Today’s soundtrack: in the bars, with the men who play guitars
Today at 8:02pm: Avoiding inattentive jackasses on the Major Deegan Expressway


Went upstate to see my folks today. Over dinner I mentioned Cuba and they raised an eyebrow, but at this point they’re like “Our son is both weird and in his thirties, so, whatever.”

I’d been letting my hair grow out but last week I had to shave it again, I couldn’t take it. Hair gets itchy and takes time to dry and looks all fucked-up when you wake up in the mornings and that’s one more thing you have to worry about when you’re already late and wearing the same tie you wore yesterday. Yeah it’s not for me.

Got home and ate a second dinner. Shady and his girl brought a bunch of weird foodstuff back from Norway so I scarfed it. Reindeer salami, caviar in a tube (like toothpaste), a hunk of orange goat cheese and a big-ass slab of lox, which I sliced up with Tony’s cleaver gift.

Reindeer tastes good and I plan to serve it to my children, which should put an interesting spin on Christmas lore. God bless the woman who’s going to marry me. We’re going to sing songs about Rudolph and then we are going to eat him. I’ll serve it with a stem-free Maraschino cherry and the lot of us will do rock-paper-scissors to see who gets to eat it.

Felt kind of guilty having a good time last night on the same day as Bill’s wake but I know this all part of the “circle of life” or whatever. I’ll try to be patient with the students in my classes like Bill was. They printed his bio at the memorial service and I found out he was a Special Agent over at the State Department, and his latest job was to break in the new agents. Cool, right?

After the memorial service yesterday Jason walked out of there with me. He’s a black belt who started a family and moved to Jersey so I haven’t seen him for a while. He was telling me about his experiences at other hapkido schools with masters more “traditional” than ours, and it was interesting to hear how other schools do it.

The “traditional” master he met asked him why, when performing a certain technique, Jason kept stepping to the side. “To avoid the other hand,” he said. We’re always taught that if you’re doing a technique on one of your opponent’s hands you’ve gotta get out of the way of the other, because no one throws a single punch and just leaves it out there; if you managed to tie up the right punch, well, get ready for the left.

The traditional master kind of scoffed at this, which we didn’t think was right. To prove his point Jason demonstrated on another student, but he had the good sense to do it behind the traditional master’s back. I’ve noticed most martial artists these days don’t take kindly to criticism. Egos, face and all that shit. Well, whaddaya gonna do.

I mean I know what I’m gonna do, which is to watch out for the other hand. If I get punched out I’d like to think I tried everything I could to prevent it.

Speaking of which, I always thought it would be funny if, at the beginning of a sparring session, I put my guard down and tried to reason with the other person.

Maybe not.