downcast eyes: Not just signal meekness but force you to be reactive.  Partially physically, but mostly emotionally, the downcast eyes completely cede initiative.  Anything you do from here will be in response, not an action.  Not finding the words... communication aside, if you can't make eye contact (some auties excepted) lowering your eyes internally turns you into the kind of person who will not act.  It is not just a sign of passivity, it makes you passive.
Interested look in the face: Makes you interested and curious.  It opens your perception and helps you quit being self-centered.
Hard look in the eyes: Sets you to take control of your world.  Turns you into the kind of person who will assert him or herself.  To an extent, eye contact is a sign of assertiveness, but it is also a step to becoming assertive.
Not looking but not downcast: Relaxes you.  By removing the personal element, the need to prove, it turns you into the kind of person for whom this (whatever 'this' is, including various forms of violence) is just a job.  Something to be done efficiently.

These aren't automatic, but the point is that eye contact (like posture and breathing and other things) doesn't just change the way the world sees you.  It literally changes who you are.

To NRY's point-- when you have a group that have the dominance games down, who enjoy rolling, if you are paying attention you will notice all kinds of inefficiencies creeping in, most of them types of signals.  Some people actually believe that pulling back your fist makes the punch stronger and I've heard some pretty detailed, mathematical sounding excuses for it... but as near as I can tell the real purpose is to give the other monkey just enough time to turn this into the kind of contest that might impress a chimpanzee female.  There are aspects of exploiting momentum that are very hard for young men to do because in order to send the dominance signal and show their strength, they have to piss away the momentum they are trying to exploit.

I want them to be hunters, not fighters.  To be beyond any concept of contest.  It's a different level than merely 'flipping the switch.'  Maija sent me an e-mail a long time ago pointing me at an article.  I can't remember who wrote it and I'm basically too happy right now (G&T on a Mediterranean beach with local calamari and shrimp stirfry on the way) to search through old e-mails or I'd link it.  But the guy used the old :
Unconscious Incompetence
Conscious Incompetence
Conscious Competence
Unconscious Competence
pattern

But he added another layer that made perfect sense to me, a consciously unconscious competence.  You don't have to think about what you are doing, but you are monitoring it, aware of all the surrounding stuff, making decisions...but it doesn't interfere with the physicality of it.

You see it sometimes in a really good instructor who is sparring one of his students while watching the others.  He stays smooth and relaxed, doesn't get tense, if anything spars better than when he is focussed and, the weird part, if the student he is sparring does something dangerous, the instructor just drops him without engaging at all on an emotional level OR if he sees the students he is watching do something unsafe, he can step away from his own sparring session in such a way that he doesn't get touched and sometimes his 'opponent' even loses balance as if it were nothing.  Because, internally, it is nothing.

IF you can get to the place where none of this is important (and that's a big if) your efficiency goes off the charts.  Not just that you are less likely to subconsciously communicate instead of remove, but also because you are more likely to see the real situation, the real problem and the real goal...not your internal interpretations.

Sorry if this sounds a little outside the ballpark, but there are some huge epiphanies on that edge and this is one of them.

No Universals

I got to talk to CC.  An instructor here.  Does stuff.  Don't worry about it. He was talking about the necessity of getting students to make eye contact when they fight.  I usually teach the necessity of breaking eye contact. Hmmmm.

It's not even a disagreement and this is one thing (among many) that you really must understand in order to teach self-defense.  And I need to look at it harder as well.  I don't just teach a homogenous group (officers) any more.  I teach different people, many different people and each have skills and weaknesses, strengths as well as training holes.

Generally, I need to teach people to break eye contact.  Generally, CC needs to teach people to make eye contact.

CC teaches a wide variety of people.  Rank beginner up to some pretty specialized groups.  Teaching beginners, you have to break down a lot of conditioning.  Years and decades of being told not to be rude. Don't swear, don't spit, don't use nasty words and don't touch people inappropriately.  Almost everything that falls under the umbrella of self-defense is rude.  Injuring people is very inappropriate physical contact.  Setting boundaries is yelling at strangers.  CC notices, "How can you hit someone if you can't even look him in the eye?"  Perfectly valid.  Very true.

My usual student profile is very different.  The people who train with me tend to be experienced martial artists who are just realizing how little they know of violence.  One of the biggest hurdles to get them through is to break them of the habit of trying to win a game.  Most are trying to dominate an opponent, not neutralize a threat.  They fight, and fighting is extremely inefficient.  Taking a threat down-- whether deadly force or handcuffing or shoving to escape-- can be extremely efficient.  Because you don't care, it is just a job.  I know I have written it before, but there is a qualitative difference between the way a farmer butchers a hog and the way the same farmer will fight a person.

• You don't need to get angry
• You have a reason, you don't need a justification (you don't need to feel that it is a 'bad hog')
• You don't give it a chance
• You never let it be a fight
• You are not trying to teach the hog a lesson
• It is not a form of communication

You can bypass all this stuff with humans, just like with animals-- and it doesn't have to be lethal.  Simply efficient.  But most can't because we are so wired to treat interpersonal violence as some form of dominance game or rules enforcement.  It becomes about messages.

Because it is about communication, it is inherently inefficient at simply removing the threat.  If you have trained hard for years at a system of fighting, it probably hurts your feelings and threatens your identity that I call it inefficient.  I'm sorry for that, but the message is no less true and no less important-- pick the scariest baddest martial artist in the world.  Could you beat him in a fight?  Probably not.  Could you incapacitate him in under a second (more, with set-up time)?  If you can't, that is a failure of either imagination or understanding, having your brain locked into the irrational belief that fighting and removing a threat are the same thing.  If they are on the same continuum, you may be missing some huge truths.

So for my student profile, breaking eye contact is a first step to making this transition.  For CC, making and maintaining eye contact is a first step to being able to fight.  For people who have fought for a long time, breaking eye contact is a first step to another level.

It's not just here, and I have to be careful.  When I am teaching to one student or one group of students, the message may be entirely wrong for a different group, and they may be in the same class.  The class last night, this morning and the one coming up in thirty minutes are 80% female.  A lot of the material, particularly on adrenaline effects, are different for men than for women.  Usually, I teach the male effects and then the female differences as a coda.  (And had a great example of it after scenarios earlier today.) For this population, I should do it the other way.  But it is hard to remember.

Different people need to be taught different things.  It is getting more and more obvious that in this field you must teach the student, not the subject matter.

Questions That Bug Me

A little off-topic, but in a comment long ago, someone asked about the questions that keep me up at night.  Here are four. And none of them are all that important.

1) Why is it that even in languages written from right to left, the numbers are written from left to right?  First noticed it inBaghdad.  One of my translators said that numbers are written from left to right in all languages.  True?  Don't know.  Possibly, if the early writers thought of 24 as 'four and twenty' the flow would be in the same direction as the writing... but that's not how they do it in Hebrew, at least.  My memory is fuzzy on Arabic.

2) In the King James version of the Bible, god is addressed in the informal.  'Thee' and 'thine' are the familiar versions, 'you' and 'yours' the formal or plural.  It is, you will note, 'your majesty' or 'your grace' when addressing upper nobility.  It appears that god is addressed as an equal throughout.

A conscious decision to make a point?  An artifact of translating from other sources?  Possibly the grammatical rules at the time are not as I was taught?

3) Explosive power decreases by the cube of the difference.  In other words, to double the blast radius doubling the powder won't work.  Nor will squaring it.  You have to cube it.  It's based on the formula for the volume of a sphere, 4/3 x pi x r cubed.  (Really sucks not to be able to do superscript and notation.)  Which makes sense.  The force just doesn't increase a line or increase the surface area.  The force has to fill the whole sphere.

So why does gravity decrease as a square function?  Does that imply that it only acts on the surface of a sphere (where the two masses would be points) and doesn't fill the void in between?  A friend (Hey, Justin!) pointed out that this is true for other forms of radiation, such as light, as well.  Which to my mind broadens the question, not answers it.

4) Was the lance a one-shot weapon?  I'm not talking medieval jousts, but like lancers during the Napoleonic wars, cavalrymen mowing down infantry soldiers.  This is what I can't figure out:
Assuming a heavy horse gallops at about 22 mph (28 would, according to one source be the max; a quarterhorse approaches 40mph at short distance) the lancer is going to stick a relatively immobile target that has weight and mass.  The second the tip of the spear drops, which it will either due to the threat falling or because (relatively) the horse keeps going and the rider is above the target, that lance becomes an enormous lever arm.

Carried under the arm, like a joust (except impaling instead of blunted so the tip stops)  that's eight feet at least of leverage applied with the weight of the target at 22mph to just under your shoulder.  Dislocation or ejection?  Carried underhand, that same leverage is applied in a rotation on the same axis as some of the better wristlocks.  Overhand doesn't seem to be a problem but at least one source, (I believe it was "The Twilight Lords" about the Desmond Rebellions) asserted that the overhand position with the lance disappeared when stirrups were introduced.

So did lancers just stick people and drop the lance and revert to a secondary weapon?  Does that imply that the most expensive unit on the battlefield was essentially a single-shot?  Does that make sense?  Or was there some technique to stab and recover that I haven't been able to find?

This is the stuff I think about. None of these are important, but if you want to bang your heads against them, go for it.

Endstate

Mike Ball said, "I think I should teach self-defense the way I teach maths.  I start with an overview of the syllabus so that the students know where this is going to go..."

Mike's going to write a paper on that, so I won't get into it, but that one sentence pinged.  Hard.  If I were to write down what I wanted a student to become, where this was all supposed to go...

I don't most times because I get hung up on filling holes ("Those are great body mechanics, but the require more space that you can get under assault.") or the big mysteries ("Flipping the switch is the most important thing, can it really, truly be taught?")

So lets bring it down a notch.  Or up.  Where is this all supposed to go?

I want the students to be able to recover from shock, to deal with being outmatched physically.  I want them under anything but the most extreme circumstances to be able to pull a 'Bill the Electrician' and say, "Yeah, I seen this kinda thing before." (Very obscure reference).  To not just know the tools, but to understand them (and you can know an awful lot and understand nothing.)  And to understand the problem.

I want taking care of oneself to be recognized as one of the most natural things in the world and to be approached and understood and done with the minimum of artificial monkey-level bullshit gumming up the works.

It may be challenging.  It may be scary and dangerous and doomed.  But survival isn't difficult or complicated, not until we make it so...and then the complications make it less survivable.

Need to work on it, cleaning it up, defining terms, drawing a clear and specific mental picture... but this is the right question at this time.  Thanks, Mike.

I Find Things On My Own

Yesterday was the rest day.  A train ride, with a little writing on the way, and coffee.  Rafal met me at the train station in Edinburgh, then a quick drop off to Mick's flat before Raf headed to work...

Then, on my own.  Late afternoon.  Edinburgh.  Rushed to try to see Edinburgh Castle before it closed.  Then proceeded with the quest-- to drink a scotch in a scottish pub.  The Bow Bar did just fine.  Something over 200 whiskeys.  No, I did not try them all.  But had a nice conversation with the barkeep and tried a couple...and as I sat in the warm afternoon sun lazily sipping on a hitherto-unknown and very fine Islay I thought I spied... could it be?  No!  Surely not.  All of my native friends had assured me that there was no such thing, not in Edinburgh...

But on a terrace above Victoria street, something looked very much like a narghila.  And the sign said "Hanam's Kurdish and Middle-Eastern Food."  You gotta be kidding me.  It almost made me rush the scotch.  Almost.

Masaw- the yoghurt drink but sweeter than it was in Sulaymaniyah.
Gosht kebab- was what I had been looking for for some time.  Ground, spiced lamb pressed over a flat skewer and served with flat bread.

It was delicious, and for one scary moment I was incredibly homesick for a place I only lived for a year.  Helped a german couple order and then fell into conversation with Khalid, one of the customers.  We talked and smoked for an hour or more.

Then a walk back to the flat, where I slept very, very well.
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Today, Rafal took me with his kids to a pair of ruined castles-- Dirleton and Tantallon.  Beautiful.  Good place to hold off zombies.  Now I have to pack, sleep, and  wake up at 0400.  Piece of cake.

Rocking On

Whew.
Edinburgh, Swindon and the first of two days in Sheffield.  Great people.  The hosts, Mick Franklin, Andi Kidd, and Garry Smith have been extraordinary-- organized, friendly.  Down to earth and devastatingly  intelligent.  Wide experience in life, martially and the world.  Good times.

Naturally sleep deprived.  The sleep has been good when I get it, but there are so many better things to do, stories to hear, thoughts to explore... Some of which I won't remember until after I get some sleep.

The breakdown has been different than usual.  Sometimes trying to cram sixteen hours of material into a single day, or spreading things over two days.
So far-
Edinburgh-- Day one was trying to get the funnest elements of a two day class into a single day, taking it all the way up to environmental fighting and still keep it safe.  It felt so weird that I stayed after for three hours and went over more stuff with the people willing to stay, filling in holes that only really existed in my own mind.  A very long, solid day.  Followed up by talking until 0300.
         Day 2-- Conflict Communications.  Met a few people that couldn't make the first day.  Saw an old friend who was able to make it into town.  And left immediately from the class to catch a plane.

Swindon-- Met Andi, checked into the hotel, slept, woke and hit the ground running.  Day one we combined a condensed version of Ambushes and Thugs with the basic version of ConCom.  A ton of material.  And I set off a panic alarm groping for a light switch.  Sigh.  I'm a dork.  The second day, met with a very few hand-picked people at a nightclub called The Furnace.  Went over in as much detail as I could how to run scenarios.  Safety.  Purpose. Personnel.  Scenario design and execution.  Trouble shooting and emergencies.  Next year that club will be perfect for either or both an environmental fighting day or a scenario day.  Left right from the venue to the train station.

Sheffield-- First session was the same evening, so Garry met me at the train station, kept up a running tour-guide imitation all about the history of the area as we drove to his home and got some stew and coffee into me.  Then we went to play.  Good crew.  One of the karate guys was probably only 5'7" but  was one of the strongest men (great structure, too) that I've ever met.  One giant.  Wide variety of systems and styles.  Mike attended the Swindon session and came up here too, so I added one of the elements I skipped due to the compressed time.

And up this morning.  Another session tonight.  Looking forward to brawling in an equipment closet.

Quick Note from Scotland

Thirty hours on about 3-4 hours fitful sleep, then a two hour nap and finish the day and... 0700, in Scotland, having breakfast and sleep cycle fully adjusted to local time.  Feeling pretty good.

The first reviews on the "Facing Violence" DVDs are in.  I think David Silver did a great job editing it.  Three hours, covers most of the material.  I catch little places where I would phrase things differently.  It would have been nice to do a more packed mass brawl... but just for the short demo of an Articulation War exercise...  I think it's nice.
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Thought for the day-- a friend with great ideas, all the right stuff, wants to get into teaching.  She has the skills and the perspective that so many lack, but like a lot of people, the perfect is the enemy of the good.  She is stressing over how to explain everything so perfectly that everybody can understand it.  It's not just her.  A friend who will not be named (but his initials are probably Marc MacYoung) has been driving himself nuts over making the ConCom book perfect.

To all the people considering teaching: There's no such thing as perfect.  Not perfect knowledge and not perfect communication.  That's just the way it is.

But here's the cool part.  That's not just okay, that's good.  Because no matter what you teach, no matter who you are, you aren't perfect either.  Which means whatever you give them, some of your students can and will make it better.

Give them the best skeleton you can.  The stripped-down, clean foundation of good knowledge and let them put the flesh on it and some-- maybe only a few, maybe many-- will create something significantly better than you have.  Because you aren't all that.  Do your best, let it go.  Your students will amaze you.
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Three classes in Edinburgh over the next three days, then Swindon and Sheffield.  Then on to points south: Israel, Slovenia and Greece.
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The Drills manual rewrite for the print version is in.  The final edit for "Campfire Tales from Hell" done and the manuscript sent to M&D to do with as they will.  I'll let you know when it's up.  Great information.

Working on something fun, under a pseudonym-- a collection of some of the stories I told my kids when they were growing up.  It's very clear that I was a terrible father, but "Horrible Stories I told My Children" is pretty funny (at least to me, but I was there.)
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Edit-- After I posted this I did a quick search and it looks like "Campfire Tales" is up on Kindle and in various formats on SmashWords.  I'm excited.

A More Efficient Animal

Learning fighting (whether in the guise of self-defense or martial arts or combatives)* isn't that hard.  It's natural.  It is something your ancestors have done, largely without any training, since before there were people or even fish.

Often training is not about how to do things or learning more techniques.  It is about finding the conditioning, the subtle little leashes that keep us from doing what needs to be done.  We all have years of being told how to be good people and how to get along, and that training has conditioned deep.  The fact that you can say the words, "When the time comes..." doesn't appear to correlate at all with your ability to actually act.

So I say, frequently, "You've spent your whole life being a good person.  Don't forget that you are also a perfectly good animal."  Here's some of what that means:

• Use sight less and touch more.  Sight, especially focused sight, appears to be wired to higher brain functions.  It almost cried for analysis and decisions at a cognitive level.  And there is rarely time for that in a really bad situation.  So use your eyes less.  I'm aware this feeds into my bias as an instructor.  My preferred fighting range is too close to see clearly... but still.  Touch is faster reaction time than sight.  When you learn to read precursor movements (shifts in center of gravity and base) you can read what the threat is about to do, a fraction of a second of precognition.  Touch is harder to fool or misread than sight.  And, possibly most important, life is a contact sport.  Eyes are non-contact, distance sensors.  You can think you know things by sight that you can only truly understand by feel.
• Smell.  Related, but smell goes to the deepest part of the brain.  It seems (at least for me) to trigger an animalistic and predatory process when I consciously smell a threat.  And I'm sure being sniffed in a brawl is a little freaky from the other end.  Lastly, if you can smell, you are breathing.
• Forget your training.  Memory and cognition are possible the worst places to be in your head in a close-up brutal fight.  Merely trust that your training has become a natural part of the way you move. A feel, not a thought.  Let go.  Your training should inform your movement, not dictate it.
• Love moving.  Grappling or dance or trail running... do something that makes you move in random, unpredictable ways and do it because it feels so nice.  Not because you are supposed to. Not to please someone else or to stick to a workout plan.  Because it is fun.  Remember that your body is your second best toy.
• Trust your instincts.  Quit trying to explain them away.
• Be a different species.  As a rule, we hunt or butcher animals and we fight people.  Slaughtering a 1200 pound steer is fast and simple, it's just a chore.  Fighting a 1200 pound steer is unlikely to end well.  When you can apply that mindset to humans, you can move and act with ruthless efficiency, solving the real problem (he needs to be cuffed) and ignoring the imaginary/bullshit/social problem (he isn't acknowledging my authority).  It's not easy.  Our deepest conditioning and much of society is set up specifically to prevent people from doing this. But it is incredibly effective when you can reach this point.
• Sense weakness.  This is something all predators can do.  You're a predator.  It is more advanced in us.  Any animal can find the smallest, the weakest, the most dependent and helpless.  Almost any animal can read the dangers inherent in certain terrains.  Any human with a little training can know most of the vulnerable places in a human body and how to reach them.  With a little practice, you can read the vulnerabilities in stance, balance and momentum with a touch.  Where it gets interesting and very human is when you can learn to find the social and emotional vulnerabilities.  It is the same skill.
• Meet your lizard.  Most people in our society have never been pushed, not to the levels of hunger or fear or desperation or rage that can completely change a personality.  The lines are there.  You can all imagine being hungry enough to steal food from a stranger.  But there is a combination of hunger and fear and desperation where you will steal food from your mother or your children who are just as hungry.  You can choose to deny it if you want and I hope that you always live in a world where you can deny it... but that line is there.  It's a deep part of who you are.  Not dark or evil, just focused only on survival.  It's hard to truly meet this part.  As far as I've gone, there is still much, much more.  Many things I don't know.
• Don't deny your lizard.  Don't deny any part of you.  
• Humility.  Everything is meat.  Part of being an animal is never forgetting that.  There is always something out there that can and will eat you.  This is another big truth that civilization seems designed to deny.
• Enjoy.  Being an animal is a very rich and intense way to live.

* But not sport.  Any sport is a contest designed to test like against like and to measure the things we value as a species.  So sport measures strength and speed and endurance (just like any animals trying to win a herd of females) and certain elements of thought.  It does not measure and specifically forbids finding out who can go murderous quickest, who has least social conditioning, who can cheat first and hardest... All things incredibly valuable in every other type of physical conflict.

Inspiration

Garry Smith at the Academy of Self Defense in Sheffield (UK) has started a blog.  I added it to the Links down on the right.  If he writes regularly, it will creep up into the blog roll list.  Garry will be one of my hosts in the UK later this month, and that's part of the connection, but he wrote something brilliant that spoke directly to me.

I don't like the idea of getting old.  I doubt if it's the years as much as the mileage.  Old breaks ache, old dislocations click and catch.  Weird tremors, vision blurry in the eye that wasn't gouged...

Whining.  Sorry.

A big part of my fear of growing old is that I don't know anyone who came from my background who did so successfully.  'Growing old gracefully' always looked like something rich people with peaceful lives could do.  The ranch country where I grew up, the loggers and ranchers just worked (and drank) until they died.  None of the extraordinary fighters that I know are transitioning well.  Either still trying to play like a young man and racking up serious injuries or collapsing in memories of the days when they did something 'more real' and all too often that descends into alcohol too, a way to time travel and deal with what seems like boredom.

The best way to solve many problems is to find someone else who has solved it... but fighters growing old gracefully appear to be rare as purple pearls.  Greg Jones of San Soo appears to be doing the best, but his early life was pretty hellish and he really appreciates the relative peace.

Anyway, I've been trying to figure out how to grow old gracefully, and that might be the problem.

Garry wrote:
"I intend to grow old disgracefully..."

Yeah.  That right there.  Needs to be on a T-shirt.

A Note From Montreal

Montreal was a blast, and I was too busy to write about it.  Now is a good time to fix that.  A small group of good people, a beautiful city to walk in and free-range environmental brawling on a condemned floor of an historical building.  It may get better than that, but it was damn nice.

Marilene, of Monteregie Aikikai was one of the participants.  During one of the lunch breaks (did I mention some fantastic food in Montreal?) she shared a little diagram on a napkin.  A Venn diagram with the big circle marked 'dojo' and three intersecting circles within the big one labelled 'humans' 'etiquette' and 'technique.'  She was putting into pictures that creating a dojo (not just good training, but creating a good, long-term place to train) was finding a balance between the techniques, the people and the ritual.

People are important.  If they don't like each other, they won't train for very long.  Same if there is no trust for the instructor.  Or if things are unpleasant.  Absolutely true.  But the essence of any training, of any learning, is to grow and change.  Not just combatives or martial arts or any specific style.  Anything you put effort into should change you (though a lot of people seem to put a lot of effort into avoiding change.) But change is always uncomfortable and often hurts... especially if the intent is to prepare the people for ugly things.  And there are a lot of ways to make people feel better, and maybe most of them blunt the training.  But people are important.  No people, no training.

Etiquette is one of the interesting ones.  I always think of etiquette as 'forms of respect.'  I can feel absolute respect and show it by my cultural perspective and still be profoundly insulting.  Good intentions are no protection against acting like a jerk... (Worst example, from an SCA event decades ago, a person who can generously be described as a punk said, "I don't have to be polite.  I'm chivalrous.")  The etiquette in martial endeavors is special as well.  What we practice is (or should be) dangerous, and that goes for those who practice at well.  Every culture of dangerous people has a detailed etiquette, whether bushi, vikings, soldiers, prisoners or gang members.  There are some universals (I know of no violent subculture where touching someone else's weapons without permission is acceptable) but some of the rules are very culturally specific.

Etiquette can also mean the ritual, too, and sometimes that is a form of respect without the respect, or with the reason forgotten.

Lastly the techniques.  My opinion, but there is no way to learn this stuff without at least pain, and injury is usually a possibility.  The very nature of it makes it easy to drive away people.  Further, good combative/martial/SD training is intensively about violating social taboos.  Deliberately violating the rules of proper decorum by invading space, controlling behavior, causing injury...  So the very thing you are teaching violates standard etiquette.

It's an interesting model, and Marilene put a lot of thought into it.

And it gets more complicated.  Human and etiquette intersect and are influenced by relationships vertically (student/instructor), horizontally (student/student) and many degrees of laterally (insider/outsider and ally/enemy).  Technique taught (and this affects etiquette and people) also have to be scaled.  Safe and effective are almost inversely correlated.

Then the two big ones that affect all other things-- purpose and context.

Purpose, of course, has dimensions.  Self-defense?  Dueling?  Raiding and war?  Exercise?  Performance?  But there is also a sneaky one that for many people may be more important and more valuable but is almost always unconscious.  Is the purpose for the student (all of the examples-- SD, dueling, etc. are to make the student better at something)?  Or is the purpose for the relationships?  Is the training about the school, the system, or the hierarchy?  Subconscious, but if there's koolaid being served it is to preserve or create a relationship.  That focus sometimes rewards magical thinking and outlandish promises and false confidence.

The other, of course, is context.  In what world is the student expected to use the skills?  Only within the safe nest of the school?  In the modern world complete with cell phone cams and self-defense laws, traffic and blood-borne pathogens?  Or in an imaginary or reconstructed medieval world?

Complex idea.

Rolling Dirty

We were rolling dirty last night.
Dan started with a series of exercises working the ranges of the guard as a warm up (love it when an instructor warms up with skills instead of calisthenics) then had his students free flow some BJJ-based self-defense situationals.  Then he okayed letting them play with rolling dirty.

That's just grappling with the other stuff thrown in-- gouging and biting and striking and slamming people into walls.  A good time.

But it can be a weird experience.  Ideally, when you start a system it will show you a whole bunch of things you've never seen before.  It hits hard on the perception part of the last post.  That is a very good thing.  But almost all systems I've seen subtly transition from seeing all the cool stuff inside the system to learning not to see the opportunities outside the system.  Eyes are opened and then blindered.

Dirty rolling just reminds people of what they already knew:  Shit happens in a fight.

But it was weird, because of the way some perceived it.  And there were a few serious mental errors creeping in.

One said that many of his go-to techniques didn't work because of the unexpected knees and elbows flying in or the gouges... and that's not quite right.  It wasn't because of the strikes and gouges so much as the 'unexpected.'  That's important.  Getting hit and gouged is kind of natural in a fight.  Once it ceases to be unexpected, the go-to stuff tends to work again.

You also need to distinguish between damage and distraction.  Rolling dirty allows for things ranging from throat spiking (always pulled) to slapping and tickling.  With the exception of the percussion slap over the ear and the shotei/KGB slap, you can slap people all day.  And tickling?  Pure distraction.  But if you let yourself get distracted, it works.  And if it is novel, people tend to get distracted.

But the biggest point might be the easiest to miss.  Doing a style, blinders and all, can lock you in.  You get exposed to something else, it can seem like the new stuff is better because when you were doing BJJ or judo or whatever it was relatively easy (in your comfort zone, expected problems) and suddenly stuff doesn't work... It 's natural to think that the dirty rolling is somehow more effective.  It is very, very easy to miss the fact that the years of rolling (judo, in my case) were instrumental in making the 'dirty' stuff so easy to do.  I wouldn't give up my early training in solid fundamentals for any bag of tricks.

But you can have both.

Perception and Decision

Last few days included guest teaching at a karate school; conflict communications; two-day Intro to Violence; a day of VPPG that ranged from getting the impact into some of the slow motion drills, fighting (and running) on stairwells, strangles and c-spine breaks and confidence in the face of knowledge; then how to run scenarios.  Heading to a BJJ class in a few minutes....

Nice, busy.

Been circling a thought.  It's nothing new in a lot of ways, but I don't think I've hit it up the middle yet.

90% (statistic totally made up) of what I teach is about learning to see.  That includes everything from seeing the physical possibilities (open targets, lines of balance, momentum vectors, environmental opportunities) to the social dynamics (what type of violence?) to exploiting the nuances of the social dynamic (gather resources, influence witnesses, reframe the problem...) to reading and exploiting terrain, both in the moment and strategically.

That's cool.  We can all stand to spend hours on that.  One of the most useless things a self-defense instructor can do is to harp on awareness without ever explicitly stating what to be aware of.

Not a problem I regularly have.

That said, whenever you increase the perceived complexity of a problem, you run the risk of slowing down the decision process. Analysis paralysis.  The brownbelt syndrome.  Doesn't matter what you call it.

There's a bind there.  It may slow down the decision.  But it increases the opportunities for resolution.  And often, for particular people, the best solution is going to be off the main path.  If you teach SD as primarily a physical skill, you limit the chances for success for the less-physical students, who are far more likely to be victimized anyway.  The more you see, the more options... but add that the options interact and it becomes a multi-dimensional problem with multi-dimensional possibilities.

And that's good.  As long as you don't freeze.

Some of the stuff is basic, and leaving it out of training is unforgivable.  That's the chapter list of "Facing Violence".  But you can add an almost infinite amount more and, if you really understand it, the nuances can really increase your effectiveness.

So the first stage is getting the student to see as much as they can handle.  It should be targeted, focused on the types of violence an individual student profiles... but more is good.

And then practice at manipulating what they can see.  A lot of this won't happen in the training hall, and that's okay.  Most of life happens in a perfect environment for reading and manipulating possibilities on almost every level.  But the student has to practice.  Get comfortable.  Slowly shift knowledge to understanding.  That will speed up the reaction time.

And then the different knowledges have to become less different.  Violence dynamics and social dynamics and terrain and physical skills might be played with separately at first, but they all interconnect and if you play long enough in the world, they become sections of a single thing in your head.  You know arms and legs and torsos and you can look at the world like that, but they eventually have to blend and be seen as people, not parts.  The same thing happens with the dynamics of violence.

Just aspects, not different studies at all.

And somewhere in there, making a decision shifts from a cognitive process to something that just happens.  A flow.  Fluid or staccato, part of a complex plan or an immediate ending, your actions, your solutions just 'are.'