Green Hell

Slain by Baw'bags!

This may come as something of a surprise to new readers, but it's well known to "old hands" on Green Hell: I actually died back in 1989, and remained deader'n Elvis until November 30th, 2007.

Yep.

No shit.

Believe me, when I heard the news, I was every bit as surprised as you, gentle reader. And why, by the way, am I always the last one to be informed of developments of this sort? Doesn't it stand to reason that if such information is to be doled out on a "need-to-know" basis, I'd be at the top of the list, it bein' Yours Truly who allegedly snuffed it out an' all?

I'm making light of this now, but when first I made the discovery, I did quite the opposite. I actually sat down, dialed up a friend or two, and cried my eyes out.

It hurt. It really hurt. Well and rightly pissed me off, too.

Moving down the body's ventral surface, a good bit below the tear ducts we find a distinctive feature of the male anatomy. In Scots slang, the aforementioned feature is referred to (for what I suspect are obvious reasons) as the "baw'bag" or "ba'bag". This choice bit of verbiage is also employed as a term of opprobrium, just as are "scrote" and "nutsack" in American English. Bear this in mind.

Predictably enough, like 3/4 or so of the pain in my life, my death also relates to Moose. The day before St. Paddy's, 1989, I made a gallant, foolish and none too realistic attempt to win her back. In the course of said attempt, I rented a car and drove 300 or so miles from Atlanta to Greensboro, North Carolina in order to declare my undying love for her face-to-face, and to give her a hand-written letter, eight or so pages in length, in which I attempted to tell her how much she meant to me, and to apologize for having been such a prize fucktard when we were together.

Unfortunately for me, she was shacked up with some other gobshite at the time, and rebuffed me. She also tore me a new asshole in the process, taking advantage of the fact that I'd lowered every one of my defenses and opened myself completely.

By way of a response, I probably should have: 1.) stuck around for a while and worked her "boner donor" over with a tire iron and then; 2) driven back to Georgia, gotten good and drunk, and forgotten the matter entirely, but hindsight is 20/20, after all.

Well, I did drive back to Georgia and get good and drunk for a week straight, so I suppose it wasn't a total failure.

At any rate, seventeen years later, I tracked her down and gave her a phone call. During the course of our conversation, she revealed to me that she'd thought I was dead. It seems that not long afterward, her folks (to whom I've ever since referred as "the baw'bags") told her I'd gone and greased myself. Ain't that sweet?

That way, even if she broke up with the fuckwit she was seeing (and apparently, she eventually did just that), she'd never even think of getting back together with me. I'm not saying she would have done so anyway (as one of my friends wryly pointed out, she never even so much as sent flowers for my "grave" or a condolence card to my Ma), but it would have been nice to have had another chance to attempt a reconciliation.

"But Bean," says the gentle reader, "isn't it true that your brother dropped the hammer on himself? Could this not, therefore, have been an honest mistake?"

That's what I thought at first, me bucko, but read on. Chris's death simply provided them with a convenient cover story ("Oops! Sorry! We fucked up! Case of mistaken identity, dontcha know?"), should I pop up unexpectedly. I know this because a dozen or so years ago, I found her mother's AOL address and sent her a short email. I didn't ask for contact information, or anything of the sort. I simply wanted to know that ol' Moose was alive, well and happy, wherever she was, and wanted to apologize for my unpleasant behavior when we were together.

The baw'bags never answered, never forwarded it, and they never told her I was still alive.

Now you know why I'm none to kindly disposed toward 'em, and why I fervently hope Santa Claus leaves a turd in each of their stockings every Christmas until the end of the world.

Nighty night.

Fun with B&E

Being yet another rambling reminiscence.

Spring, 1990.

It was well after nightfall when we dimmed the headlights and pulled into the parking lot. I chugged down the last of my beer as my best friend parked the car. We sat there for a few moments, scanning our surroundings as best we could. The place was off the main road. Lighting minimal. No other cars. No pedestrians. No barking dogs. Outstanding.

“OK,” I said to him, summoning up my courage/insanity. “Let’s do it.” As he’d wisely parked the car a discreet distance from our target, we got out and made our approach.

“So far, so good,” he said, as we headed up the walkway. “Now all we have to do is get in.”
Pulling on a pair of gloves, I flashed him one of the unbalanced, “Cheshire cat” grins I sported all too frequently in those days.

“Just leave that part to me.”

The first time I ever committed the act of breaking and entering, I was fourteen years old. I’ve never been a thief, then or now, and the circumstances under which the act was performed justified it. I was overseas at the time, and a friend of mine -- a “latchkey kid” - had locked himself out of his apartment while his parents were out of town. Not knowing where else to go, he came to me for help. Being every bit the thoughtful and kind-hearted bastard in those days that I am now, I gladly agreed to help solve the problem.

As there was no shortage of kids who lived under similar circumstances in those days -- many of them the children of single parents, whose mothers or fathers were often sent on TDY -- I had ample opportunity to practice this particular “skill,” and my fame spread far and wide. All the way from one end of our block to the other, to be exact.

I’d been taught how to do it by an older kid, a senior at our high school, some months before. He’d explained to me that the doorjambs to most of the apartments in the area were made of wood, and that if one got a running start and put his shoulder to the door, or gave it a sharp kick just below the lock, the wood of the jamb would split, and the door would open. He then demonstrated, and I went away much impressed.

Now I’m not one of those “artists” -- and there is a degree of art to B&E, at a certain level -- who can defeat damned near every security system in existence and get into and out of Fort Knox without leaving a trace, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Still, I have learned a few ways to access a building during the course of my curiously misspent life. A fringe benefit of keeping certain company, I suppose.

My lock picking skills are so marginal as not even to be worth mentioning -- without a pick gun, I’m almost completely helpless -- so they play no part in this tale.

In addition to breaking down doors as previously described, windows often provide a convenient means of ingress. People are far more inclined to leave them unlocked than they are doors, and often, a window can simply be opened after prying the screen away. Failing this, one can always break a pane, and pop the latch. This, however, is noisy and carries the risk of injury. As glass cutters are slow, and take some practice to learn to employ properly, one of the cruder, and more obvious methods I learned was to put a square of duct tape over a pane and strike it sharply. The tape could then be peeled away, and the glass fragments would adhere to it. In this case, though, our options were limited, as I’ll soon reveal.

One evening in late spring, my best friend stopped over for a visit and informed me that he was concerned for the welfare of another friend of ours. The latter friend, in his opinion, had been keeping unsavory company, people who served to do little more than drag said party down. Although both of us were a bit “squirrely” at the time (and had little room to talk), and neither of us possessed the world’s best sense of judgment, I agreed with him, and still do. Putting it bluntly, these people were douche bags.

As we two well-blackened (and slightly cracked) “pots” commented upon the condition of these “kettles,” we put our heads together and figured out what to do next. As usual, the first order of business was to procure two sixpacks of “tallboy” cans of malt liquor as lubrication for the brain and to fortify the spirit. This we did, and as we spent the remainder of the rather warm and pleasant evening cruising around metro Atlanta and knocking back our “courage-in-a-can,” we formulated a plan.

My best friend had come to me for several reasons: 1.) We were best friends; 2.) He’d accompanied me on my trip to Greensboro, NC, the year before, and I owed him bigtime;
3.) He knew I was fairly adept at information-gathering, and that I kept dossiers on people who incurred my displeasure; and most importantly; 4.) He knew I’d done this sort of thing before and; 5.) I was probably the only friend he had who was fuckin’ crazy enough to go along with something like this.

At length, we decided to enter our wayward friend’s domicile surreptitiously and gather as much information as we could on the new crowd. By the time we actually got around to pulling it off, we’d been drinking for three or so hours, and we were both slightly tipsy and very keyed-up. I remember hauling ass down I-285 with our favorite “motivational” music blaring on the car’s tape deck, and actually flipping off one of Dekalb’s finest as he pulled another motorist over.

Just twenty-two, an’ I don’t mind dyin’…Who do ya love?

We hit “spaghetti junction” and headed south on I-85. From there, we proceeded to our destination. As this was a “brown bag” job, the entire point was to get in, get the information we needed, and then get out -- leaving the place exactly as we had found it -- without being detected or going to the pound for criminal trespass.

From here, the story is fairly boring. As the door and all the windows were locked we encountered a few difficulties at first, but I found that a window set in the front door was in poor condition, so I was able to pry it open, reach inside, and unlock the door. We got in, closed the door behind us, and I kept watch as he set about collecting names, addresses and phone numbers. For as loaded as we were, he exhibited some really good thinking. He took the papers into a windowless room and examined them with a flashlight, so as not to alert any passers-by of what we were doing. These days, I’d have put the job on hold for a day or two, procured a pair of cheap NVDs and outfitted our flashlights with IR filters, but this was seventeen years ago, and the technology was still horrifically expensive in those days. At the very least we could have used red filters to lower our “signature”, but we were young, impulsive and slightly foolish. Not to mention slightly hammered…

We got what we needed, and it was a good job, for all that we’d had luck with the door. We re-lowered the window, locked the door, put everything back exactly where we’d found it, and didn’t leave a trace of our having been there -- no mean feat, as the place was a pigsty. At this point, we decided to pat ourselves on the back by celebrating at Denny’s. On the way to the restaurant, I noticed an itching sensation first in one place, then another. I began scratching, and noticed that he was doing the same.

“Hey man, are you itching?”, I asked him.
“Yes, I am.”
“Me too. All over?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t just itch, I itch like hell.”
“Same here.”
“Maybe we should try to track down the lot number on that booze we drank.”
“Maybe.”

We continued scratching and bitching until we reached Denny’s. After entering the restaurant and getting a table, we had the chance to examine ourselves.

“Hey, man. Are those…”
“No way…”
“I’ll be damned if they don’t look exactly like…”

Like something we both, being dog-owners, had seen time and time before.

“Flea bites!”

And they were. We were covered with them. In addition to being a pigsty, the place had been infested, and we’d both been so caught up in what we were doing that neither of us had noticed that the little bastards were feasting on us the entire time. That part has nothing to do with B&E per se, except to illustrate that when pulling off this sort of thing, one should always expect the unexpected. I vowed on the spot that did I ever tackle such a project again, I’d slather myself with “bug juice” beforehand. I suppose it also serves as a study in poetic justice of sorts, but that’s neither here nor there.

For a Denny’s the food wasn’t bad, so we ate and scratched and joked, happy that we’d accomplished our “mission” and that we weren’t sitting in the back seat of a black-and-white.

One the way home, we encountered one of metro Atlanta’s God-awful “eternal red lights.” Ahead of us was an almost stereotypical “yppie-ette” in a Mercedes. I looked over at my best friend and asked: “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”.

“Yeah. Let’s fuck with her head and see what she does!”

We cranked up Anthrax’s "I’m the Man" full-blast and began roaring and howling like crazed animals, at the top of our lungs. She took one look at he rear-view mirror, floored the gas pedal, actually ran the red light and put as much distance as she could between us. We, in turn, laughed so hard we nearly lost our lunches (or dinners, if you prefer.)

The light eventually turned green and we headed for home, young, tipsy, half-crazy, well-fed, laughing, scratching and ready to do it all over again.

Those were the days…

Maximum Chop Socky VII

Being part the seventh in our quirky protagonist’s account of his karate days, an account which, by now, probably has the gentle reader wishing he’d just shut the fuck up and resume taking potshots at liberals and neocons.

Now where were we? Ah, yes! I’d touched upon the importance of breathing in the martial arts. Some of the reasons for this emphasis are obvious. One (presumably) trains in a martial art in order to improve his odds of emerging from a violent encounter breathing, i.e., still alive. In order to remain alive, one must breathe, violent encounter or no.

This is so obvious, it goes without saying.

In martial arts field, though, breathing is far more than a mere life-support function. It’s at the very foundation of the arts. Beyond the obvious -- that such activity is often physically strenuous, and requires that the tissues be kept oxygenated, breathing, for its other effects upon the body and mind, is considered fundamental.

“What the hell are you goin’ on about now, dude?” asks the gentle reader.

Why, I’m going on about things to which most folks don’t pay much mind, of course.

One often hears the phrase “Take a deep breath,” meaning: “Calm down,” or “Don’t get riled.” There’s quite a bit to this, actually. For this reason, many styles of Asian martial arts teach the student to breathe deeply, from the diaphragm, as opposed to the “top lung” breathing in which most people seem to engage. When breathing this way, the lungs are slowly and completely filled, and then (in most systems with which I am familiar) just as completely emptied, thus purging them of as much accumulated carbon dioxide as possible.

The effect upon the body and mind is, paradoxically enough, both invigorating and calming, both effects being equally desirable and beneficial to the karateka. One of the basic goals of karate is cultivation of zanshin, (literally “remaining mind”), a state of relaxed hyper-alertness. There’s far more to the concept than this, and I could easily write an entire post on the subject without even scratching the surface. For now, though, let’s stick with the “bare bones” definition I’ve given. If one wishes to cultivate this quality and to focus upon learning karate, one can’t allow the day’s concerns to burden him during the course of a class. Therefore, at the school in which I studied, each class period began with seiza, a period of seated meditation during which the student was to concentrate solely on his breathing.

The breath-count varies from style to style and system to system, and some patterns are considered especially conducive to certain specific results, but once again, an entire post could be written on this matter, without even scratching the surface. In our school, the method was to inhale for a count of four, hold the breath for a count of eight, and then exhale for a count of four. During the course of the breath-counting, the student finds himself achieving a calm, relaxed state that is most conducive the learning process. This simple breath-counting also leads to a degree of self-discipline, as it’s not at all easy.

“What, Bean?” asks the gentle reader. “Have you been inhaling paint fumes for a 4-8-4 count or something? What’s so difficult about that?”

There’s the rub, you see. When counting breaths, the student is to engage in no other mental activity. The moment he does, he must return to the count of “one” and begin again. This means focusing on the breathing and nothing else at all. Should the student notice that the tatami feels scratchy, that his armpit itches, that something smells funny, it’s right back to square one. Ditto if he should think about the fight he had with his girlfriend, the dipshit who cut him off in traffic on the way to the dojo, or the overdue bill sitting on his desk. Back to square one. Ain’t so easy now, is it?

When this kind of slow, deep breathing becomes habitual, the student begins to face life with a greater degree of calmness and rationality. It’s not a magic, “cure-all,” by any stretch of the imagination, but is immensely beneficial, just the same. When one learns to adopt this breathing method automatically when confronted with a stressful situation such as a violent encounter, it allows him to “keep his cool” and to respond to the threat instead of merely reacting blindly.

Breathing during karate-proper was different in many ways, but based upon the same principles. The breath was drawn through the nose, deep into the lungs, the diaphragm and abdomen expanded as far as possible (but never to the point of strain) and then expelled forcefully through the mouth, accompanied by a tensing of the abdominal muscles. This specific kind of exhalation is called ibuki, could also be expounded upon indefinitely. I’ll skip that.

The hard/soft, in/out breathing method has symbolic and philosophical significance, too, but that’s beyond the scope of this post. Suffice to say that when executing a technique, -- a punch, for example -- we were taught to inhale upon preparation and to exhale vigorously upon execution. This is the method employed by most “hard” styles of which I am aware, and it serves a purpose.

I’ll use the reverse punch (gyaku tzuki) as an example: Upon cocking his fist, the puncher takes a breath. Remaining loose and relaxed in the interest of speed and fluidity, he releases it, and then forcefully exhales on contact. The exhalation serves to “focus” the blow by synchronizing the necessary muscle groups, excluding the unnecessary ones, and completing the circle of yin (the loose, relaxed delivery) and yang, (the hard, forceful conclusion of the move).

Breathing in this manner wasn’t reserved for offensive techniques, but used in defense, as well. I could argue that it was even more important when employed defensively, and I reckon I’ll do just that.

If the gentle reader is a man, he’s probably been hit in the “bread basket” with sufficient force to “knock the wind’ out of him on at least one occasion. If not, he’s a “marshmallow" and a pantywaist, and should probably be reading an anthology of “Dear Abby” columns instead of Green Hell, but I digress.

The best way to illustrate this is to relate it as it was related to me. When the lungs are filled with air, they’re analogous to inflated balloons, and as we all know, an inflated balloon can be popped. A body-blow delivered to a person who has just drawn a breath is therefore rather like sticking a pin into a balloon. This, by the way, is the reason why the best time to hit a man is when he’s drawing a breath during the “trash talking” phase of a fight.

As we usually study karate in the interest of not having our “balloons” popped, exhaling while executing a defensive technique makes perfect sense. When the air is expelled from the lungs, the muscles of the abdomen (and others, for the record) tense and harden into a form of “armor”, a good and desirable thing when and if his opponent‘s blow lands. The value of armor, of course, is that -- in the words of my dear friend Marc MacYoung -- “It covers your mistakes.”

Other benefits?

Of course.

As one has already expelled his own “wind,” there’s little or none to be knocked out of him, should his active defense fail. Beyond this, The ribcage tends to “close” rather like the “ribs” in the bellows of a stoutly constructed accordion, and the danger of sustaining a broken rib (never fun, and sometimes very dangerous) upon receiving a body-blow is reduced.

My instructors -unlike many at the time -- introduced their students to a number of sweeps, reaps, drops and throws from the beginning of their training. To the best of my recollection, they wouldn’t allow any student to complete any of the aforementioned techniques upon a student who ranked below green belt, but “eating pavement,” whether by losing one’s balance, or being “helped” by a hostile party is simply a fact of life, so they put a great deal of emphasis on break-falls, beginning at the white belt level.

We were taught to perform break-falls according to a simple method, and one easily remembered, as the fundamental points were presented to us in the form of a simple mnemonic: “The four B’s”. The aforementioned “B’s” were: 1.) Bend; 2.) Bite; 3.) Breathe; 4.) Break-fall.

The rationale behind the two leading items is rather obvious. The point of executing a break-fall being the avoidance of injury (especially to the central nervous system), the chin is tucked, in order to facilitate “rolling out” of the fall/throw. Just as “loose lips sink ships”, slack jaws are a quick ticket to broken teeth and bitten tongues, so biting down is another obvious necessity when becoming intimate with mother earth.

Now we’ve come back to breathing, haven’t we?

The ibuki exhalation serves the same purpose when one is falling or being thrown as does it when one defends himself against a punch or kick to the body. The “balloon” doesn’t pop, as it’s deflated prior to impact with ol‘ terra firma. Diggest thou, gentle reader?

Good.

I’m gonna read the news and have a beer.

G’night and God Bless.

Maximum Chop Socky VI

Being part the sixth of a rambling narrative in which our “hero” (at the time, a slightly disturbed, obsessive-compulsive young man) recounts his experiences training in the martial arts and induces the gentle reader to scream: “Oh, Christ! I knew it! I just knew it! He’s gonna tell this damned 'Kung Fu Jones' story kyu by kyu! Where’s my air-sickness bag? I gotta barf up my tofu now!”

September 1994

When last we saw our boy, he’d just learned two new methods of rearranging faces (and other body-parts): the stomp kick (fumikomi); and the palm-strike (teisho).

Needless to say, I was happy as a pig in shit with both of ‘em. By this time, I had four months of daily practice under my (orange) belt and a much better idea of what I was doing.

Yessiree, Bean, ol' boy, that dude who’s usin’ Moose as his jizz-jar is lookin’ increasingly fucked with every passing day!

From what I now know, I’m inclined to believe that at this point, they were no longer even “an item,” however full of blood‘n‘thunder‘n‘piss‘n‘vinegar I might have been over the prospect of doing the red eyed pogo on this dude‘s face. Owing to a very interesting coincidence and a piece of misinformation I’d picked up in ‘89, though, I’d thought they were still together, so at the time, I‘d have been truly surprised upon discovering this not to be the case.

Especially when I consider the gushing way in which she’d informed me that she loved him when last I’d spoken with her. Hell, to listen to her, I’d have thought they were “soul mates”, intended by providence to cling fast to one another for all eternity.

“And maybe monkeys will fly outta my butt,” as Mike Myers said in Wayne’s World… It wouldn’t have mattered either way, mind you, as I’d have considered “fair game” anyone with whom she was shacked up. What can I say? I had a mild case of the "green-eyed monster" over the thought of my green-eyed obsession being with another guy. I'm the jealous type. Just deal with it.

I’ve said before that I’d spent the years between ‘89 and ‘94 gradually “talking myself down” from actually wasting the guy to simply beating the shit out of him. I now wonder, though, if I was being completely honest with myself.

Let’s get back to the palm strike for a moment, shall we? In many circles it was (and still is) rumored that one could kill a man by delivering a palm-strike to his nose. According to the story, the nose would break, and the cartilage would be driven upward and inward until it pierced the brain. A bit of research and consulting a few people who were “clued in” eventually revealed to me that this is one of those stories consisting partly of truth and partly of utter bullshit. After a few years of training, one discovers that quite a number of these myths are in circulation, but more about that later. Back to brains and nasal cartilages.

A palm strike to the nose will break it as easily as will a punch. That much is true. In order to drive the cartilage into the brain, however, the nose first must be broken with a downward blow such as a hammerfist or vertical backfist. Only at this point is the broken cartilage properly positioned to be driven home with the palm strike, and even then, it doesn’t always work.

Still, until my rude awakening (i.e., my discovery of the truth), I was captivated by the mystique attached to the “lethal” technique I’d just been taught. Before I continue, let me emphatically state that to the very best of my knowledge, I have never killed anything but bugs, fish, reptiles, birds and animals. Dig? I want to make that abundantly clear. All the same, though, I was no more an angel when I was younger than I am now, so I’ll admit that during my early twenties, I went “a-hunting high and low” for those who were “in the know,” and managed to learn a few sentry-removal techniques and two ways to break a person’s neck.

I won’t relate any of these methods here, as this post concerns martial arts and self-defense and none of these operations has any defensive value at all. In a battlefield environment, they may be seen as unpleasant necessities, but in any other context, they’re simply cold-blooded murder. The only real “skill” required to perform the SR techniques is stealth, aided, perhaps by owning an extremely hard heart, and the other two are just- plain ugly, for all that they require a bit more practice and a greater degree of finesse.

At the time, though, I developed a fascination with unarmed killing techniques. I have no idea how much I spent on such titles as Black Medicine, Dragon’s Touch and Deadly Karate Blows: The Medical Implications, but it was certainly a pretty penny. In addition to partin’ with a good bit of filthy lucre, I spent a significant amount of time poring over my old high school anat/phys workbook, books on anatomy at the public library, and even flipping through The American Red Cross’s Standard First Aid and Personal Safety to see if perhaps anything could be “reverse engineered.”

I devoted more of the same to studying the U.S. Army’s (pre-Tae Kwon Do) FM 21-150 and applying the principles and concepts I was learning in Karate to the techniques in the manual, which is far superior to the more modern versions, to my way of thinking. The latest edition, which I perused at a gun show, simply left me muttering: “OK, that’s a good way to get a broken ankle”; “Try that on me and I’ll you’ll be less worried about macho, CQC shit than about stanching the bleeding from your femoral artery when I introduce your thigh to 'Mr. Clip Point'”; and “You ain’t never met a guy who hates losing so much, he’d actually bite your nuts off to win a fight, have you, sport?”

No, the new FM 21-150 ain’t all that great. The old one, though? Lotsa good stuff in there. Crude and ugly, but effective and worth thinking about.

This, by the way -- and my saying this is sure to piss off many a “Brass Balls Press”-type publisher -- is one of the very few ways in which books on self-defense or martial arts are of any value; providing new ideas and approaches to a person who already has some training. One simply cannot learn a martial art from a book or magazine article. It can’t be done, end of story. Learning any system of this sort requires serious and dedicated training under an instructor who knows what he’s doing. There’s just no other way to acquire the skill -- one must “put in the hours.”

Period.

And speaking of skill… We were supposed to be learning atemi (anatomical weapons and weak points) as part of our training, but I’d rather leapt ahead of the syllabus in that particular area. As, by then, I was becoming quite fond of my instructors -- growing to regard them not only with affection, but with respect and admiration, as well -- I didn’t want to tip them off to the fact that I was up to no good. Therefore, I played it cool and didn’t push too hard for new information. The only other particularly nasty bit of “craft” I learned from them at the orange-belt level was the carotid choke, a.k.a. the dreaded “sleeper hold,” which I’ll discuss later.

Instead of pestering my sensei and potentially giving away my less-than-noble intentions, I consulted other sources, and during this period, began cross-training with people who studied other styles and systems. I was particularly interested in learning what were reputed to be “killing” techniques, so as I’ve said, I don’t think I was being very honest with myself when I’d “convinced” myself that sending Moose’s “gladiator” (and I’ll warrant she was, as well…Sorry. That was tres tacky. It was funny, though. Wow! It ain't even 08:00 and I've already made a reference to "muff-diving"...) to the hospital via the time-honored “Chuck-Claude van Carradine” method was the only thing I had in mind.

Let’s dispense with this talk of "eatin' at the Y" and of “murder most foul,” though, shall we?

I believe I’ve mentioned that as one’s education progresses, one is gradually introduced to increasingly complex concepts. In no field of endeavor is this truer than in the martial arts --unless , of course one studies “fast food karate” under some “tournament-tag” fairy who operates one of those fucking one-year-to-shodan-for-a-mere-two-hundred-a-month “belt mills.” I can’t stand those kinds of places, or the assholes who run them, and I’ll have much to say about them (none of it pleasant) in the future.

My instructors weren’t that type, by any stretch of the imagination. It goes without saying that they both had to make a living, but I was very impressed by the way they balanced salesmanship with substance. The “substance” of martial arts consists far less of fancy kicks and exotic-looking moves than of the fundamental physiological processes and relationships we tend to take for granted.

Let’s take breathing, for example. Respiration is an automatic process, and one to which I doubt most of us devote much thought. This very unconscious process, though, is at the core of many martial arts techniques.

And since it’s getting late and I need to go to work, I’ll discuss this later.

Maximum Chop Socky V

Being part the fifth of an Homeric chronicle, wherein our oddball Odysseus (a mildly “conflicted” young Suth’n fellow) takes up the not-so-gentle art of self-defense, in order to “get his head straight,” “find himself,” and expand his horizons. (But mostly in order to hunt down his ex-squeeze and beat the livin’ shit out of her boyfriend.)

July 1994

“When Dawn spread her fingertips of rose,” as Homer (the guy who works at the gyro joint and barely speaks or understands English -- “No, you asshole! I don‘t want Amfissa olives on my salad, I want Kalamata! What‘s wrong with you? Been nippin‘ at the ouzo again? Don‘t give me that look, dude! You‘re an 'OTM,' which means you can actually be deported!”) once wrote, our boy had just gotten out of bed after returning from Florida.

After a week off, I was itching to get back into the dojo and resume my formal training. I was itching to immerse myself ever more deeply in this strange, wonderful new endeavor. I was itching to explore new vistas. I was itching to “get all Bruce Lee” on Moose’s boyfriend, stomp a mudhole in his ass and walk that sucker dry.

I immediately proceeded to scratch said itch.

As with any meaningful endeavor, martial arts training becomes increasingly difficult as the student progresses; the techniques more refined; the concepts more complex. I’d been taught to exectute the basic back break-fall from a squatting position, but now I was required to perform it from a crouch. I was also introduced to the side and front break-falls, the latter being particularly valuable to those who care to keep their teeth in place when being thrown, swept and tripped by other psychos in white pajamas.

The front break-fall, while among (as stated) the more valuable, is also one of the more difficult to execute. The goal of any break-fall is to avoid injury when kissing terra firma, but ironically, the front break-fall is one of the most potentially injurious if done improperly. Owing to this, I was taught to begin the technique from a kneeling position at first. In order to perform it, the hands are brought up before the face, palms out, the thumbs and fingers describing a triangle of sorts. The elbows are bent, the head turned to one side, and then, bam! Down goes the practitioner. The positioning of the hands and arms is particularly important, as if they’re out of alignment, severe damage to the elbows or wrists can result, as well the reader may imagine.

In addition to these new break-falls, I was taught the forward and backward rolls. The backward roll was particularly difficult for me to learn, but I kept at it and eventually got the hang of it. I have a very large backyard (a full acre) that is carpeted with especially lush grass in one spot, so upon returning home, I’d head for that section of the yard and perform repeated forward and backward rolls from one end to the other. My neighbors probably thought I was on something, but the skill I developed has since paid dividends, so learning it was well worth eliciting a few odd looks from the “citizens.”

Aside from learning a new skill-set, I began to “come out of my shell” to a great extent, and to make friends with many of the other students. As one might expect, training of this sort demands that a certain level of trust be established between the karateka, his sensei, and the other karateka. As I had what I’ll call “trust issues” for years, this dimension of training was especially beneficial to me. Beyond mere trust, a certain camaraderie develops between people who train together in this manner, and in many ways, I began to think of my fellow students as a sort of extended family, or at least a circle of friends. One in particular became my longtime training partner and is still a close friend twelve years later.

I tested for my orange belt in August or September of that year, and was surprised at how comfortable I was during that test, compared to the degree of angst and self-consciousness I’d suffered during my first. The exam went so smoothly that it’s not even particularly memorable. This time I didn’t test alone, and that might have had something to do with it. I demonstrated my basic techniques, practical self-defense, combinations and forms with relative ease.

During the final phase of the test, the board break, I had the option of employing either a side kick or a backfist. My build is ectomorphic; my bone structure very light (that‘s a fancy-ass way of saying that I‘m all scrawny-like), and I hadn’t begun “serious” hand conditioning at the time, aside from working the heavy bag without gloves. Given this, I opted for the kick, and succeeded on my first attempt.

In the dojo in which I trained, white, yellow and orange belt levels were considered beginner. Green, green w/black stripe; blue; and blue w/black stripe were considered intermediate, and purple through black were considered advanced. Of the classes offered, most were “general admission,” as it were, with Tuesday and Thursday nights featuring additional intermediate/advanced class periods. Although orange belt was, as previously stated, considered “beginner” level, the more serious students (as one of which I apparently qualified) were allowed to participate in the intermediate/advanced classes.

I took immediate advantage of the opportunity, and increased the number of classes I took to 6-8 per week, in addition to practicing at home. Due to this fairly heavy schedule (a schedule which, in time, I’d increase even more) I began to improve rapidly.

At the orange belt rank, we learned two new techniques, the palm strike (teisho) and the stomp-kick (fumikomi).

I am, as I’ve mentioned, rather thin, so the palm strike became one of my favorites. This technique uses the fleshy heel of the hand as the striking surface, which renders it far less punishing to the bones of the slender. In my opinion, it’s the ideal hand technique for women, and for men whose skeletal structure is on the lighter side. For this reason, I much prefer it to punching.

The amount of protection afforded the bones by the “meat” of the palm-heel allows it to be employed against a great number of targets. Delivered to the nose, it will easily break it, resulting in sympathetic eye-watering, a shitload of pain, and a bad day in general for the person so struck. When the base of the skull is targeted, a “one-shot” knockout can result. A strike to the jaw from the side will dislocate it, and when the chin is struck, a knockout or “whiplash” effect can be had, an additional benefit of hitting in this manner being that the fingers are ideally positioned to claw the eyes and/or rake the face upon completion of the technique.

The stomp kick is, in my opinion, one of the most under-utilized and under-appreciated techniques in the martial artist’s entire “bag of tricks.” The kick is chambered much like a front kick, but the heel or sole of the foot are used as the striking surface. When used from behind, (as an escape from a headlock, for example), it will easily buckle the recipient’s knee and drive it forcefully into the ground, potentially resulting in severe damage to the patella. Delivered to the knee from the front, it can hyperextend the joint to the point of breaking it, and even when it’s used only to rake down the shin and pin the foot to the floor, the effect is astonishingly painful. Yes, I know this from personal experience.

I’m a bit of an experimenter by nature, so I soon discovered yet another use for this particular kick. Upon gentle application during one-step sparring, I found that when driven into the hip socket, the impact would cause the recipient to bend forward at the waist. This, boys and girls, is a very, very useful effect. If, for example, one were to chamber the rear leg and deliver the kick, the opponent would, as stated, bend forward. At this point the foot would be placed upon the ground, now the front leg. As the target doubles over, his head can be grasped with both hands and "helped" downward, and his face treated to a powerful rising knee strike, courtesy of the rear leg. Following this, he can be finished with a hammerfist (kentsui), knifehand (shuto) or elbow strike (empi uchi) to the base of the skull or cervical vertebrae.

And it’s nearly time for me to go to work, so I’ll knock off for now.

Maximum Chop Socky IV

Being part the fourth of an epic tale during the unfolding of which our Celtic-descended (and perhaps ever-so-slightly unstable) yahoo undertakes to learn the butt-kickin’ methods of the Far East, the better to send his ex-girlfriend’s “boner donor” to the nearest ICU.

1994

When last we saw him, our misfit, malcontent of a protagonist had quit his job, skedaddled from what promised to become a dead-end relationship, and devoted himself to pursuing the “way of the warrior.” He also stopped getting haircuts, but that’s neither here nor there.

To his credit, he continued to shower…

I’d begun my training during the last few days of April 1994, and by June I’d earned my yellow belt. This necessitated learning a few new techniques, a new set of offensive and defensive combinations, and a new kata.

The new techniques consisted of the backfist (uraken) and the side kick (yoko geri). The backfist, while not something I’d use on Arnold Schwarzenegger, is an interesting “rattler” of a technique. If the gentle reader has fond childhood memories of his old man backhanding him for misbehaving during a long drive, he’ll also have a good mental image of the technique. The arm is “cocked” by bringing the striking hand to the opposite shoulder, and then released in a backhand motion, deriving its power from the contraction of the back muscles. Unlike the backhanded slap, though, the fist is clenched, and the striking surface consists of the first two knuckles. The most common targets include the temple, the hinge of the jaw and (if the blow is delivered from the side) the nose. Like many karate techniques, the strike can be delivered with considerable power, but is more often employed in the same way as a Western-style jab -- as a “stunner” or setup technique.

The side kick’s name is self-explanatory. The knee of the kicking leg is raised high, the heel of the supporting foot pivoted toward the target, and the kick then released sideways, deriving its power from the muscles of the thighs and buttocks. The striking surface is the outer edge of the heel. While more difficult to execute than the front or roundhouse kicks, it’s also considerably more powerful. Any number of targets may be selected, but the kick is particularly effective when delivered to the knees or (and bear in mind that kicking above the waist carries certain inherent risks), the ribs.

Boo-yah! How you like me now? This, as Caesar said upon completing the conquest of transalpine Gaul, was totally bitchin’! Now what was I gonna do to Moose’s boyfriend, though? So many techniques from which to choose! Lessee…I supposed I’d “rattle his cage” with a backfist, nail him the solar plexus with a reverse punch, buckle his legs with a pair of roundhouse kicks, blast him in the rocks with a front kick, and then “kneecap” him with a pair of side kicks. Yeah! That was it! Hooboy! It was really gonna suck to be him, whoever he was!

The combinations we learned consisted of the two new techniques, in sequence. The offensive combination was a simple backfist/side kick, the underlying logic thereof being that the intended recipient would raise an arm to block the backfist, at which point the side kick would be delivered to his now-exposed ribcage. This was also our formal introduction to the idea of feints or “setups.”

The defensive combination consisted of an inward block, followed by a side kick and a backfist, the order of the last two techniques being optional. The idea was that an incoming punch would be deflected with the block, the arm seized with the rear hand, the side kick delivered to the stretched and now extremely vulnerable ribcage, (preferably the floating rib) and the backfist applied to the parietal bone or the hinge of the jaw as a “finisher,” or vice-versa.

The form we were taught was called Taiokyu ichi. While not especially complicated in terms of the techniques it employed -- simply the downward block and mid-level lunge punches -- I found the footwork rather tricky, as the kata required that two 270° pivots be executed. In order to do this, the rear leg had to be brought crosswise behind the front, and the body rotated in the same direction. In time, the move became natural, but it really hung me up at first, and often left me feeling like a retardate attempting to learn ballet.

At that belt level, I was also introduced to new “practical” self-defense methods, so I had quite a bit of material with which to work. As I was worried about overtraining, I only attended five formal classes a week, but practiced a great deal on my own, as well. That way, I was able to concentrate on proper form without overtaxing myself via the physical conditioning that made up roughly a third of any given class period.

For me, this was a necessity, as learning to execute the techniques properly (as opposed to the “going through the motions” I’ve since observed in any number of martial arts-types) required a great deal of effort. Whereas I’d taken up calisthenics and weight-training in 1988, aside from these two activities, I’d never been particularly athletic. Given this, committing these new moves to my “muscle memory” was quite a challenge.

That’s a slight oversimplification, actually. Some techniques proved very difficult to learn, while others came to me quite naturally. This led to complications upon which I’ll elaborate in the future.

I must admit that I began showing the first symptoms of what Glenn Morris called “martial arts madness” at about this time. I didn’t quite go the “ninja wannabe” route, but I wasn’t far from it. Over the next few months, I purchased a set of nunchaku (an agricultural implement adapted for use as a weapon -- two sticks connected by a chain), a dozen or so shuriken/shaken (throwing stars), a jo (a Japanese staff, which, at 4‘, was intermediate between the 3‘ hanbo and the 5-6‘ bo in length), a bokken (wooden practice sword) and added considerably to my already formidable collection of cutlery. My most extravagant purchase was a katana, but more about that later.

Beyond accumulating paraphernalia, my interest in Asian history, culture and philosophy began to deepen, as well. I acquired and read quite a library of books over the next few years, including: The Overlook Martial Arts Reader; Westbrook and Ratti’s Secrets of the Samurai; Nitobe’s Bushidō; Winston King’s Zen and the Way of the Sword; Funakoshi’s Karate Dō: My Way of Life; and (of course) Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, among many, many others.

I can’t say that reading any of them had a profoundly life-changing effect upon me, but they did exert a beneficial influence of sorts, an influence I’ll eventually cover at length and in depth.

When July of ‘94 rolled around, I took a week off from training and went to Daytona with one of my Bros. This is noteworthy for two reasons only. One of the other students at the dojo had taught me a Tae Kwon Do technique called the “axe kick,” and while “showing my ass” in an Ormond Beach motel room, I lost my footing and had my first practical opportunity to apply the back break-fall. The second is that I was able to practice on the beach, including in the water. I’d read of this before, and was very curious, but this was my first opportunity to give it a shot. I was still very self-conscious at the time, so I kept my practice sessions short and confined them to dawn or after dark, but the experience was an interesting one.

There really was something -- and I’m not overly fond of words of this sort -- almost mystical about sweating my way through forms and combinations as the sun rose over the Atlantic and the breeze filled my nostrils with the smell of the ocean. The night sessions emphasized the kinesthetic dimension of the art, as visibility was greatly reduced, and I found that keeping my footing on soft, shifting sand was very different from doing so on the hard floor of the dojo.

Practicing while neck-deep in the ocean was yet another memorable experience, as the footing was especially precarious. In addition to the buoyancy afforded me by the saltwater, the sand was even less stable a surface than that on land, and I found it extremely difficult to maintain even the basic horse stance. I also noticed that the unfamiliar resistance offered by the water was particularly taxing on my muscles after a few minutes.

As is the case with all good things, the vacation eventually came to an end, and in a few days, I was “back in the saddle” with the goal of earning my next belt in mind.

More later.

Flashbacks

This post might be somewhat lacking in structure. It consists of a few musings on the topic of flashbacks.

At times, I believe it’s nearly impossible to describe a flashback to a person who’s never experienced one. By “flashback” I don’t mean the LSD-induced, dippy-hippie kind, but rather the involuntary act of reliving an especially unpleasant incident.

A flashback isn’t merely a daydream or memory. It’s an actual altered state of consciousness, a sort of terrible autohypnosis. Those of us who have them are often given such helpful advice as “Get over it!” or “Stop living in the past!”, by people who don’t, and therein lies the problem: We really are living in the past, for all practical purposes. When one experiences a flashback, his conscious awareness of the “here and now” fades entirely, and he finds himself completely drawn into the “then and there.”

A flashback is similar to but not as severe as the state of mind found in the “walking wounded” to whom Marc MacYoung referred in his guest post Creepy Crawlies. For them, the “movies” playing in their heads never end. For us, they do end, but they start and stop without warning. I don’t know what triggers them in others, but as I’m an associative thinker, I found that damn-near anything could cause me to have them. One moment, I’d be fine, dandy and functional. The next moment, I’d be elsewhere, mentally speaking.

In some of the worst I’ve experienced, my immersion in the “bad trip” if you will, was so complete that I actually responded physiologically to what was a purely psychological state. Rapid breathing, increased heart rate, the “adrenaline dump,” the whole nine yards. In other words, I was experiencing physical responses to a set of stimuli that had long since ceased to be real, save in my own mind.

I’ve heard it said that a human being can focus his attention upon 7 +/- 2 objects at once. Sounds reasonable to me, and “gibes“ with my own observations. This also explains the intensity of the flashback state. With one’s consciousness of the “here and now” temporarily suspended, one is able to focus on the negative past-experience in awful detail.

One such “movie,” and one that haunted me for years, relates to a trip I made nearly eighteen years ago, in an attempt to win back the girl I loved. I’ve related it elsewhere on this blog, so I’ll skip the background material in this particular post. As an example of both the “trigger” stimulus and the completeness of my immersion in the flashback, though, I’ll furnish the following anecdotes.

I was working in a deli/restaurant some years ago, when I heard a man say to his wife: “Hey Teresa, get me a soda, will you?” Bam! That was all it took. Hearing her name served as one trigger, and the fact that one of our nightly rituals when we were kids was walking over to the neighborhood Swim and Tennis Club and purchasing a soda from the vending machine served as yet another. Suddenly, I was no longer in an eatery in Roswell, Georgia. I was in an apartment complex in Greensboro, North Carolina.

In another such incident, I was getting into my car on a clear, but cold morning. Something or the other “set me off”, and I was completely drawn into the memory. Even though the weather that day was -- as previously stated -- cold, I’d made my trip on an unseasonably warm day in March, so as the flashback kicked in, I actually began to perspire and to experience a physical sensation of warmth. So vivid was the memory of the incident, that I could recall an incredible array of minutiae, as if I were actually once again physically present at that point in space and time.

I could see her face. Her eyes. The fact that she’d had her hands in her pockets and that her shoulders were slightly raised when she stepped out of the building. The fact that she wasn’t wearing much makeup, just a light smudge of eye-shadow and some mascara. That her hair had been crimped and apparently highlighted. That she was wearing a hideous white blouse and tight jeans. I could even remember the way she smelled. I remembered the taste of my cigarette (I smoked Marlboro “reds” in those days). I could actually hear the sound of that God-awful song “She’s Got the Look” playing on the stereo. I remember that her building faced north, and that her apartment was at the easternmost end of said building. I remembered that -- judging by the position of the sun-- it was approximately 15:30. I remembered that I had given her my hand-written, multi-page letter with my right hand.

I remembered the melodramatic, sometimes exasperated-sounding sighs, the eye-rolling, and her tone of voice. I remembered her words as if my brain had somehow tape-recorded them. (Is it live or is it Memorex?) I remember the sudden flash of resentment I felt when she said “I’ve been through soooo much,” and thinking: Sweetheart, try walkin’ a mile in these here boots before you lay that shit on me. I just buried my only fucking brother a few months ago, but “biting back” on it, and the actual physical tensing of my muscles as I did so. This is for another post (perhaps), but I remembered that gut-plunging sensation I’d experienced when she said: “I could never love you again,” and how I’d feel exactly the same way every time the “tape” of those words played in my head, which it did for years afterwards.

I also remembered the insane jumble of impressions I absorbed and associations I made as we spoke. Green. Her eyes are green. The leaves on that tree over there are young and green. The Grounding of Group Green. That was an awful book, just fucking dreadful. Dreck and dross from cover to cover. Why did she ask me to read it? We’re on West Cone Boulevard. One of the antagonists in the book was named “Homer Cone”.

Hopefully, I’ve managed to convey something of the vividness of a flashback. It’s a maze within a maze, and incredibly "real" to the sufferer. When having one, one is aware not only of the environmental stimuli one experienced during the root-incident, but of one’s mental state at the time, as well. A flashback is essentially a living nightmare from which one can‘t awaken until it‘s run its course, or until some stronger excitant snaps one out of it. Sometimes -- luckily -- that excitant could consist of the sound of my own voice. During the worst episodes of this kind, I’d actually find myself talking to her, saying things I wished I’d said and asking questions I wished I’d asked at the time, even though years had passed since the actual events had transpired.

I remember having another one during a karate lesson, shortly after I’d gotten my brown belt. I was in an advanced class, and we were working on knife techniques. As everyone present held a brown or black belt, our instructor was rather disgusted at the timidity we were evincing during what should have been a “put ‘em down, take ‘em out” exercise. He called me onto the floor of the dojo and rather contemptuously tossed a training knife at my feet.

Bam! Once again, I was elsewhere, reliving not one, but two incidents I’ll not relate, as one ugly memory fed into another. Yes, it was just as it sounds: A flashback within a flashback. As a result, I went after him with a fury that shocked not only him, but everyone else in the room, as well, and led him to refer jokingly to me as a “psychopath” at the conclusion of the lesson. It wasn’t that I was a psychopath, at all. Just that my internal experience was entirely out of synchronization with my external surroundings, and the all-important element of context was absent. Arguably, I might have been experiencing a temporarypsychotic state, but that’s hardly the same thing as a bona fide psychopathic/sociopathic condition.

I realize that I’m belaboring the point, but a true flashback is so powerful that it’s essentially indistinguishable from reality.

In conclusion (and I’ve mentioned that this is an exercise in rambling and musing, have I not?), I’ll say that I wish I had some cut-and-dried solutions to the odd reader who might himself be subject to flashbacks. Unfortunately, I don’t, as it’s taken me years of oft-blind “flailing” to learn to handle them.
The meditative techniques I learned during my martial arts days have helped, to an extent. Talking about the condition has helped, as well. Writing about my life has proven immensely beneficial, and running this blog has had a palliative effect second only to that of speaking with Moose for the first time in years. That’s all I have to offer, for now.

Thanks for reading.

TMI Revisited: Bullfrogs, Bodhrans and Bad Behavior

"My excuse must be that all Celts gravitate towards each other."
-- Oscar Wilde

I burst out laughing when I read this post on Marc MacYoung's Animal List.

I'm a sentimental SOB, and memories of good times spent among good friends (however recently) warm my heart when I pull them up. As today is New Year's Eve, a bit of reminiscence seems appropriate, even if it was penned by another. To the casual reader, it may mean nothing, but to me, it's a very fond reminder of a magical weekend spent "letting my hair down" with my weird, wild, wooly and wonderful "Bros". As our little "clan" is scattered all over the globe and often confined to communicating via email, letters, and the telephone, time spent face-to-face with them is all the more meaningful to me. This particular List post refers to such a time, and ties into "the Unknown Hack's" contributions of a few days ago.

In the words of the late Bon Scott: "The following is a true story, only the names have been changed to protect the guilty". This one's courtesy of Marc "Animal" MacYoung himself, who kindly granted me permission to reproduce it here.

Between this and the Bullfrog references, does anyone want to explain to people who WEREN'T at the 2005 BBQ what everyone is talking about? M

MN: Go ahead, dear! };-) ... just remember: Fiction has to make sense ... and no one in his or her right mind is going to believe actual events that occurred during a List BBQ ... };-)

It all started with a Mr. David Jefferson Bean going to his boss and saying, "You really want to give me these dates off ... trust me on this one." Later, you would think that three reprobates standing in an alley passing a bottle of Scotch before entering Tony's restaurant would have indicated where it was going, but it got worse than that.

Each BBQ has a different "flavor." Thus far, 2005 is the one that was the woolliest. First it started with two of the three Scotch guzzlers and other folks heading over to the ________ house for cigars, Scotch ... later, Ann Coulter (blonde, conservative, political darling) being offered rides on the Bean Machine after her take on the Federalist Papers was shredded by the owner of said machine. Somehow Al Franken got involved, but that's another story. Anyway the rest of the _________ family was back in New Jersey for the weekend, and "Flyboy" was bachin' it for the weekend. Then after a night of nearly wetting themselves from laughing, Mr. _________ was flabbergasted when this group of total bad-assed, rip-your-head-off widow makers started cleaning the house and doing the dishes.

Then came the next day where the drinking and carousing was pretty heavy. I'm trying to remember if "The Last Boy Scout" passing out in the chair with his mouth open, and "Flyboy" crawling into our front yard pond to catch the bullfrog to put on "The Last Boy Scout's" face (in lieu of "teabagging" him) was Saturday or Sunday. But "Flyboy" slipped hip deep into the pond and proceeded to drown his cell phone. Then Federal Air Marshal "The Last Boy Scout" woke up, looked over and saw an Air Force captain sitting in the pond, shrugged and went to go get something more to drink.

The bullfrog, however, became more and more of an issue as the constant croaking began to get on certain intoxicated people's nerves. Of course the fact that the Cracker Bean had found "Young Dr. Kildare's" "Green Fairy" made him a little more susceptible to Evil "Flyboy's" goading (i.e., "Hey Bean, the frog is cussing you out in Gaelic!"). "The Last Boy Scout," however, was about to shoot the frog until Dianna put her foot down and said, "No weapons." Then she had to explain to "The Last Boy Scout" that knives constitute weapons, as well. In the meantime, Roaring Girl, who had been happily imbibing Scotch and was playing the bohdran (Celtic drum), decided it was time to threaten "The Last Boy Scout" with "de-pantsing" if he didn't behave and listen to Mama about the no weapons to be used on the bullfrog. During that interval, Dave started screaming that the frog was saying "Pog mo thon" ("kiss my ass" in Gaelic). Now this doesn't sound too funny in retrospect, but it was hysterical. In fact, several pants were wet because people were laughing so hard.

It was decided that Mr. Bean should spend the night at our house, instead of trying to navigate his way back to the hotel. Even though Castle Rock's finest don't have much to do, we figured it was best if we didn't spring a twisted cracker on them. So we steered him toward the futon and went to bed. Now, fortunately, Dave has enough experience with mind-altering substances that he didn't have too much trouble accepting advice from the cat that it was time to go to bed.

This is why the 2006 BBQ shirt had a bullfrog, posed ready to fight, on it.

M

Ah, the memories! I'll never forget that weekend. Hell, I'll probably never be allowed to. Photos exist, after all...

G'Day, Eh! Or: The Hillbilly Among the Heathen, P. III

Being part of a narrative in the serial “penny dreadful” style, in which an obsessive-compulsive (and at times, quite unbalanced) Suth’n boy relates some of his more twisted exploits and adventures.

Let’s see, where was I? Oh yeah! Now I remember! It was July of 1989, and I had just completed a circuit consisting of the University of Ottawa, the Public Library, the National Archives and StatsCan, at which point my hopes of becoming the world’s first international stalker were dashed.

That left me with six days worth of free time. At this point, the question I posed to myself was: “How best to spend it?” The idea of sitting around a hotel room with my thumb up my ass didn’t appeal to me overmuch, and I’d be required to vacate my room at the “Y” on the morrow, anyway. Given this, I thought it best to find somewhere else to park my redneck rear for a the remainder of my sojourn.

Upon leaving the “Y“, I was accosted by a young couple ( These days, I call them a “young" couple, but they were roughly the same age as I, actually) who began babbling at me in French. Whereas I can read a bit of said language in a pinch, the spoken language still -- If I may be pardoned for using this expression -- Kommt mir Spanisch vor. Being quite the resourceful bastard (chuckle), and having determined that these folks couldn’t hardly speak no English nohow, I failed the “thin slicing test” completely, and opted to reply auf Deutsch.

“Es tut mir Leid, aber Ich spreche kein Franzosisch. Sprecht ihr Englisch oder Deutsch?”

“English? Did you say ’English’?” said the male half of the duo in a very American accent.

His French had been so good (if I’m qualified to judge these things) that I’d actually mistaken him for a frog.

“Yeah, dude. I said 'English',” I replied.

“Oh! You’re American!”

“Last time I checked…”

As it happened, they were tourists, too, and simply needed directions to some place I can’t remember. As I had my Ottawa-Hull map neatly folded up in my spiffy Brigade Quartermaster map case, I provided ‘em with such useful information as I could, and bade them good day. Pardon the digression (or read something else-- Ye’ think I give a rat’s ass either way?), but it still amazes me to this very day that tourists in general (and American tourists in particular) don’t collect a little more preliminary “intel” before setting out for parts unknown. End digression. I also suspect one Sluggo of cypto-anarcho-patriot sentiments, but I can’t prove it in a court of law, and he wasn’t there anyway, so that has nothing to do with the price of tea in China, the price of China in faggy little Buckhead yuppie roach-motels or much of anything else, so I‘ll drop the matter for the time being.

I’ll also drop my trousers and “moon” you without warning or provocation, so watch out!

Anyway…

Heading back to the YMCA, I made a brief detour and spent a few hours wandering around the Museum of Man and Science, which was directly across the street. I’ll readily admit to being a rather crude, foulmouthed “hayseed”, but I have never been able to resist museums for all my crude, foulmouthed “hayseediness”. I had a look-see at every single exhibit in the building, purchased a few postcards for my buddies, and then made my way to the nearest post office, in order to buy stamps.

The crude, foulmouthed “hayseedy” diatribe to which I subjected the poor clerk on duty upon discovering the exorbitant (perhaps “extortionate” is a better word…) price of Canadian postage stamps (“How much? You gotta be shittin’ me, buddy! I could get a blowjob for less than that!”) might very well have served to cause a deterioration of American/Canadian relations, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the War of 1812. Fortunately, he was a non-confrontational sort, so nothing came of it.

On the whole, Canadians are an unbelievably civil bunch (as evinced by this gentleman’s shrug, raised eyebrows and “Sorry, I don’t make the rules, I just have to live by ‘em” facial expression), and I quickly gathered that he might very well have found the “fight-at-the-drop-of-a-hat” rage that smolders just beneath the surface of each and every Upper Southern psyche a tad disturbing. As it was his country and not mine, I pissed right off, but not without befouling the pristine Canadian air with some exquisitely “redneck” invective of the “This is fucked-up as a football bat!” variety.

Stomping back to the “Y“, I remembered that I was well into the second day of this foray, and that my poor, long-suffering mother was probably expecting a phone call. Being none too polite to the transients who seemed to throng around the payphones -- without ever actually using the things, mind you -- I made a collect call to her house.

As she’d lost her youngest son not a year before, I should have been less brusque when "checking in," and I admit it. She hadn’t heard from me in two days, and even if I’d only opted to visit our closest neighbor and (at the time) one of the most civilized and civil countries on earth, I was nonetheless technically “abroad” and well beyond her “sphere of influence,” as it were. At the time, I was so self-absorbed and so occupied with licking my own recently acquired psychological wounds that it didn’t occur to me that the pain of a mother who’d lost a son might have been equal to or greater than that of a brother who‘d lost his only sibling. Seventeen years down the road or no, I still feel like an asshole over the way I behaved.

She became very emotional, probably out of sheer gratitude and relief at the sound of my voice, and I, in turn, acted every bit the consummate shithead, snappily informing her that I was right as rain, and that all manner of things were, in fact, well. Hanging up, I returned to my room and hit the phone book and my map.

Having surmised (and quite correctly, as it happened) that the local Holiday Inn, the Inn of the Provinces, the Lord Elgin and a few other hotels were just a wee bit outside my budget, I began looking for something a little closer and a little less expensive. After jotting down a list of likely facilities and making another trip to the lobby, I called around and finally settled on a place called the Somerset House, a few blocks to the north and west.

The next morning, I set out for my new digs. Ottawa is a truly beautiful city, so the walk was pleasant, for the most part. It was a clear and sunny day, and while the weather was comfortably warm, the heat wasn’t nearly as oppressive as that of the Georgia summers to which I’d become accustomed.

As my own purse-strings are often every bit as tight as those of the proverbial Scotsmen from whom I’m descended, I’d opted to save a few bucks by not calling a cab. The mild weather notwithstanding, I was sweating like a whore in church and cussing like a sailor by the time I reached my destination, some seven or eight blocks to the north and an additional block or two to the west. That particular experience motivated me to abandon suitcases and switch to a duffel bag with shoulder straps, a practice to which I still adhere, for the most part.

The good folk at the Somerset House were very accommodating, allowing me to check in early, so after doing so, I lugged my suitcase up to my new room and unceremoniously dumped it off, subjecting it to some especially choice profanity as I did so. I then took stock of my surroundings. It wasn’t a bad little hotel, all in all. I’ve stayed in better places, but I’ve stayed in a lot worse, as well. The room was clean as, more importantly, were the sheets on the bed. Always a “plus,” as in the course of my wanderings over the years, I’ve encountered places (one right here in Atlanta) in which clean sheets actually cost extra. The less said about that, though, the better.

My room was on the second floor of the hotel, and while somewhat Spartan (there was a washbasin on the wall, but few other amenities), couldn’t have been beaten, price-wise. The communal bathroom was down the corridor, but as I’d become accustomed to such arrangements while living in Europe as a boy, the fact didn’t bother me. Besides, the cost of the room came out to a mere twenty dollars (Canadian) a night or thereabout, so the price was definitely right. Back in the lower forty-eight, twenty bucks a night would get one a room in a real “roach motel” or “shooting gallery,” but that was about it.

As a bonus of sorts, there was a restaurant/bar on the ground floor of the building (the baked trout served in said facility was particularly good, as I recall), so I had everything I needed (except, perhaps, a competent psychoanalyst) right there at my fingertips. As the room was much “homier” than the one at the Y, and as travel tends to wear me out, I lay down on the bed -- just for a second, I told myself -- and ended up taking quite a long nap. I awoke feeling considerably more “grounded,” and took stock of my situation.

All that remained was to figure out how to kill the next few days of my vacation.

As my slightly insane project had fizzled out on day one, staying occupied was my top priority. I don’t handle boredom gracefully, and as I was a considerable distance from home, my usual approaches to assuaging ennui seemed -- uhm -- “inadvisable,” at best. While I was mulling this over, it occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten much of anything in nearly two days, and that I was actually very hungry. It also occurred to me that I could use a beer.

There was a small grocery store not far from the hotel, so I moseyed on in and purchased some junk food, a bag of peanuts, as I recall. Searching the store from top to bottom, I quickly realized that there wasn’t a beer to be had in the entire place. Feeling like an idiot, I asked the clerk at the cash register where the beer was kept. Looking at me as if I were a mongoloid cretin with a booger dangling from one of my nostrils, he told me that they didn’t sell beer.

Canada sucks! I thought, as I left the place. All that “Doug and Bob McKenzie” stuff was complete bullshit after all! Man, I thought some of the dry counties in Georgia were bad, but it seems I’ve stumbled into a “dry country”. Returning to my hotel, I asked the desk clerk: “What does a guy have to do to get a beer around here?” He gave me an odd look, so I related my sad discovery to him. At that point, he informed me that beer had to be purchased from a specially licensed facility, and gave me directions to the nearest one.

OK, that made sense. I’d seen similar arrangements in Europe. Even in Georgia, grocery stores were limited to selling beer and wine, while hard liquor had to be bought at licensed package stores. I thanked him, moseyed on over to the facility and got myself a much-needed sixpack. I’d heard about Canadian beer and was anxious to try it, but to my consternation and puzzlement, American brands were actually cheaper. How an “import” (even one that wasn’t much to write home about) could be less expensive than a domestically produced brew was lost on me.

The price of even the cheap stuff seemed extortionate, (“You gotta be shittin‘ me! Why so much? Do y’all bottle this-here horse piss at the friggin’ fountain of youth or something?”), but I was informed that upon returning the bottles, I’d get a good bit of my money back. Thus mollified (if only slightly), I headed back to my room with “The King of Beers” in hand. Great. Just great. I fly all the way to Canada, and I’m drinking friggin’ Budweiser…

Still feeling like a bit of a shitheel, I cracked open a beer, got on the phone and tried to smooth things over with my mom, apologizing for having been so curt when last I had spoken with her. She seemed to be in a much better mood when I hung up, which was a relief, as my conscience had kicked in by then, and was really doing a number on me. With all she’d endured over the last few months, she certainly didn’t need me making things worse by acting like a complete prick. I spent the remainder of the evening killing off the sixpack and staring out the window, watching the “street life,” such as it was. When imbibing, I tend to think some very odd thoughts, and while watching the flow of humanity moving up and down the sidewalk beneath my window, it struck me that something just didn’t feel right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was definitely something wrong with the picture. Finally, I realized what it was.

I was in the heart of a fairly major city, and yet everyone I saw was White. Having lived in Atlanta for the past five years, and having spent so much time hanging out in the downtown area, Chamblee and Doraville, I’d become so accustomed to seeing people of other races that I took their presence as a given. This place looked like Minnesota or Vermont, for the love of God! It was actually weird, as even in Germany I’d become accustomed to the sight of Turks and other Middle-Easterners. Having solved the puzzle, I concentrated upon “people watching” and polishing off my beer. Upon completing said task, I smoked one or two cigarettes more, placed my “punk jabber” on the nightstand, and went to bed.

As I’ve said, Ottawa is a lovely town, so I decided to get out and see more thereof. Over the next few days, I visited the National Library and Public Archives, the War Museum, The Currency Museum, the National Gallery, and the Halls of Parliament.

On the grounds of the last site mentioned, I wandered around a bit, had a look at the locks on the Rideau Canal, and took a very nice photo of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, in Hull, across the Ottawa River. I still have it, and I’m still very proud of it, actually. For some years, I was a semi-fanatical “shutterbug”, and the shot of the museum is one of the best I’ve ever taken.

As I sat down in the shade of a tree for a rest and a smoke, I noticed an immense black rat staring at me. The rat was actually clinging to the tree, about three feet off the ground, peering at me from around the curve of the trunk. My cigarette dropped from my lips as I regarded the critter with a mixture of fascination and horror.

It must have wandered up from the river! But I’d never seen rats climb trees before! Perhaps this was some as-yet undiscovered species! For a moment, I looked around for a rock to throw at it, but quickly remembered where I was. Next, moving very slowly (and praying that the thing wasn’t rabid), I advanced the film in my camera and lined up my shot. The world was about to be introduced to Rattus beanus, the Canadian Tree-Climbing Rat.

And then the damned thing rounded the trunk of the tree, revealing a large, bushy tail.

It was a squirrel. Nothing but a squirrel. As I’d spent most of my life in the Southeastern United States and in Europe, I’d taken it as a given that squirrels were either grey or red. This one was coal-black. At first, I thought it might be some freak of nature, so snapped a few shots of it anyway, as it leaped to the ground, picked up a nut of some sort and began stuffing its cheek-pouches. Then I took a look around me, and noticed that there were a few more squirrels in the trees, and that all of ‘em were black. So much for turning the world of zoology upside down. The photo is another I still have, though, as black squirrels were such a complete novelty to me.

By this time I was getting hungry, so I looked around for a suitable eatery, and found that it’s nearly impossible to starve in Ottawa. The city was home to numerous restaurants of various grades, and to plenty of street vendors as well. The “dog carts” in Ottawa were far cleaner than those found in Atlanta, and also offered a more varied bill of fare, a definite “plus.” For the next few days, I made a habit of buying lunch from them, as I could have not only “jes’ plain” hotdogs, but Bratwurst, Knackwurst, and Kielbasa, as well, with a wonderful selection of toppings.

For all that most of these vendors seemed to be immigrants from Eastern Europe (and therefore probably KGB “sleepers,” to my mind), I found the experience of eating -- for the first time in years -- real Bratwurst, prepared to my satisfaction (which is to say: Enhanced with a squeeze of hot mustard and smothered in Sauerkraut and banana pepper rings) so nearly orgasmic as to temporarily quench my white-hot hatred of Ivan and his minions whenever I partook of one.

Another feature of Canadian street-dining that impressed me consisted of what I’ll call “burger buses,” for lack of a better term. In Ottawa, the hungry traveler often found small buses outfitted with kitchens. These buses -- one side furnished with a panel that raised or lowered and served as a built-in awning -- cruised the streets looking for business. Upon finding a likely spot, the driver raised the awning and awaited the lunch-hour stampede of famished “working stiffs” (and in this case, Ridgerunner tourists).

The vittles provided by these “greasy spoons on wheels” -- while unlikely to inspire a classically trained Cantonese chef to toss his wok and utensils into the Si Kiang and beg any given driver/cook to take him on as a student -- weren’t bad by any stretch of the imagination. I’d rate them more highly than McDonald’s or Burger King, and perhaps even slightly above Wendy’s in those days.

I ate at a few other fast food joints while I was there, and can’t say they were much different from those in the states, save for the facts that the overall quality of the fare was higher, one could actually obtain tolerable fish and chips at a few of them, and that Canadians really overdo the vinegar and mayonnaise at times.

Another pleasant experience was had at a little breakfast joint I found. At the time, I tended not to eat before 11:00 or so, but one morning, I came down with a case of the munchies and set out in search of something with which to stuff my craw. It’s been quite a long time, so I can’t remember the eatery’s exact location, but I did have to walk north a ways from Somerset. Not too far, mind you. I’m thinking it was between Laurier and Sparks, but as I was {{blush}} a tad bit hung over at the time, I can’t recall where it was situated with any degree of acuity.

The place interested me because it served people from all social classes. No single group or socio-economic stratum seemed dominant. I noticed the Canadian version of yuppies, the older, more refined “Old Money”-types, hard-hatted construction workers and “Bohemian”-types all breaking bread in peace and quiet. For the record, these groups didn’t interact with one another as far as I could tell, but some of the overt hostility one might observe in my neck of the woods -- the hard-eyed stares and “Oh shit! I think we’re in the wrong bar/diner/garage/grocery store!” looks of horrified recognition were conspicuously absent.

Perhaps Canadians (in those days) were better able to understand and accept inherent differences in individual capabilities and endowments. Or perhaps they were just wussies. I still haven’t figured it out.

While I was making these observations and trying to analyze the social dynamic, my stomach was growling like a tired, old tomcat confronted with a playful but ill-mannered puppy, so I done well and rightly ordered me some eats. As I’d seen a Canadian grocery store or two, I knew that grits were not only unavailable in these parts, but completely unheard-of, as well. Perhaps a tiny but sharp stab of homesickness led me to order toast as my carb source, but I didn’t ask -- and still don’t know -- what manner of grain-based gruel Canadians use to fuel themselves. Oatmeal? Cream of Wheat? Boiled, sweetened barley? As I’ve said, I still have no idea.

I did find, though, that for all the differences that exist between the two, Canadian and American breakfast foods aren’t irreconcilably divided. Like the British, my own Countrymen, (and even Koreans: I‘ll rant and rave about the endorphin-rush-inducing culinary “enlightenment” experienced by a certain Suth’ ne’er-do-well upon first tasting kongnamul kuk bap in a future post) Canadians eat real breakfasts; breakfasts that “stick ta yer ribs.”

I’ve remarked in the past that eating breakfast in Britain (for all that most British food sucks) was a
“vacation in Paradise,” compared to the experience of shoveling down the shit placed before me when vacationing on the continent. Eggs! Ham! Bacon! Fried tomatoes! Joy!

Lord have mercy! The stuff we were served elsewhere? An over-baked roll with a pat of butter and some jam or jelly. A-bdeeah, a-bdeeah, a-bdeeah, that’s all, folks! What the hell kind of way to begin the day is that? Britain, however was different, as was Canada. The latter country seemed to have adopted the best of the British and American traditions, and for all that I’d have been glad for sausage, biscuits, pepper gravy and whatnot, I enjoyed my meal.

At this particular eatery, I had no trouble ordering eggs fried “over easy,” yet another definite "plus," as that‘s the way I like ‘em. Unlike the Brits, our northern cousins understand that one need not resort to scrambling or boiling when cooking them, that there are nearly as many ways to cook an egg as to skin a cat. I also had toast (pretty much the same everywhere), my first taste of Canadian bacon, which is quite different from our own -- more like some sort of ham or gammon than what I‘d think of as bacon. Ours is more like the “streaky bacon” the British slice into “rashers”. Differences in terminology aside, it was very good., and I tucked into it with relish. Having stuffed my craw with a real breakfast, I then hit the streets again, looking for mischief -- uh, make that fun. Yeah, that‘s it. Fun.

As I was actually feeling somewhat -- how to put this delicately? -- “stimulated” for the first time in months, I decided to check the Yellow Pages and see what I could find by way of suitable entertainment. Cursory examination revealed that there was no shortage of either “exotic” dance clubs or “escort services” in Ottawa, but (in a rare moment of lucidity), I questioned the wisdom of getting hammered in a Canadian titty bar and/or hiring an “escort” in my admittedly precarious emotional state.

It began raining shortly after I’d finished my breakfast, so I brushed aside all thoughts of hookers and strippers and beer (Oh, my!) and took refuge in the Public Library, before returning to my room. After making a few telephone calls, I’d determined which banks gave the best exchange rate, so I made it a point to mosey over to the best of the best and change some more money. The teller was a very friendly young lady, who, noticing that I was a smoker, offered me a Canadian cigarette for some reason or the other, perhaps for the sake of comparison. I didn’t notice much difference between American and Canadian stogies, for the record, but it struck me as a friendly gesture. I probably should have asked for her phone number, but as I was only in town for a few days, there seemed to be little point in so doing.

As I left, it occurred to me that my own carton would run out eventually, and that I might as well find a source of nicotine. This led to my next rude awakening. I found a tobacconist and nearly fell over backwards upon discovering the price a deck of smokes fetched in the Great White North. They were nearly five bucks a pack. Even with the Canadian dollar being worth only eighty cents US or thereabout at the time, the price was still extortionate, and nearly four times what I’d pay for generics back home.

After a few more hours spent wandering around the city, I went back to my room and took a nap. Awakening just before dusk, I decided to take a stroll and have a look at the nightlife. For reasons pertaining to visibility, I often favor dark clothing, and for this reason, I pulled on a black BDU jacket, dropped my polycarbonate “punk jabber” into one pocket and went out for one of the long walks I‘d become accustomed to taking. I was out and about for quite a while, and must have walked around every block in an area bounded by Lisgar and Gilmour to the north and south, and Bank and Bronson Avenue to the east and west. This time, I just allowed the “sensory flood” of which I’ve complained earlier to wash over me without resisting it.

For some reason, one image in particular has remained with me to this day. It is that of a girl of perhaps my own age at the time. She was wearing a red-and-white striped shirt, had long, dark, wavy hair, and was leaning out a second-story window, just “watching the world go by,” as I suppose. Not sure why I remember that with such clarity, but I do. Perhaps it was the way the light of the setting sun threatened to paint the stripes on her shirt out of existence, or the way it tinted her hair, but she seemed very beautiful, and almost mysterious. I suppose that’s why I recall the incident so clearly after all these years.

Night fell as I performed my “reconnaissance,” if you will, and I found the darkness oddly comforting. I played a few games, slipping in and out of the shadows as I saw or heard other pedestrians approaching, but soon tired of them and returned to the hotel. As I made my way back, an unpleasant thought -- which I quickly shooed away -- came to me. I was carrying my synthetic dagger as protection against psychos and “skels,” but in this neighborhood, I myself was probably the closest to either I was likely to encounter. This was very different from Atlanta, to say the least.

A thought that sobering demanded that I wash it away with something a good bit less sobering, so I decided to give the hotel bar a try. It was a very cozy little place, and the barkeeps were extremely friendly. I tried my first LaBatt’s Blue and fell in love with the stuff upon taking my first sip. As I put ‘em away, a “character” entered the bar and sat down beside me. I gave him an “Evenin’, bud” and a quick once-over. His hair was uncombed, and his cheeks unshaven. For all that it had stopped raining some hours ago, he was wearing a raincoat, and not a very clean rain coat, either.

Canada, it appears, has its share of transients who live in cheap hotels, just as does the US. This gent appeared to be one of them. He began talking animatedly if bitterly, this bum, and I immediately noticed a trait characteristic of the breed, a weird combination of chattiness and hostility. I didn’t know Marc MacYoung at the time, and wouldn’t have employed these terms in those days, but this gent would perhaps best be classified midway between “creepy crawly” and “walking wounded”. My encounter with him was one my earliest experiences as a “freak magnet,” and this alone made the occasion memorable.

For all that he was Canadian, he claimed to have served in the US Army during the Vietnam War, and courtesy dictated that I take him at his word, at least to appearances. He was certainly “off” enough to have done as he claimed -- he might as well have had the letters PTSD tattooed on his face -- but this was 1989, after all. In those days, every whacko out there claimed to be a “Vietnam vet,” and I’d actually met a few men not ten years older than myself who claimed to have served in “the ‘Nam,” so by that time, I was learning to take such assertions with a large grain of salt.

Eventually, he became unbearably obnoxious, and the bartender rather sharply told him to pay up and make tracks. As she called him by name, I gathered that this wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence. I spent a few minutes making small talk with her. Eventually, other patrons began seating themselves around the bar. As I engaged in meaningless chatter with the barkeep, a very cheery and almost stereotypically Canadian voice chirped: “So, where’s the accent from, eh?”

I about died laughing. These folks were the ones who talked funny, and yet I was being questioned about my accent. “Georgia,” I said, as I turned to have a look at the questioner. It was a cute, petite Canadian girl wearing (for lack of a better word) a “nerdy” pair of glasses and -- if I recall correctly; I’d had a few beers by then -- a short, white dress with some sort of repeating pattern in blue printed on the fabric.

We began chatting over quiet a few subjects, most of which I can’t recall, (although I do remember having to bite back on a bit of irritation when the health-care systems of our two countries were compared; I‘m not a fan of socialized medicine or socialized anything, for that matter). During the course of the conversation, she introduced me to a few of what I gathered were the “regulars”: a guy from Ireland; a guy from Scotland; and a Canadian graphic artist, who seemed to regard me with some suspicion. In retrospect, I gather that he had the hots for this gal, and resented the attention she was paying me. That, however, is pure speculation on my part.

And that’s where I’m gonna have to leave you for now, gentle reader. Time to go earn a living.

Maximum Chop Socky III

Being part the third of a rambling narrative in which our boy relates his experiences as a tofu-eatin’ “karate kid” hippie, and inspires the gentle reader to shout: “Who gives a rat’s ass?” and: “So tell me again: Why is it that your mother didn’t toss you into a dumpster shortly after your birth?”

April 1994

When last we saw our ever-so-slightly thuggish, Scots-Irish anti-hero (truly “Born Fighting,” and with himself as often as not) he was gloating over his newfound knowledge of the ancient, oriental art of whupass-dō, and was looking forward to applying said to the baw’bag of the baw’bag his ex-girlfriend was shagging at the time. Yes, our boy was something of a sore loser, but that’s another story entirely. For now, let’s focus on his “Kung Fu Jones” days.

I went home that afternoon, and spent most of the day kicking and punching the air, ingraining the offensive and defensive combinations I’d learned, and trying to get a “feel” for the art. I had no idea what I was doing, mind you, but there was something new and exciting about this karate business, and I could tell that I was on the verge of becoming hooked. Being the eminently unreasonable bastard I am, I threw caution to the wind and “took the plunge.” I attended as many classes as my work schedule would allow, neglected yet another of my short-term romantic dalliances (Yes, I still dated on on occasion. The fact that I was obsessively in love with Moose didn’t mean I was gonna cut myself off from “gettin‘ some” every so often , dig? Were it not enough that she was certainly getting her fair share, what with a live-in boyfriend an’ a’…, I’m a man, and “A Man‘s a Man for A' Tha',” as the song goes. Ya see? I got “gear“ and it all works. Canst thou groove thereunto, hipster?), and once again gave my obsessive/compulsive tendencies free rein.

The physical demands of training were rather arduous, so I cut back on the booze and smokes, and began working out again, lifting weights, running, and jumping rope. Interestingly enough, one of the side-effects of martial arts training is an increased degree of willpower, so “just saying ‘no’” to that one-beer-too-many, or holding out for another fifteen minutes before lighting a cigarette became far easier than in the past. By ‘94, I’d said: “Sayōnara” to all illegal drugs some time before, and this li’l fact didn’t exactly impede my progress.

The techniques I’d learned in that first class proved only “tip of the iceberg,” as it were. Even though students at the white-belt level were responsible for the offensive and defensive combinations assigned to that level, we were taught numerous other single techniques, which we were required to know as such: The four “basic” blocks and the two kicks I’ve mentioned earlier; and two punches, the reverse punch (already described) and the lunge punch. We were also required to practice other hand strikes along with everyone else, particularly the ridge hand, backfist, palm strike, and the shuto (the so-called “karate chop”). Then there was learning to step correctly, basic stances (“attention,” “ready,” front, back, “horse,“ and side stances) , bowing (we did quite a bit of that at that school), proper breathing, and certain core practical and ethical principles of the art. I was also shown my first kata (solo form), my first real stumbling block.

Because the form is rather simple (rather like many martial artists I’ve met, but that’s for another post), my instructors had opted to “fudge” a bit, and have students at the white belt level learn the Korean (Tae Kwon Do) form Chon-Ji. It’s not at all difficult, as it features only four stances (two of which really don’t count, to my mind), two blocks, and a single offensive technique, the lunge punch. The footwork is also easy, consisting only of basic forward and backward steps, and 90° and 180° pivots. For all its simplicity, it gave me fits, and it must have taken me the better part of a week to learn just the basic sequence of moves. When I had memorized said sequence, I spent a good bit of time practicing the form at home.

As I was becoming rather fanatical at the time, I decided to videotape myself performing it, in order to observe my form and improve my overall performance. I donned my gi, set up my camcorder, and went into the kata. When I’d finished performing (and what a performance it would be!), I put the tape into the VCR, turned on the television, and nearly lost my lunch.

My God! I looked like a complete spaz! My facial expression suggested that I was either severely constipated or thinking entirely too hard about what I was doing. My attention was clearly everywhere but on my intended focus points. That was the good part. My stance was too high and too narrow, my focus was non-existent, and my co-ordination was even worse, with my hands and feet apparently receiving their orders from two separate brains.

Videotaping and critiquing one’s own performance, by the way, is one of the best means of improvement available to the student. It is, however, an ego-killer. In my case, I was aghast at what I saw. My sense of shame was so great that I was motivated to practice far more seriously, breaking the kata down into smaller sequences of moves until the sequences became automatic, at which point I was free to focus on the intent of each technique.

Within a month, I’d learned the basics, and was able to focus more and more on the matters of breathing properly, meaning each technique instead of merely “going through the motions”, working balance and coordination, etc. I’ve said it’s a simple form, but that’s only compared to others. No kata is truly simple, as there are so many elements -- many of which only become apparent in time. In our school, there were ten basic principles upon which to focus. I don’t know if they’re universally accepted or copyrighted, so I won’t post them here. Supposedly, the human mind can only focus on seven or so things at once, so clearly, no fewer than two or three of the basic points had to be internalized and made instinctive, to free the mind up to concentrate on the other elements. Given this, it’s fair to say again that no form is truly simple, and further, that no one ever really “masters” any given form, as there is always some element that could bear improving.

Karate is, of course, a defensive art, and some of the basic techniques aren’t necessarily suited to immediate use as an effective means of self-defense. I was far more interested in offense, mind you, but the environmental and “practical” techniques we learned (the “give ‘em-something-they-can-use-almost-immediately-and-send- ‘em away-happy”
approach, I suppose) were interesting and had great potential, for all that I was aware of many of them already. The first thing we were taught was how to escape a variety of wrist-grabs, followed by bear-hugs, the full nelson, and various headlocks.

We were also instructed in a few basic wristlocks and armbars. I had trouble with the wristlocks at first, but kept at it, imagining applying them to Moose’s boyfriend and hyper extending and hyper flexing his joints to kingdom come all the while. Nothing smoothes the learning process more than a high degree of motivation, after all. And I was most definitely motivated, gentle reader.

Beyond physical motions, though, there were other things to be learned. Unlike many other schools, the one I attended also required the students to memorize the Japanese name for each technique, stance, principle, etc. I’ve had a “thing” for languages for a very long time, so this was hardly a burden. On the contrary, it made learning karate even more interesting.

I bought myself a few basic grammar outlines and a dictionary, and began studying the language, as well. Memorizing words has never been difficult for me, but I never gained much proficiency in Japanese. I found trying to learn two syllabaries plus the kanji (Chinese characters) to be something of a pain in the rear, so I eventually abandoned the undertaking, aside from learning the terminology. Interestingly enough, the experience came in helpful a few years later while I was putting some real effort into learning Turkish. There are interesting structural similarities between the two languages, the subject-object-verb syntax being only one of them.

In June of ‘94, I had enough lessons under my belt (no pun intended) to test for the next rank, yellow. I was the only person testing that day, so my nerves were fairly ragged, as the instructors and two of the senior students who’d come to help with the testing (both girls, one holding a brown and one a black belt) had only yours truly upon which to focus their attention. This, incidentally, was yet another way in which Karate helped me greatly. One has no choice but to practice the art or wallow in self-consciousness. Either/or. He cannot do both.

I was fairly stressed-out during the exam, but I recall: Performing several repetitions of my offensive and defensive combinations; demonstrating my basic techniques while advancing and retreating; performing the kata I‘d learned; striking and kicking the heavy bag and focus pads; and demonstrating at least one defense against each of the attacks I’d been taught. The sensei’s reasoning was flawless, if simple: Unless one could defend against a technique as well as he could perform it, he didn’t really know it. There was a written test, in which I was required to answer questions pertaining to Japanese terminology and the basic principles of the art, and I nailed that one down with flying colors. Finally came the moment of truth: The board-break.

In the dojo in which I trained, each belt-test --- regardless of the student’s rank -- was concluded with a board-break. No exceptions. I was given the choice of breaking my board -- a 1’ x 1’ square of inch-thick pine -- with a reverse punch, a lunge punch or a front kick. As I hadn’t done any real hand-conditioning at the time, I opted for the kick, of course. One of the senior students held for me, and psyching myself up, I let fly with the hardest, fastest kick I could muster, kiai-ing like a bull with his balls caught in a barbed-wire fence. To my surprise -- and a pleasant surprise it was -- the my foot went straight through the board, which broke neatly in half, right down the middle. I didn’t feel much impact at all.

Wow! This is fuckin'-A great! This stuff really works! My inner child (a juvenile delinquent, I’m afraid) giggled with glee. Moose’s boyfriend’s posterior was fescue, and I was gonna be the lawnmower!

That very month, I decided to devote myself to learning this stuff fulltime. I checked my finances and noted that if I cut a few corners, I could last for a few months without working, so I devised a train-for-three-months/work-for-three-months plan. I then told my bosses at work that they had me for two weeks more and that was it. Between April and June, I’d stopped showing up hung over, and had become one of the best workers on the crew. In March, they’d essentially been looking for excuses to cut me loose, but three months later, they were begging me to stay. I didn’t want to burn any bridges, so I didn’t give them the “Kiss it and don’t miss it” bit. Instead, I told them that I had some personal problems that required my immediate and undivided attention, and that the sixty-hour work week didn’t allow me sufficient time to do that.

This, of course, was a case of telling the unvarnished truth without revealing too much. I couldn’t exactly sit down on the corner of my supervisor’s desk and say: “Well ye’ see, I’ve gotta git mah ‘ace’ up ter Nor’ Car’liner, pick up m’ gal’s trail, hunt ‘er down an’ put her current ‘boner-donor’ in the ‘mergency room.” Attribute it to my keenly developed intuition if you will, but I didn’t imagine the aforementioned scene would sit well with them at all. So I “bullshat without really bullshitting”, as it were, and went my merry way.

As my car (“Turd Hearse II,” an ’84 Chevy Cavalier that by then had cost me twice as much in repairs as I paid for it in the first place) had finally given up the ghost, I’d been walking to and from work --a little shy of three miles each way -- for the better part of a month. This daily ritual had a few interesting effects both physical and psychological on me, but I’ll discuss them later, if at all.

Daddy had returned to the States from Europe at the same time, and nearly had an apoplexy when I informed him of my decision. I dug in and wouldn’t budge (I can be infuriatingly stubborn and tenacious when I’m really motivated-- a rare occurrence, indeed), and he knew I meant it and eventually stopped riding my ass. I’d only been training from late April to early June, but Ma had apparently noticed certain positive changes in my behavior and outlook as a result of said training, and was “cool” with my decision once I’d shown her my latest bank statement.

“You do what you need to do,” she’d said. There was nothing cryptic or inscrutable in her mien when she said it. She clearly meant it, and I believe she might have played a part in getting my father to accept my decision, as well.

Having ditched the dead-end job, the only things left to do were: ditching the dead-end, quasi-relationship in which I was half-heartedly involved, and getting down to the business of becoming a bona fide “Karate Kid.” After all, I’d spent five years “talking myself down” from outright “murder 1” to boring ol’ aggravated battery, and there was no sense in quitting now!

And that’s where I’m gonna leave ya for now.