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How to Win a Street Brawl in One Easy Step

Yesterday my school hosted a somewhat impromptu non-competitive tournament and invited a few other schools to bring their students, in order for all involved to have experience fighting people they have never fought before. There were no points, nor winners and losers; it was more of a proof-of-concept night, to show that it works to loosely gather together different schools to organize a night of sparring rounds. This now enables us to circulate word that schools have been meeting for a night of training-by-fighting and why don't the rest of them come out and join us?

This is also a great way to meet other people in the Taekwondo community, and perhaps the martial arts community as a whole. Ellen and I happened to choose a school with very few people in our age group. We train with about 6 other regulars, including instructors. This is good for its own reasons, but sometimes, as in the case of last night, it's just exhilarating to walk back into the dojang after a water break and see a hundred people stacked in lines, doing practice and warm-up drills, or to see a hundred people sitting around the perimeter watching the fights being refereed in the center.

It was also the hardest and most brutal class I've participated in so far. After my first round was done I felt like throwing up for a good half hour, forcing myself to push on regardless. I had a great time, all things considered. I think I'll find myself loving these nights where we have a commingling of different faces, different styles, and no pressure to bring home first place prize. I can't see myself ever caring about "winning." It's not the reason I started this endeavour to begin with, and hasn't become one. I don't really see the point in trying to show you're better than somebody; among the many other good reasons for studying a martial art, it instills in you a respect for physical confrontation, the perils of it, and the necessity to avoid it at all costs, only using it as a last resort.

Which reminds me: Daniel, Jordan, Jonathan, Jasmine, Matthew and I went to the cinema on Tuesday night to catch Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, which by the way is an amazing movie (for a male ego, anyway, heh) and one I would recommend to all fighting-movie fans. We watched this movie, heavy in martial arts violence, and afterwards went to the arcade room to play Street Fighter, Tekken, etc, all that ridiculously fun fighting game stuff. Pumped up on adrenaline and aggression, the six of us left the theatre and were walking away, towards the van, when we were promptly accosted verbally by three guys obviously looking for a fight. Jordan (who has years of various martial arts experience in his past) turned back a couple times to engage them verbally, but by and large we continued to walk away. It took a bit of prodding on my part to get us all to the van safely; Jordan has a tendency to get into fights wherever he goes, and the odds are usually stacked against him. Tonight would have been great redemption time for him even though it would have drawn Daniel and I into the melee in order to prevent Jordan from getting himself into a three-on-one. (Matthew, Jasmine, and Jonathon probably wouldn't have bothered taking part at all, to their credit.)

We got into the van and left, cursing among ourselves at this certain ethnic population in Ottawa that seems to think their skin color can be used to intimidate the majority of the other people they come into contact with. From a certain angle it's perceivable that they would have deserved it, that they had it coming to them because of their inability to just let people go about their businesses in public without intruding—not to mention their ridiculous inability to weigh odds (five guys against three??). And in fact, assuming they weren't armed in any way, because of their size we would have easily "won" the fight—no question about it. But it would have been a loss for Jordan and I as martial artists to waste our time fighting with people who were being mere nuisances and no tangible physical threat to our persons. As much as I spent the rest of the van ride home wishing we'd taken the opportunity to send a message in their direction, I'm quite glad that at the time of the actual confrontation I was thinking more clearly than that. In the last six months of training I have gone from being too scared to get into a fight to being too smart to.

Shikata Ga Nai

There are eight people in the world whose lives I value over my own. In any sudden catastrophic situation or crisis requiring an instant (possibly instinctive) decision whether or not to give up my own life so that theirs can be saved, I wouldn't hesitate longer than a heartbeat to do it for any or all of these people I love to death. Naturally I would never simply type their names up for the world to know as though they were just another list in my life; I like to keep it as one of my most respected and sacrosanct secrets, never committed to paper as a tangible list of names or uttered as speech as though ephemeral like spoken word itself. I keep it safe in my mind and rarely consider it, rarely doubt it—it's like a set of intuitive axioms that I never question or need to question. If they are there, they should be; if they are meant to be, they will be, reinforced instinctively from time to time, like when I tell my mother and father that I love them, when I tousle my nephew's hair or adjust the bib on my niece so it rests just so, when I enjoy the most intimate moments with Ellen, when I support my younger brother without question no matter what trouble he's gotten himself into, and so on.

This tendency to value others over myself is something I have always invitingly allowed in my nature. No matter how fierce the impulse to save myself in any given situation, I would willingly override this instinct in preference for these people. The rest of the world I would leave behind.

Background Deletion

To bring out the most visceral sides of my psychology I need only take a trip on Ottawa's bus system, especially at night. Even the most boring and latent mental moments of mine are rekindled quite readily by boarding a bus and interacting with—or even just watching—the other passengers, that's when the hatred sets back in. This evening I found myself struck again by contempt for everybody around me. Again I wished that people in the world were just files I could delete when their continuing existence no longer satisfied me. I'd probably suddenly get into one of my cleaning moods and unlink half the world, starting with those idiots who have their cell phones loaded with the latest childish ring tone, then progressing through those massive swarms of noise-producing eye diarrhea who all probably dropped out of grade four, and finally finishing up with a large-scale mass deletion of all smokers. I would even background the deletion process so I could carry out the rest of my day with as little trouble as possible, watching person after person poke out of existence.

Swinging Nunchucks

It's been so long since I last wrote in my physical wire-bound journals that I no longer have any clue where they are, any of the six volumes I owned at last count. They are great to have around for inspiration during these times when I have so much trouble thinking of what to write about that I end up doing all of the other things that I've been doing lately, like adding a flood throttle to my IRC client, reading short stories, learning the Unix utility awk, and attempting to fly trans-oceanic flights in a simulator while hammered. A recent theme on some of the sites I like to visit every day seems to be discussion of the authors' private space and what it means to them. Since I am an enormously territorial man I naturally have a lot to add on the matter from my own personal angle. Having my own space is so important to me that we have things arranged here in this two-bedroom apartment that one whole bedroom has just my computer, my books, my old single bed that I use for nap time, and a great big map of the world on which I trace the legs of my around-the-world flight in pencil. This is generally considered to be "my room," though Ellen has been known to sneak in and draw pictures on the whiteboard in the margins around the logic I've scribbled for the latest programming problems I've worked on. I sit in my room every day and read, or code, or just lie on my bed thinking, getting stronger with each passing day while the rest of the world around me gets weaker and less threatening and stuff like that. I wouldn't hesitate to kill anybody who attempted to take my room in a spontaneous domestic coup, especially if they were to come through the window swinging nunchucks and engaging in senseless falsetto wailing.