The Kerambits

Title sounds like an animated feature about superheroes, but actually, kerambit (spelled in a variety of ways, sometimes "kerampit," or "karambit," "korambit," among others) is an Indonesian knife that usually features a short, curved blade that may be sharp on both edges or sometimes just the inner edge, and a finger ring on the butt. Is a close-quarters weapon, designed for more for hooking and slashing than stabbing, and one may use the ring end to strike.

For a fight scene featuring these, you should run right out and buy a copy of The Musashi Flex, Ace Books, by Yours Truly.

Um. Anyway, having posted a photo on the previous entry, I thought I'd re-post it and name the knives pictured therein. These live in the gun safe, and there are a couple more knives in it I haven't had a chance to photograph with the collection. One is by Chuck Pippin, and you can see it at:

http://www.tribaledgeknives.com/

Along with Mushtaq Ali's designs, including the Tiger Claw, which is a cousin to the kerambit, and as I have pointed out before, a very nifty little knife.

I have also a nice double-bladed Javanese ring knife that was a gift from Bobbe Edmunds, and I'll get a picture of that one eventually. Way cool.

Meanwhile, clockwise, starting at twelve:

1. Steve Rollert's original prototype for the "boxcutter," with faux-ivory scales by Yours Truly. Western Knife tool steel.
2. & 3. Shiva Ki's 250 layers of laminated damascus kerambits.
4. Traditional Javanese kerambit with buffalo horn handle, in wos wuta pamor steel.
5. Traditional Javanese kerambit with cast and sculpted silver handle, also wos wuta pamor.
(These traditional blades are sharp on both edges.)
6.One-off, sabertooth knife, made from a circular saw blade by Rick Perry, (from a resin cast of an actual sabertooth fang pulled from the La Brea tar pits.
7. Folding kerambit, Cutter Knife & Tool, ATS stainless steel, titanium handle, aluminum ring.
8.&9. Steve Rollert's production kerambits, skeletonized handles, tool steel.

Stick 'em, Dan'l

Recently, there was a discussion on Martial Arts Planet, in which a fairly well-known MMA (mixed martial arts) teacher talked about how silly the art of silat was.

MMA guys tend to judge all martial arts by how well they do in the ring, and since some martial arts don't go in for sporting applications, you don't see them in the ring.

The argument usually starts when one of the MMA folks allow as how anything that isn't what they do is pretty much worthless, which tends to ruffle a few feathers. They really like the phrase "alive training." This is basically sparring against an opponent, and they think that anything that isn't sparring is waste of time. Well, except for a few drills, like hitting the bag or shadowboxing, like that.

In silat, we call our drills "djurus," or "sambuts," but apparently, according to the MMA folk, these are "dead training," and useless.

My response tends to come down to, "Okay, you bring your Speedos and I'll bring my knives and let see does that alter the rules in my favor ... ?"

To which they immediately say, "Yeah, well, we can fight dirty, too! What makes you think we don't know how to swing a knife?"

Maybe, I say, you do. But if you knew squat about knives, you'd know you don't want to dance with somebody who is really adept at swinging one, because even if you have one of your own, YOU WILL GET CUT -- exclamation point and end of sentence.

If you are barehanded against someone who barely knows which end to hold and which one to poke, and you are an expert, it's still likely you'll get cut, but maybe in a place where you can get stitched up and be home in time for supper. Steel against flesh is a bad trade, generally.

Barehanded against a expert with sharp steel? I don't fancy your chances -- 0r mine, and I've trained for some time in a blade-based art. One of the things I've learned is, barehanded against a trained knifer is not the way to go. Even if you have a knife, better to find a path elsewhere if at all possible. (There's a Javanese saying: In a knife fight, the loser is ashes -- but the winner is charcoal. The term "Pyrrhic victory" covers it pretty well.)

In the ER getting sewn up is better than being in the ICU full of tubes and needles, but neither is as good as sitting at home having a quiet beer and fried shrimp.

The point here is -- excuse the pun -- that somebody who doesn't spend a lot of time playing with and against sharps likely doesn't understand just how nasty they can be, and they might have the notion, ala Richard Pryor's famous comedy routine, that they can just take that knife and shove it up your ass.

Good luck on that one. True, a knife isn't a magic weapon that will drop you faster than Obi-wan taking off a drunk's hand; somebody can get cut and fight on. But a knife is a better weapon than a fist, else we'd still be having wars barehanded.

The military dictum sums it up: You're not an ape, use a tool!

An art that plays with knives frequently tends to give you a certain respect for them. For thirty years of assorted martial arts training, I didn't have much interest or regard for knives -- I carried a pocket knife for cutting string or boxes or whatnot, but I liked sticks and swords, spears, sai, even nunchaku. Knives were up-close-and-personal, in-your-face, and scary.

The more I learned, the scarier they got.

After getting into pentjak silat, I came to understand that a knife was not just something you used to spread butter on biscuits. And one of the things I got was that a guy who trains barehanded all, or most, of the time who thinks he can dance in and slap a knife out somebody's hand and then KO him with a punch, no sweat, is a fool.

Such fellows might also be called by other names, like say ... "Dinner steaks ..."

Gladiators

Richard Ben Sapir wrote a novel in the late seventies called "The Far Arena." (Some of you might recall his name from the very long running and bestselling Destroyer series that he and Warren Murphy created. Those started out serious, but quickly turned funny, and though Sapir passed away, Murphy kept going, stretching them out to well over a hundred titles.)

Um. But in the Sapir novel, which was science fiction, the set-up is that a Roman gladiator got too popular and was ordered to kill himself. This he did by taking some mysterious poison and walking into an icy sea. The combination of the poison and cold somehow preserved him, and two thousand years later, he was found in a block of ice, thawed out, and revived.

Yeah, okay, that's the suspension of disbelief, but not so hard for SF readers to make.

Anyway, as the story progresses, the main character's prowess as a sword fighter gets bandied about and -- forgive my fuzzy memory -- he winds up in a match with the current French fencing champion. The French guy is a master of his art, and he is pissed at the idea that the gladiator could possibly beat him. He pulls the button off his blade and goes for blood. His technique is far superior.

The gladiator, however, had fought men and sometimes tigers, to the death in the arena, and within a couple seconds, the French champion was past tense.

And the point was, real combat isn't sport.

A recent posting by a MMA champ on a martial arts website as to how silly the art of silat is compared to what he does brought this memory up.

I guess some folks still think sport is reality ...

Religious Responsibility on a Jet

In my salad days, I got into yoga and meditation. I can't say I was fanatical about it, but I was diligent. Every day, I'd do yoga asanas (on a wool blanket), and twice a day, morning and evening, I'd sit.

"Sit" here being a technical term for mediation, and more specifically in this case, mantra mediation. Basically, you find a spot, get comfortable, and mentally intone a word or phrase over and over to yourself for however long you feel is valid. I did it for twenty minutes a session or so. (I had an Indian mantra, but scientific research says that any word will do -- "Coca Cola" apparently does the same thing physiologially as "Brama ...")

Not a cult fanatic, but maybe not that far away. My wife and I had a rented house, and that was where the group meditations met once a week. We were considered the state's representatives by the powers-that-were in the yoga society to which we belonged -- we got all the mailings, and had our second-round mantras given to us by Dadaji, one of the chief lieutenants, who wore the orange, and who flew from India to Baton Rouge to show us all the way.

For a couple years and some, I did my routine every day without fail, rain, shine, no matter where I was.

I was also obnoxious about it: "Toke that? No, thank, you. I meditate ..."

"Sorry, I have to go and sit now, we'll continute this discussion later ..."

"Acid? Yeah, it's okay, but it doesn't let you stay where you want to go. Meditation is the key."

Remember: Be Here Now was our bible.

Eventually, I got out of it, for several reasons: I picked up Krishnamurti's Flight of the Eagle, and it, said something about mechanical meditation in, mechanical results out, and when I read that, it gave me pause.

A friend asked me if I was really getting off on meditation, or if I was getting off on people seeing that I meditated -- and I honestly wasn't sure which it was.

Then there were the frauds and organizational wars in the group that led, at one point, to rival factions coming together on a quiet plain and whacking the shit out of each other using their holy peace-and-harmony signs.

I got your universal love right here, pal -- !

Yeah? Meditate on this -- !

Baba, we were told in mails from Ma, had fallen off the path, and we should disregard him.

Ma, came the response from Baba, had abandoned the true teachings and run off with a heathen, ignore what she had to say.

It got ugly, and when we all figured out that our secret, must-never-be-spoken-aloud mantras that had been personally tailored to fit each of us were all the same word? Well, that pretty much tore it. AMF.

But the point of all this was how holier-than-thou I was at the time, glorying in my superiority as a meditator and not just a dope-smoking, mescaline-dropping, going-nowhere hippie like a lot of my friends ...

At one point during this period, I had occasion to fly from New Orleans to Los Angeles on a jumbo jet. During the flight, my appointed time to sit came, and since I had a row of three seats to myself, I raised the seat arms, pulled my legs up crosslegged, closed my eyes, and spent twenty minutes intoning my magic word silently.

I was aware that the flight attendants -- then called stewardesses -- were passing by and looking at me. One of them asked the guy I was traveling with, "What's he doing?"

My buddy, who was not pursuing any kind of particular moral or spiritual path -- he smoked three packs of Kents a day, and drank a fair amount of booze -- said to the stewardess through his cloud of cigarette smoke, "Oh, he's masturbating in his mind."

At which time I realized I wasn't in the zone, because that was pretty funny, and I couldn't stop the grin.

I could have gone to the bathroom and stayed there for twenty minutes. Or I could have waited until we landed. I could even have just leaned back and closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep and repeated my mantra -- but no, I was, by Brama, gonna sit half-lotus on that plane, in front of God and everybody, and do my thing, and devil take the unbelievers.

Playing to an audience, I was.

I hope I'm not that obnoxious any more. I know I wouldn't do it in today's charged climate, because, even as old redneck-oakie-hillbilly as I look, such a thing might cause more than a little concern on a crowded airplane. I might not be part of the solution, but I don't want to be part of the problem.

I have little sympathy for anybody who, today, would behave on a plane as I did back in the late sixties. Yeah, I was young and full of myself, but the times were different. Plane hijackings in the U.S. were rare -- D.B. Cooper's stunt was in the future, and nobody had flown any aircraft into buildings.

All of that changed on 9/11, and for better or worse, we all have to live with that from now on. If you are going to commune with God, do it in a way that doesn't scare your fellow passengers; I'm sure God will understand.

The Tenor of the Times

Recently, there was a long-running thread on a marital arts group in which there was some spirited discussion about a recent event. The short version is, a college grad student, wanting to make a point about how lax airport security is in the U.S., put up a website in which he showed anybody who cared to log on how to make fake boarding passes for an airline. Just to make a point.

Shortly thereafter, the feds kicked in his door, scooped him up, seized his computer, and hauled 'em away. There were some laws apparently being broken, and even if he was just funning around, the people at Homeland Security and TSA don't have any sense of humor about such things. Nor do I blame them.

I was not the least bit surprised. I took the position that the guy was stupid to have done this, and got a surge of hate about how I was, at least, a tool of the repressive jackbooted government. And at worst, a Nazi myself.

Such things should not be illegal! they said. High, loud, and repeatedly.

Nor did I disagree.

But if you want to smuggle a gun onto a plane just to show how easy it is and you get caught? That's gonna be your ass in jail, unless you are working for Sixty Minutes, and maybe even then. The law sometimes takes into account intent, and sometimes, it doesn't.

Understand, I went to some lengths to explain that I thought the Homeland Security Act violated at least three or four of the ten amendments that are the Bill of Rights and that I disagree with how the law came to be and what it covered, but nobody seemed to understand the basic point:

If you are standing next to a tiger and you pull its tail, that's generally a bad idea. Doesn't matter that the tiger ought not to be there, the fact that it is is paramount.

Pulling a tiger's tail is not on my to-do list, thank you. And if it turns around and takes your head off when you do it, you ought not to be too surprised. This is not ignorance, this is stupidity. Take a guy raised on a island who's never seen a TV or a book or any animal bigger than a squirrel and put him down next to a tiger and his hair will stand on end and he'll start looking for a tree to climb -- fear of big critters with huge teeth goes waaay deep into the lizard brain.

Recently, there is the case of the mullahs who were kicked off the plane. On the face of it, that's sheer bigotry -- as Mushtaq pointed out on his blog -- see the link to Traceless Warrior -- instead of DWB -- Driving While Black -- we now how FWM -- Flying While Muslim. And I am quick to agree this ought not to happen.

It shouldn't happen.

And yet, I wonder: Were these men tugging, even slightly, on the tiger's tail? From the accounts, it isn't clear exactly what they said or did prior to boarding the flight, but apparently whatever it was did disturb the wa of a number of passengers in the waiting area.

Should these people have been disturbed? Probably not. Probably. But -- in today's spooked climate, saying or doing anything at yon airport that makes things worse is maybe not the best idea. Yes, you should be free to bespeak your mind as long as you aren't yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater (more or less) but unless you have been living in a cave for the last few years, you should know that you might want to keep a low profile while waiting for your flight. Rightly or wrongly, the times and certain places have become over-sensitive, and it is perhaps wiser to take note of that than to have to suffer for making a point you consider important to make.

You can choose to do otherwise, of course, but you should recognize that such choices might cost you more than you want to pay.

I can hear the retort: "This is America, by God, and I can say and do what I want, long as I don't step over the legal line! "This is true, technically, but sometimes technically isn't enough.

If half a dozen men about to get onto my plane stand up and say "Allah Ackbar!" as we are boarding? I have to tell you, that will make me nervous. Yeah, I know about freedom of religion but even being a reasonable liberal-type when it comes to such things if it makes me jumpy, I'm guessing that people with less tolerance than I are going to be coming unglued.

And I have to say, anybody who does such a thing damn well ought to know it is a bad idea for fostering harmony among one's fellow passengers. If you are bright enough to have found your way to the airport, you are bright enough to know this.

What to do until the Messiah comes is always tricky. In today's charged society, thinking carefully about that before you do it is maybe not a bad idea ...

Thanksgunning Day

With the two oldest of the five grandsons ...

Long in the Tooth

So Sunday my calf muscles were really sore, more so yesterday, and for just a moment, I was puzzled? What did I do to cause that?

Saturday, I went to a science fiction convention, Orycon, held at the downtown Marriott Hotel in Portland. Experienced volunteer committees who run these things eventually learn that it is wisest to schedule the programming on one level, and failing that, two floors accessible by stairs and escalators.

Otherwise, you wind up with elevator parties. These don't take place on the elevators themselves, but gathered around the buttons waiting for the elevators to arrive.

Pretty much the concom managed that here, it was on three levels -- basement, ground, restaurant -- with a few places up the high-rise. The green room, where the writers and other guests go to collect their badges and programs and to hang out before panels and speeches, was on the sixteenth floor, as was the fan lounge.

At big cons, really big ones, like the Worldcon, with five or eight thousand people, there are usually multiple venues, and even so, the elevator parties last forever. If there are forty people waiting, even when one finally shows up, it's like being in a long line of traffic at a left turn signal in Beaverton, you aren't going to get to go for a couple cycles.

Science fiction fans are not generally athletic, and a lot of them will take an elevator up one floor rather than climb the stairs. There were probably a couple thousand attendees at Orycon this year, plus the normal folks staying at the hotel. The elevator waiting areas were thus congested, so I took the stairs.

Except once, when I had to go to the green room. My business there concluded, I came out to find a dozen people standing by the elevator buttons waiting, and I decided, "Bag this," and headed for the stairs.

I mean, yeah, sixteen floors, but -- going down, right? That's not like going up that many, hey?

At the time, it was fine. I descended -- had the stairwell completely to myself the whole way. Got to the ground, had to go outside and loop back to the lobby, wasn't even winded.

But apparently I had fogotten the last time I had come down that many stairs.

Perhaps I'm not in as good a shape for a man my age as I thought ...

November 19, 1966

It was forty years ago today/Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play ...

So we've now been married for 2/3rds of our lives -- today is our pearl anniversay.

Gotta go, the champagne should be cold enough by now.

Why Martial Arts?

I get asked this one now and again. Why go to all that work to study something you might never use? That you are going to go out of your way to avoid using?

The quick answer is, "Because it only takes one time to pay for itself." That extra twenty-five years you get when the guy trying to take your head off can't? Hard to put a price on that.

If your car gets rear-ended, insurance can pay for a new bumper.

You can't fix dead ...

Most people get into martial arts (and I'll include western-style boxing and wrestling here) for self-defense. Some do the stuff for sport, some for discipline or social intercourse, or just to stay in shape, but if I had to guess, based on the last survey I dimly remember reading, eight of ten do so with the idea they can use the training to keep somebody from kicking their ass.

Certainly that's why I did.

Here's the inevitable digression ...

Much of how I was formed as person has been a study in Napoleonic Compensation. As a boy, I was terrified of drowning, not just worried, terrified. The way my father taught us to swim was, he showed us how to paddle and kick, and, when he thought we should have it, chucked us into the deep end of the pool to see. At age eight or so, I got tossed, and I managed to get back to the side; that time, my little brother went straight to the bottom and my father had to dive in and fetch him.

Old-style teaching, and not my wont.

So I could swim, after a fashion, but for the next few years, I was fearful any time the water was deeper than I was tall, and in the schoolboy dunkings, I was panicked.

So when I got to the Boy Scouts, I started taking every class and merit badge there was on how-to-swim. After I got those, I got a job working as a lifeguard at a country club pool and spent hours every day in the water. Became a Water Safety Instructor, courtesy of the Red Cross, and at one point could hold my breath for four minutes. I learned all the swimming strokes well enough to teach them, and did.

Also got scuba gear and learned how to dive -- until a blown-out eardrum ended that.

By the time I was eighteen, I had absolutely no fear of drowning. The water was my friend, a source of fun, I loved to swim, and though I don't much these days, still love it. Doesn't't mean that drowning is impossible, but the unreasoning fear of it is long-gone.

Somebody wants to grab me and hold me under? Fine, let's both go -- and see who runs out of air first ...

As a tad, I got into a few fistfights, schoolboy stuff again, and while I wasn't particularly adept (and was passing small in size), I won as many as I lost. But I was fearful, worried that I would get beaten-up, and during my junior high years, was in a school where there were a dozen fights every day. I walked wide to avoid possible confrontations, even though when they happened, I held my own. It was not so much the ability, it was the confidence that was lacking.

So when the first karate school opened its doors in our town a few years later, I was in the first class. Didn't really learn much there, but subsequent attendance and training at a half-dozen other martial arts schools eventually followed.

At some point, I stopped worrying that I was gonna get thumped.

After the last eleven years in pentjak silat, I feel fairly confident that my skills are sufficient to provide me some tools that work, so while I might still get my ass handed to me, I'm not afraid that is going to happen. I kinda feel like that scene in Gordy Dickson's Dorsai novel when somebody is watching one of the Dorsai and realizing that if that guy sees a fight coming, he isn't worried about whether he can win, he's considering how he is going to do it.

Not, "Can I sink the six ball?" but, "That's a given -- how many rails can I use, and in which pocket do I want to sink it?"

There is a difference, of course, in what you can do and what you think you can do, and sometimes the latter may get too far ahead of the former and cause you some problems. But if I had to narrow it down, I'd say that believing you can survive a dust-up is more important than being a master of the art you'll use to try.

Attitude matters. The fight, as they say, isn't under the glove -- it's under the hat. You might not be the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the Valley of Death, but if you believe that you are? Better than being sure you'll get whipped if push comes to shove.

Waaay better ...

Non-Violence

As an adjunct to the recent post on martial arts, I came across a quote I found some years back.
Let me share it with you:

"Non-violence does not admit of running away from danger. Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence to cowardice."

Mahatma Gandhi

Oh, Yeah --

The picture on the previous post, I was gonna tell you, but forgot:

The folding knife is a Mel Pardue design for Benchmade, the scales their version of fake ivory.

The pistol is a S&W M-52 Master, a target pistol that shoots mid-range wadcutters. It's about as accurate out of the box as any production centerfire pistol made -- put it in a benchrest and, at a target fifty yards downrange, it will put the bullets into a space about the size of your palm all day long. Not that I can shoot it that well, but I don't get to blame the hardware when I can't.

The gun's grips are Ajax's version of fake ivory, so Jumbo did not die for my sins.

The images, of the keris on the folder and The Shadow on the Smith, are my poor attempts at scrimshaw. (The other side of the S&W grip has a copy of a Vaughan Bodé nude, out of Cheech Wizard.) I dabbled briefly in this art, realized it was way too hard to do well, and took up the guitar instead. If, however, you want to see somebody who is really, really good at it, go here:

www.scrimshander.com/Nudes2.html

Guns or Knives, Butch?

A recent series of exchanges on a newsgroup I frequent started when one of the posters told a scary story. He lives in the U.K. -- the supposed-heart of civilization -- and a group of thugs-in-training (teenage rowdies) broke into his flat landing. When he tried to shoo them away, he was cursed, spat at, and eventually had to retreat upstairs to his flat, where his wife and small son were. The rowdies decided to follow him. They booted the locks off, and he managed to lean on the door enough to keep them at bay, while his wife called the local police. Apparently the police station was but a couple blocks away.

Eventually, the high-spirited lads tired of their sport and left. And fifty minutes after the call, the police eventually came round.

This being England, no handguns are permitted. (I love it that the British Olympic pistol team has to take the Chunnel to France to practice.) Rifles and shotguns are allowed, but require some effort to obtain, and must be locked up in approved cabinets or safes when not taken out for actual shooting.

This begain a discussion in which, as a martial artist, I offered some advice about what weapons might be better than the crowbar the poster had in the back of a closet somewhere. Various ones were bandied about: Swords, crossbows, and I allowed that a pair of large butcher knives might give the thuglets pause.

Warriors and pacifists came out and began to debate the merits of violence, and those comments ranged from let-a-smile-be-your-umbrella, don't-worry-be-happy, to split-'em-like-
chickens-and-put-'em-on-roasting-spits!

And eventually, as these threads often seem to do, it went down the road to gun control.

Generally, in my experience, there are few fence-sitters on this one. Like abortion, most people come down firmly on one side or the other, and minds seldom get changed. It's an emotional issue, and me being a non-conservative with a gun confuses people no end. How can that be?

Because things aren't always black or white, and convenient political labels seldom cover everybody?

Anyhow, at some point, I was doing research to bolster my side of the debate and I came across a couple of gun-sayings I enjoy, so I thought I'd share them with you.

The first concerns what often happens when people learn that you might go around strapped.
"You carry a handgun? Why? Are you expecting trouble?"

To which the proper answer is, "No. If I were expecting trouble, I'd be carrying a rifle."

Non-shooters don't get it, and I have to explain that a revolver or pistol is a compromise. One can carry such with relative ease compared to hauling a rifle around unnoticed, but handguns are not nearly as effective as long guns.

I also pointed out that knife in hand inside seven meters is better than a big-bore handgun in a concealment holster for getting there firstest with the mostest, even though it's not generally a good idea to bring a knife to a gunfight. At fifty feet, the shooter wins. And if he draws before the knifer, or is the reincarnation of John Wesley Hardin, the knife guy has a problem. Take both, that gives you more options

You carry a gun and a knife?

I didn't say that. But knives don't run out of ammo ...

The other saying: You know what the two loudest sounds in the world are? One, when you are expecting click! and instead you hear bang! The other is when you are expecting bang! and you hear click ... !

New T-shirt Logo

Now and then, I get a few cheap T-shirts and do iron-on logos, to pass out among the silat players in the Thursday class. This is the latest version. With this one, there are two things slightly different than earlier ones: I've dropped the silent "k" in "Sera," and added Maha Guru Plinck's name, to differentiate us from other branches of the art.

Henceforth, unless I am told otherwise by my teacher, this is what I'm calling what we do up there in Kelso ...

Big Brother, Little Sister

Stopped raining and the dogs got to go out and chase the squirrels. You can see in the top picture just how much the squirrel is worried ...

This Magic Moment ...

Today's word is "epiphany."

There are several meanings for this one -- primary and specific is the religious revelation of Christ to the Gentiles, in the book of Matthew.

A bit more generally, epiphany is a manifestation of a spiritual or supernatural being.

The third meaning is more general still -- it is a sudden and usually unexpected realization or insight, the "Aha!" moment when you get something. It's the forehead-slapping, oh-wow! how could I have missed seeing this? second. You come to Jesus, or you come to realize something in a visceral way that, in the moment, is very tangible. Like the sound of a seatbelt latch snicking into place, something clicks! and you are locked in.

Sometimes these moments can be huge. Cosmic consciousness, connection to the divine, a pattern recognition that stretches across your personal universe and alters your life, maybe the lives of everybody around you. Of that moment, you know who you are, what you need to do, and how to do it, and your place in the scheme of things. Nearly every religion I've spent any time studying has this concept, and there are a lot of names for it, nirvana, samadhi, zen, beholding the Divine, attaining bliss, the cosmic thunderbolt, the finger of God, the kundalini risen ...

Most people don't get a lot of those moments. If you get one in a lifetime, you might consider yourself blessed. Or maybe like Cassandra, cursed. But whichever, you won't be the same afterward. The fire anneals and re-tempers you, and you come out different.

The smaller epiphanies, the ones that come as you struggle to understand something, be it emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, physically, are more frequent, less overwhelming, but, as I am discovering, something you can cultivate.

On the one hand, these moments aren't dependable -- you don't know when they'll happen.
On the other hand, they are dependable -- if you work at it, they are going to happen sooner or later. At least in my experience.

On a typical day, most of my time is spent doing the things most working people do -- I get up, get dressed, go to work. In my case, I don't have to get very dressed, and commuting to work involves walking down the hall to my office, but still.

There are several things I do on a typical day that I try to do well: I write, I do pentjak silat, I practice the guitar. (I also interact with my dogs, sometimes hike to the local Safeway, or the post office, and do other errands. And put it all away when my wife comes home from work to be with her. And there are kids and grandkids and other activities, too.)

Of late, I have had several small -- or maybe not so small -- epiphanies. They are not the end of the journey, but they are mileposts along the path.

One day in silat class, it came home to me that I knew enough of the art to use it. Not mastered, far from it, but during one of those fumbling attempts to add a new piece, I realized that the reason I couldn't do what I wanted in that moment was that I was thinking and not doing. Of course, that's the nature of learning in a class -- a new thing can't be internalized the same way a repeated move can. It blossomed in me that, if I wasn't following directions to do-it-this-way, that if I were turned loose and told just do whatever I felt like as the attacker came at me, that I could clean the guy's clock, no problem at all. I had the moves to do it, and they'd be there when I needed them. Simple.

It's not as if I hadn't thought I could before, and it's not as though I won't someday have another Aha! moment that will be different, but that little flash changed the way I felt and moved. Of a second, I was better at it, and I knew it. Right down to my toes.

Same thing happened whilst practicing the guitar. I picked up a new piece of music recently. It wasn't a complex composition, but as I started to play it, it came to me that I could do this, and I could make it sound good. That didn't mean I wouldn't have to work just as hard getting my fingers to go where they were supposed to go as before, but that, in the end, I knew that if I kept it up, I'd learn it, and after a certain amount of time, I'd have it.

These kinds of moments used to happen fairly often in my writing, not as much any more. I think maybe I'm as good as I am apt to get, though now and then, some small bit will flower on the page and I'll grin at it. Of course, I've been writing a lot longer than I have been doing silat or playing the guitar, and there are roads I've been down often enough so I know the scenery. Maybe if I take a different path, I'll see new things.

And my point about all this?

These magic moments are the product of work. They come because you are doing what is necessary to learn something. The timing isn't predictable, but the realization that you can and most like will internalize concepts or movements or feelings as long as you keep plugging away is, for me, a major one. And that one path to the magic is the old Nike TV commerical:

Just do it.

And if you just do it long enough, you will eventually get it.

And there you go. Today's epiphany.

And How are the Two Corgis Getting Along?

The view from my office chair ...

Personal Trivia - Star Warriors

I meant to explain this cover, after showing it in a recent post to demonstrate the, um, less well-written fiction ...

The artwork, by Ken Smith, is for the story "Star Warriors," a blatant steal from ... well, you can probably guess what that was. My working title was "Rip-Off Warriors ..."

In the late 1970's, I met the writer Hank Stine (now Jean Stine, and that's another very weird story. Some years earlier, Hank had written a classic sci-fi porno novel for, I think, Grove Press, called Season of the Witch, about a woman trapped in a man's body. Apparently it was not as fictional as one might have thought -- he eventually had the surgery and changed gender.)

I digress. Bad habit. But it's so interesting ...

Anyway, I had just started writing and trying to sell stuff, when Hank, who had moved to my home town with his new wife, gave a talk at the local library. I had never met a published SF writer, and since I was probably the only other guy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, even trying to write the stuff, we had something in common. We started hanging out.

Hank introduced me to science fiction conventions, my first one being the SunCon in Miami, in, I think, 1977. I met Robert Heinlein there. Sorta. He walked under my arm as I was leaning against the wall. He was not a tall man, Bob Heinlein ...

Um. Anyway, shortly after that, Hank moved away, and got the job as editor of Galaxy Magazine. At another convention in Phoenix, in 1978, he and I and Harlan Ellison were walking to Harlan's GoH speech when Hank offered me a gig. He needed, he said, a thirty-thousand word novella, a Star Wars pastiche -- that recent movie -- to be published in two parts. He needed the first half in a week, all he could pay was a penny a word, and could I do it?

No problem, I said. I was a two-story pro at that point -- nothing was beyond me, I was fearless. (I got another assignment at that con for a short story, and I wrote the first part of it on a napkin whilst sitting in the bar. A very productive convention, I doubled my entire published output as a result of attending, plus I met J.F. "Jesse" Bone, who wrote The Lani People ...

No, no, I won't veer into digression-land again. Back to the tale:

After the con, I went home, cranked out the piece, and shipped it. It was published in two parts, under my pseudonym, "Jesse Peel." Hank had told me to get it done, not to worry about how rough it was, he'd fix it. I was afflicted with both exclamation point poisoning and said-bookisms at the time, and Hank, bless his hairy little head, didn't touch the sucker, so every goof I made stayed on the page. Had a guy hiss the word "damn." Try that some time. Can't do it. Nooo sibilants ...

It was not the acme of western literature, though it did get a couple of nice reviews, despite the fact it was almost totally derivative. Almost.

Kenneth Smith, the artist, who published a magazine called Phantasmagoria, went on to bigger and better things. Not long ago, I tracked him down. Did he still have the cover he had done for that old Galaxy? I'd be interested in buying it, since I'd always liked it, and couldn't afford artwork at the time I wrote the novella.

What was not to like? A half-naked couple on a giant pile of skulls and bones blasting away at the bad guys, the demi-whelf Linchini snarling next to them, the giant Trogian robot in the background. (See, I had a short furry sidekick and a giant robot, instead of a giant furry guy and a short robot, so it wasn't totally derivative. And in case you missed it, Linchini is not far from Lon Chaney, and swapping a couple letters in "Trog" gives you Gort ...)

Klaatu barrada ... uh ... uh ... oh, crap!

Smith said, Why, yes, even after all these years, he did still have that cover. It was in an art gallery in San Francisco, and for sale. I could have it for a mere $20,000.

Twenty thousand dollars?

Right. I got three hundred bucks to write thirty thousand words, only half of which I ever managed to collect.. Of course, that was in 1978 dollars, so that hundred and fifty would be maybe ... three hundred dollars today ...

Twenty grand. Maybe I shoulda been an illustrator instead of a writer ...

Lincoln's Dictum

Those of you who know me personally know that I am not a fan of war in general, the current one the U.S. has blundered into in particular, nor do I hold a positive brief for the current White House Administration. I am by nature and political affiliation, an Independent. I don't want to lend my name to either of the two major parties.

Those of you who didn't know? well, you do now.

Lincoln's Dictum, sometimes attributed to P.T. Barnum (which I can understand) goes:

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time."

Delightful to see the rare occasion when the third part holds true. Captain Karma Rules! the chickens came home to roost, and I cannot recall a time in recent memory when I was so happy to see the party in power get its comeuppance.

And for the first time I can ever recall, every measure and every candidate for which and whom I voted for (or against,) passed, failed, or won as I would have it-- I batted a thousand. Never happened before, probably never will again, but for once, I am pleased to be in the majority.

Probably means I should keep an eye out for signs of the Apocalypse ...

Vote

The mid-term elections are Tuesday -- save in places where vote-by-mail is allowed, like Oregon -- and while you might think your choices are between dumb and dumber, or the Devil and the deep blue sea, if you are a citizen, you can always vote against somebody.

Choose the lesser of two evils. But if you don't vote, you don't get to bitch. At the least, later, you can say, "Well, I tried to keep the son-of-bitch out of office -- I voted for the other guy."

Exercise your franchise. One vote might make the difference, and won't you feel like an idiot if the guy or ballot measure you hated won by one vote?

Even if you lose, at least you went down swinging. Do it. It matters.

New Puppy!

Layla Mae - 12 weeks

Adventures in Hollywood

I've never been a big player in La-La-Land. I've had some small experiences there, animation writing for the tube, a few movie scripts that haven't made it to the silver screen, like that. But in the vein of what I think is funny, lemme tell you one of my Hollywood stories ...

The story is true. The names, as they used to say on Dragnet, have been changed to protect the innocent. And the guilty ...

Some years ago, my then-writing partner and I -- call him Roy -- got a freelance gig to write an episode of a cartoon show, let's say it was Funny Little Critters. At this point, the show is being written and boarded, so it's months away from being on the air.

Eventually, we wound up writing several scripts for the producers and fine time was had by all.

Face-time is important in the Biz. So I go down there, since I was living in Oregon, and Roy and I go out to lunch with the story editor and his assistant. They'd be, let's say, Sammy J, and Gary. We go to a nice upscale burger place, called The Good Earth, a SoCal chain. Burgers, bean sprouts, whole-wheat buns, like that.

The waitress, an attractive young woman in her early twenties, comes to take our order.

Now there is a thing you may not know, but in Hollywood, there are folks in the Biz who, for reasons I can only guess at, feel the need to impress service people with how important they are: These guys will go int a 7-Eleven store, usually in pairs, and comment loudly to each other about their latest deal, dropping actor's names like rose petals at a formal wedding, and for some reason, lacing their monologues liberally with profanity: "Yeah, I got this piece of shit dramady to do for Disney, they think maybe Brad and Angelina to star, but the fucking director is a motherfucker ..."

I think this bespeaks a basic and deep insecurity, that you need approbation from the minimum-wage 7-Eleven clerk, but that seems to be part of what Hollywood runs on ...

Anyway, back at the Good Earth, Gary decides that he is going to impress the hell out of the waitress, and so he says to her, "Do you know who this is?" and points at his boss.

"No, should I?"

"This is Sammy J! He is the story editor for Funny Little Critters, the new animated show!"

Which, you recall, isn't on the air yet. And, in the Hollywood pantheon, animation impresses nobody anyhow. Cartoons? Plus, writers don't impress anybody even more. Think of your three favorite movies -- can you name the writers of them? I didn't think so ...

And the waitress says, "Huh. And who are you? One of the funny little critters?"

In Hollywood, they do love a snappy comeback. Roy, Sammy J, and I all grin and chuckle. Point for the waitress.

Gary, being very high on the insecure-list, turns red and fumes, but doesn't say anything.

So she takes our orders and then asks what we want to drink. Gary decides that if he can't impress her, he can, by God, put her in her place. So he says, in a snotty voice, "I'll have water. And keep it coming." Every time he takes a sip, he expects her to hurry over and top off his glass, and by saying this, he is letting her know who the boss is.

(My opinion is that guys who do such things to waiters and waitresses are, not to put too fine a point on it, pricks.)

The waitress doesn't say anything, though. She leaves.

We chat about the show, and a couple minutes later, the busboy shows up with our drinks.
Roy gets iced tea, Sammy J, some kind of juice, I have a Coke. And the busboy puts six full glasses of water down in front of Gary ...

As you might imagine, this is cause for more mirth. Roy, Sammy J, and I cackle, and Gary shades right through red into purple. Score another point for the waitress, but -- wait!

A second busboy shows up. He's carrying a five-gallon plastic bucket full of water, with a slice of lemon on the rim, and he sets this down on the table in front of Gary.

The rest of us are now on the floor, trying to find our asses, which we have all laughed off.

Eventually the waitress returns with our orders. Smiles sweetly. "Anything else I can get you? More water, sir?"

Game, set, and match for the waitress.

This time after we stopped howling, Sammy J takes a business card from his wallet. "You do any writing?" he asks her. "Come by and see me ..."

Now, I don't know if she ever followed up; I'd like to think that she did and is now a big-name scriptwriter making big bucks; but what this story illustrates to me is the culture that it the media-biz down in LaLaLand, which is to say, passing weird. Larry McMurtry says that going to Hollywood is like going to a town of very powerful two-year-olds, and it's true. They aren't like thee and me down there ...

Hallowe'en

So, every year, I carve a jack-o'-lantern for the front door stoop, and here, this year's effort ...

Happy Hallowe'en.

So These Three Guys Walk into a Bar ...

Recently, I had an online discussion regarding humor, and more specifically, black humor -- not the racial kind, but the kind that cops and doctors and reporters and undertakers tend to engage in. I was taken to task by somebody when I told a story about my days in the medical field. Admittedly, it was not something normal people find funny, but a lot of folks who deal with death or serious trauma use such stuff to blow off steam.

Tragedy, Mel Brooks said, is when I cut my finger. Humor is when you fall into an open sewer and die ...

Different strokes. What one person finds hilarious, another thinks is vile. If you have the whistling-past-the-graveyard sense of humor, and if the joke stays just inside the fine line between hilarious and too much, a lot of things can be sidesplitting. Funniest stand-up routine I ever saw involved a fighter jet plane crashing into a motel and killing half a dozen people.

Second funniest involved a killer whale attacking a baby seal. (My wife was there for that one, and she is as tender-hearted over small creatures as you can find, and even she was laughing so hard I thought I'd have to take her home in a plastic bag.)

The Fawlty Towers routines, about the rat, and the one about the Germans, are politically incorrect out the wazoo, and some of the funniest material ever aired -- for my money.

Um. Anyway, the guy I was talking to was unhappy because somebody was being made the butt of a joke, and I explained that somebody was always the butt of a joke. Not talking a cute-puppy-smile kinda thing, but in a roiling, belly-laugher, somebody or some thing, or some group is always being made fun of -- there is always a goat about whom we are laughing.

For me, the best of these usually involve the teller making fun of his- or herself, or the group to which they belong, but not always.

So I invited my correspondent to dust off his funniest jokes and find one that didn't involve humor at somebody/thing/group's expense.

He couldn't.

Anybody here got one?

Jude on the Road to Enlightenment

Got a couple of good pictures at the Oregon Coast this weekend. This was one of them ...

Yeah, but what if I did This ... ?

Way back when I first started studying martial arts, now and again it would come up in a conversation, and now and then, I got the yeah-but-what-if? refrain going.

Thus:

"Oh, you're into that karotty kong-fu stuff, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, lemme ask you something. What would you do if I did this?"

This would usually be something fairly simple, like, say a right overhand punch.

And I would say, "Well, I'd probably block and counter, like so ..."

Whereupon I would demonstrate a technique.

"Yeah, but, what if I then did this?" At which point the questioner would counter my counter and launch a second attack.

"Okay, well, then, I could do this ..."

"Uh huh, but then what if I added in this?"

And pretty soon, we would have a whole choreographed fight sequence right out of Enter the Dragon ...

Or maybe The Three Stooges ...

Um. Anyway, after a few of these conversations, what I realized was two things: A) the guy asking the what-if-I-did-this? questions didn't really want to know what I would do, he wanted to demonstrate that my karotty-kong-fu crap wasn't no way, no how up to snuff against his good, old American fist-fighting, and B) If you show somebody what you intend to do, it's not that hard to come up with a counter for it.

(There is actually a third thing I learned, and that has to do with training specific counters for specific attacks -- you throw a high, right punch, and I do Waza block-and-counter #1. But if you throw a left punch, I have to shift to Waza block-and-counter #2, and so on, and what a dead-end that was. But more on that in another post.)

Somewhere along the way, I realized that yes-but fight conversations were a waste of time, I couldn't win, and what I came up with, should they start down that road, was a good way to short-stop them:

"Okay, what would you do if I did this?"

"You know, I dunno exactly. Why don't you do it and let's see, hey?" Along with a big smile.

Oddly enough, nobody ever wanted to follow through on that. Because if they didn't know what I was gonna do, then they wouldn't have a clue how to deal with it, and if I didn't tell them, they wouldn't know. By the time they figured it out, it would be too late, and I believe they understood that on some basic level.

I suppose if I had been good enough, I could have Billy Jack-ed 'em, i.e., told them what I was gonna do and, even knowing that, there wasn't anything they could do to stop me, but I wasn't that good -- and I had sense enough to know it.

And the lesson is? If you show people your cards, it makes it easier for them to bet, so better to play them close to your vest. It's not that what you do is full of secrets, it's that there is an element of surprise in it that can work to your advantage. No point at all in giving that away.

Where is the Death Ray When You Need One?

(Raygun, courtesy of Dal Perry)

So, I'm coming home from silat last night, it's a beautiful, clear, fall evening, and I'm tooling along I-5 about thirty miles out of Portland, enjoying the ride. I'm in the slow lane, doing 72 in a 70 mph zone, very little traffic.

All of a moment, some dweeb in a pickup truck rolls up behind me and proceeds to ride my rear bumper, close enough so you couldn't get a motorscooter between us.

I'm in the slow lane, remember, there is plenty of room to pass, but bozo back there can't seem to see that if I sneeze, we are going to be a highway statistic all over the road.

This is when you wish you had a working death-ray. (I think James Bond's oil spray out the back of his Astin-Martin is too good for people like this.)

It's not just that it's illegal, it is dangerous. In Oregon, according to an article I read recently, thirty percent of auto accidents are caused by tailgaters. I don't care if Bozo wants to wrap himself around a tree and meet his maker, but I don't want to go with him.

So, sans the death ray, what do you do? I used to have a bumper sticker that said, politely, back the fuck off. But sometimes my wife drives my car, and I didn't want her having to deal with people who might take offense. And they do take offense.

For a while, I carried one of those throwaway cameras, and when somebody got too close, I'd hold it up and snap a picture of them. That way when I got killed, maybe the cops could figure out who did it -- plus, at night, the flash going off sometimes caused the moron to back off.
Didn't work too well in the daylight, though.

Then I got a flashing scuba diver's light that strobes a bright amber. Hold that up, that works, too. They aren't sure what it means -- maybe the bomb is about to go off ...

I considered getting one of those little battery-powered LED crawl-signs and holding it up, programming to say something clever, like "Back the fuck off!" but maybe that's a bit confrontational ...

Mostly, what I do is just slow way down. If the guy behind me wants to hang too close at 70, he usually loses interest at 50. Unfortunately, this only works where he can pass -- on two-lane roads, you have to pull over, and it is interesting how many times I've done that that the guy behind me honks and gives me the finger when he goes by. I'm getting out of his way -- but he's still pissed off.

I used to use rude gestures myself, but I stopped that. Guy who drives that way is stupid enough to be armed and a road-rager. Sometimes I'd wave them around, or just hold up my hand in a "What?!" gesture. Or now and then, I'd hold my thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, indicating either a) You are too close! or b) You have an itty-bitty dick. Probably both.

I think this happens more to me than most people because of the car I drive, which is a two-seater red convertible, a Mazda Miata. Nothing special about it, car is almost twelve years old, but there seems to be something about a little droptop tooling along that just pisses people off. I have the top down, I'm enjoying the ride, maybe that just gripes 'em because they aren't having a good time, I dunno.

Anybody have any better ideas as how to deal with tailgaters, aside from shooting them, I'm listening here ...

Testing, Testing ...

So, after my most recent visit to the doctor and the not-as-good-as-I-wanted blood test results, vis a vis sugars and cholesterols and lipids and like that, I went online and checked out home test kits. I found what appeared to be the most accurate and reasonably-priced one, which was the basic CardioChek meter and strips. According to the study I found, the meter was within 1-3% plus-or-minus on most of the tests, when comparted to a standard lab.

Close enough. I ordered it.

It got here today, and since I hadn't eaten anything since dinner last evening, only had black coffee and water, I thought I might as well get a baseline.

Apparently, only a couple of weeks of attention to one's diet can do wonders. Of the tests I ran, everything was down considerably -- all WNL (within normal limits) save for one, which was still slightly high, but only just so, having fallen 20%.

This is most encouraging. I'm going to wait a couple months and check everything again.

Figure of Speech

Okay, so Sunday morning my wife and I and the younger dog went with my son and daughter-in-law and our three grandsons on a Buddy Walk for the newest grandson, Nate, who has Downs Syndrome. Lot of folks marched, leaving and returning to Millennium Park, in Lake Oswego.

Among the group was a bagpiper, and as we were finishing up, Dal got the picture above. It's one of the organizers, writing a check, and ...

paying the piper ...

Doctor, Doctor, What you say?

So, my ear is all healed up, my cold waning, and I should be back to what passes for normal soon.

My physical exam whilst at the doc's was fine. I'm in good shape, she says, for a man my age.

Oh, I hate that phrase. I prefer, "You're in great shape!" Period. Last time I banged up a knee and went to see a doctor, six, seven years ago, he asked me, "How'd you do this." Well, I said, either when the dog sidewiped me or doing squats.

And he said, "Squats? A man your age ought not to be doing squats!"

Hey, I said, I'm not a man my age!

Blood pressure is the same as when I first checked it in tenth grade biology class. Weight is actually a bit less than it has been for the past twenty-five years -- same size jeans I wore in high school. Resting pulse of sixty. No lumps or bumps that are gonna cool me immediately evident, ah, but the bloodwork showed my triglycerides are higher than they should be. And total cholesterol isn't really high, but it is heading that way ...

For those of you who don't know from triglycerides and cholesterol, suffice it to say that they get high from too much southern cooking -- i.e., fats, and this is a bad thing.

Not a serious case of biscuit-poisoning -- too many biscuits -- no Dunlap's Disease -- that's when your belly done lapped over your belt --but I would be wise if I cut out junk food, and of course, anything deep-fat fried. Ditto the black walnut Haagen Dazs, the six eggs fried in butter, and the potato chips and cookies and cake and chocolate candy and, well, you get the idea ...

Ah, well. I'm six or eight pounds over my best fighting weight. Guess that's going away. Given the way I normally eat, I'm guessing that will take ... what time is it now? Yeah, about twenty-four hours ...

Lookalikes

Well, yes, it could be Ironside, but I see more of a match with Chris.

Though Xizor is pretty close, too ...

It Could Be Worse, Bobbe ...

I dunno what you are griping about, kid. Look at those evil grins ...

Separated at Birth?

Bobbe Edmunds/Chris Bauer

So I was channel surfing last night and I came across something called "Smith," a caper series on CBS, I think, about high-tech thieves who have other jobs to cover their adventures. I wasn't too impressed with how they did business -- long and overly-complicated scenarios to do things that could be accomplished a lot easier, but still kinda fun in a guilty-pleasure way.

And lo, there appeared on the screen an FBI agent who -- to me -- looked very familiar. Actor's name is Chris Bauer, and I was sure I'd seen him before ...

Anybody else notice that he bears a certain resemblance to our own Bobbe Edmunds, up in Washingston state ... ?

New Puppies ...

So Zela -- our dog Jude's mom -- has a new litter. Here she is, with Jude's half-brother and -sisters, the pups six weeks old when we took this picture, day before yesterday.

So the only question is, which one will we be able to get -- the little boy (topmost) is already spoken for, and probably one of the girls will stay with the breeder (black and white, closest to her mother's tail.)

We think our choice will be between the two girls who are the closest to the right side of the X-pen in the photo above, both brindle-colored, but we won't know until they are older, so the breeder can tell if they will be show-quality or not.

Puppies ... !

Ten CC's

The summer I was thirteen I blew out my right eardrum while scuba-diving. Killed my diving career, and since I was worried they would stop me from swimming altogether, I didn't tell my parents.

The result of that forty-odd year old decision was, aside from a permanent hole in the right tympanic membrane and subsequent loss of hearing, was a tendency to develop infections in that ear canal.

I haven't had one for a while, but last week, I developed a new one. Without going into the stomach-churning medical details, let's just say such infections are not fun, they involve some serous fluid seeping from one's ear, and now and again, problems with such things as one's balance.

Stand up suddenly, you can develop a severe list to starboard that is apt to put you into the nearest wall. Most unpleasant. Best hope your groundwork is solid, because you will likely need it ...

Treatment with alternating instillations of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide usually clears it up in a few days, but now and again, the bug is stubborn and more stringent methods are required. This one didn't want to quit.

The result of which was a visit to my doctor. I knew what I had and what I needed, and since I needed a physical anyway, whack, two birds with one stone.

My doctor agreed with my diagnosis. However, it has been long enough that the old medication is no longer considered wise. Something to do with sensitizing the eardrum, so they don't give that out any more.

Fine. I got a prescription for the new stuff and went on my way.

At the Rite-Aid pharmacy, they asked me if I had co-pay on my drug insurance. I dunno, I said, it's been so long since I bought any medicine for myself, I wasn't in the computer -- though, for some odd reason, my dog Scout was ...

To get to the point: The reason they asked, they said, was that the drops, which came in a ten cc bottle, were expensive. Ten cc's (or ml's) equal about a tablespoon of liquid, for those of you not into metric system.

How expensive? I asked.

One hundred and sixteen dollars, they said.

Holy crap! You're kidding! What is it made from? Ivory-billed Woodpecker tongues?

Sorry, there's no generic version.

Fortunately, I did have co-pay insurance, and so it cost me a mere twenty bucks.

But I can understand why busloads of American seniors are traveling to Canada and Mexico to buy their prescriptions medications. Somebody who is retired, on a fixed income, without insurance, has a choice of paying the rent or buying meds.

There is something really, really wrong with this picture.

The Gangster Conspiracy

Chris Bunch

Apparently the Chris Bunch Star Risk, LTD. book that my son and I fleshed out after his passing has been deemed acceptable. I got a note from my editor saying that the line-editing was done and the ms would be sent to production next week.

I think it is supposed to come out next summer.

Guitarzan ...

Thursday before last, I went for my first guitar lesson. Local guitar store has four or five teachers on tap, and I picked one who plays stuff I like. Got there just as the skies opened up, wind, rain, and met the teacher, a guy maybe my son's age. He saw that I had a classical guitar, went out into the shop and collected one, tuned it, and asked, "Okay, what do you want to learn?"

The teacher is in a local band, has CDs, and plays a wide range of material.

I was, I said, interested in fingerstyle playing, (fingers instead of a flat pick) classic rock and blues, with some odds and ends pop stuff. Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Buddy Guy, like that.
I also wanted to learn a specific technique, called tremolo, more about which later.

I didn't have a book I was working from, which is how a lot of students approach things. I did have a fresh piece of music with TAB (a system of notation created by luteists and often applied to the guitar in lieu of standard cleft-and-notes). He looked at it, played it, and demonstrated that he had the musical chops to be be teaching.

The piece -- the theme from the movie The Godfather -- had in it some tremolo, which involves rapidly picking a single string with several fingers to produce a quavery sustained note. (A violin string under a bow can make a long, echo-y note, but plucked guitar string notes decay rapidly, thus tremolo. If you've ever heard a good mandolin player do Russian music, you know the effect. And if you have ever heard the classical piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra, you also know what it sounds like.)

I'd been trying in on my own, but hadn't managed to get it right.

The teacher demonstrated that could do the effect. He brought out a piece of classical music by Carcassi that wasn't too hard and suggested I try that. Then he showed me a nice Chicago blues groove, that sounded a lot like the background music of a TV commercial for Cialis, the, um, anti-ED drug. He wrote out some different key progressions for 12-bar blues, ( I-IV-V chords, since all you need for blues is three chords and a turnaround, though you can add in 7ths and 9ths to make it sound better. Showed me a nice turnaround in the key of A.)

This being an introductory half hour lesson, that was it.

It was a good experience. I enjoyed it. The teacher obviously had skill, knew his stuff, and he was pleasant, but there was something ... missing ...

The first thing was, he didn't ask me to play anything. Not being a teacher, I don't know if this is normal, but had I been in his seat, I would have wanted to know what the student knew, and I'd have asked questions and asked to hear something so I could tell. No big deal, but that makes sense to me. If I laid something out, then maybe he could have pointed to places where I could have fingered the piece differently or better. Made comments on the tone or resonance or somesuch. Was what I already had any good? How could I make it better?

That would have been my first order of business: What kind of music do you like? Play something for me.

Second thing was, he didn't really show me anything I couldn't have gotten out of book or offline on my own. I've been doing that for a couple years and while I'm not a good player, I am still making progress.

I'm not sure what I expected, but whatever it was, I came away less than satisfied.

It isn't the teaching per se; I've been studying one thing or another all my life, I have no problems having somebody offer knowledge I have to work at learning. I've been in a silat class coming up on a dozen years, started a yoga class this summer.

The question now is, do I try again? Give the guy another shot? Or maybe try another teacher?
When I got a new guitar, I resolved to give it serious attention, and taking lessons seemed to way to go. Now, I'm unsure.

Maybe the autodidact in me wants to make a point. And I wonder, does he have a valid one?

Case in Point

So, the long awaited guitar case finally arrived. Goes well with the osage orange guitar Alan Carruth built, heavy and well-made, should protect the instrument just fine, and it looks waaay cool, with the faux-swamp gator and gold plush lining ...

Okay, I'm done buying stuff for a while. Back to work ...

Another Passage

I had planned to do a funny bit about bad metaphors and redundant terms in fiction writing today, but the phone rang at five-thirty a.m. and it was my wife's sister:

My mother-in-law died this morning.

This was both completely unexpected -- and not at all a surprise: My mother-in-law was a Christian Scientist, and since they don't talk about things like illness, much less the possibility of death, she hadn't let on that she was anything but fine.

From twenty-five-hundred miles away, it was hard to tell otherwise. My sister-in-law, who lived a few blocks away, didn't keep us apprised, being a Christian Scientist herself.

This is a large can of worms in our house, cause for much anger and grief, since my wife's middle sister died almost a dozen years ago, and she was also a Christian Scientist. Nobody bothered to tell us she had breast cancer -- nobody ever actually told us that at all -- and by the time we found out, it had spread beyond any hope of medical treatment.

She found a small lump in her breast a year before she died. A year. And she prayed instead of seeing a doctor. She never told my wife about it. She came to see her mother a few weeks before she died, and we all took turns sitting with her when she finally passed away.

There is no way of knowing if she would have died anyhow, western medicine can't cure everything, but the odds would have been in her favor. She left behind a grieving husband, two not-quite-grown sons, and a sister who mourned her beyond my ability to put down here. I thought it was a terrible, terrible, waste, and, more horribly, that she was blamed for dying because her faith wasn't strong enough -- that put me into a murderous rage.

If you have ever sat up half the night with somebody hallucinating monsters because of what was probably metastatic brain cancer who wouldn't take medication to help, you might have some idea of how angry I was when it was all done.

Yesterday, my sister-in-law called to tell my wife that their mother had not been eating, and that they had driven her to Dallas, Texas, from Baton Rouge, to put her into a CS nursing home.

Yesterday afternoon.

How bad is she? my wife asked.

My sister-in-law was vague. She doesn't really know much about illness.

Should I fly down? Call? My wife asked.

Maybe not yet. She probably doesn't feel like talking.

So before my wife could do anything -- Less than twenty four hours later -- her mother was gone.

She never told us, but the ME in Dallas knew by looking at her:

Breast cancer.

Two weeks ago when my wife talked to her, her mother allowed as how she had lost some weight, but that she was fine. And from our experience, we now realize that this was something less than truthful disclosure. She had probably been ill for months, at least. Maybe years.

I am perfectly willing to allow that people should be allowed to believe whatever they wish, as long as it doesn't involve making me believe it, or hurting others. But I have to say, straight up, that my experience with Christian Science causes me to despise it. It has given my wife no end of unhappy times, and I have no use for it whatsoever. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law were deeply committed to it, and it didn't work for them.

If you disagree with my opinion, don't bother to tell me. I don't care to hear what anybody thinks about this particular subject from the other side.

My mother-in-law and I seldom saw eye-to-eye on much of anything, but I knew the woman for more than forty years, and I am sorry that she is gone -- and sorry for the path she chose to leave.

Dixie

Yeah, I was born down there and certainly that part of the country has its share of problems, but it was home for a long time, and it also has some good points. The song "Dixie" isn't really PC these days, although I find it amusing that it was supposedly Abraham Lincoln's favorite tune. I like it. Especially that slow version Bobby Horton did for Ken Burns's PBS documentary on The Recent Unpleasantness (though he mistakenly called it "The Civil War ...")

Anyhow, I came up with a slow instrumental version I like and since I wanted to give folks who might find it interesting a chance to hear what the new guitar sounds like, if you want to risk it, go here:


http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=431344


Starting Thursday morning next, I begin guitar lessons. Maybe a year or two from now, I'm still around, I can post a link to something better than this poor effort.

For you gearheads, this was recorded straight into my Mac via a Samson CO1U USB mike, using the program GarageBand, exported to iTunes, and then uploaded as a small MP3 file to SoundClick. It's not sweetened, save whatever GarageBand does automatically for its mixdown, and all the finger taps and squeaks are audible.

Me, I'm not so good, but -- don't the guitar sound fine?

Labor Day Weekend Silat Seminar

This weekend just past, we had our annual Silat Sera seminar, held this year at the muy thai boxing gym next to the Place to Shoot, in Portland. This is a gathering designed primarily for Guru Stevan Plinck's students, though dedicated silat players from other styles are sometimes invited.

All day Saturday and Sunday we played, stand-up combinations, groundfighting, sensitivity exercises, and I had a fine old time. Even though everything we covered was pretty basic, each time I see it, it looks different. It is true that you never step into the same river twice.

The facility was great. Todd and Tiel found a barbeque place that delivered ribs and chicken and red beans and rice and cornbread and collard green on Saturday, and that was passing good.

Got a chance to meet Bobbe Edmunds, finally, who also brought one of his silat students, Todd, and that was cool -- Bobbe is really a nice man, no matter what you might have heard otherwise.

Yesterday was a particularly long day for me -- we got started silat about ten a.m., I left at four p.m., hurried home, showered, dressed in a tuxedo, and Dianne and I attended the wedding of Ami Margolin, and Andy Rome, Ami being the daughter of a writer we know.

It was a traditional Jewish ceremony, and the bride's parents, Phil and Doreen, had basically rented an entire hotel for it. Champagne, snack food, dinner, and dancing, with three different musical groups playing at various aspects-- a chamber trio, a jazz quartet, and a dance band. A truly happy event, and my guess was about four hundred people in attendance. We sat at a table with people we knew -- my literary agent, Jean Naggar, (who is also Phil Margolin's agent) and her husband Serge; Ray and Jean Auel; Mary Joan O'Connell: and our Congressman, David Wu. Lovely event, worked up a sweat dancing in my penguin suit, and we got home just before midnight. Walking the dogs was a slow chore because we were really tired by that point.

Couple More Guitar Pictures

And a couple more pictures ...

Guitar!

So, my much-awaited Alan Carruth-built classical guitar arrived today, and, boy, howdy, it is a humdinger!

Those of you who recall seeing me post on this before, please bear with me while I gush a bit:

The guitar has a cedar top, with back and sides of Osage Orange. This is a "trash" wood that Alan says works as a drop-in for rosewood -- sounding, somewhere, he says, between Brazilian and Indian. Freshly cut, it has a pumpkin color to it, darkening eventually toward brown.

One of the biggest advantages of such a wood as Osage Orange is that it doesn't start the meter running anywhere near the cost of Brazilian rosewood.

Um. Anyway, the guitar got here, I tuned it up, and it -- not to put to fine a point on it -- is outstanding. It's pretty basic, the only decoration being a small inlaid owl Alan uses for his logo, on the headstock. Sloane tuners.

I have been fortunate enough, even though I'm not a good player, to lay hands on some very good classical guitars, and Alan's is the equal of any of them, and at considerably less cost.

From time to time, Alan posts in the music newsgroups, regarding various instruments. He really seems to have a handle on the theory -- he can talk the talk.

And I'm here to tell you, he can also walk the walk.

Once the strings settle in and I have a chance to fool around with it, I'll record something and put it up on my SoundClick page.

This one will be traveling with me. If I have to leave it behind, it will be stored somewhere as secure as Fort Knox ...

Sure makes up for the case not getting here, yee-haw it does ...

(Clicking or double-clicking on the pictures will make them larger -- least it does on Firefox's browser.)

For the Guitar Players

A cautionary tale ...

At the end of March, I decided I needed a new guitar case, in honor of my new guitar which is supposed to be here any day now. Maybe even today ...

I got online and built a virtual case, on Cedar Creek's website. This is a cool feature, by the way -- you tell the software what color and finish and hardware you want, and it produces an image. I wound up with brown faux "swamp alligator" on the outside, and gold plush on the interior.

I have one of my classical guitars encased in a Cedar Creek tweed, and it's a fine box -- five-ply laminated wood, arch-top, six latches, very sturdy and heavy, and if not quite a top-of-the-line Calton case, a really good deal for about half as much.

So I emailed the sales department, got the price and delivery information, which was four weeks, and then sent a credit card number. Being cautious, I split the card number into two emails, half with one, half with the next.

June rolled around, no case, so I sent another email query.

Seems they hadn't gotten the second email, so they hadn't put the order through, and the salesman had been on the road, so he missed it.

Okay. That could have been my fault. I re-sent the number. First week of June.

Third week in July, having not heard back, I sent another email? What's up?

Salesman got back to me -- Sorry about that, my order was still in progress, but things got busy, the shop's volume went up, and the 6-8 week lead time had gone to 8-10 weeks.

Well, okay, since my order went in June 6th, I figured middle of August, right? Maybe another week past that.

So, last week of August, no case, I sent another query, and even though it has been only a few days, so far, no response.

Thus far, this process has run five months. If you discount the first chunk due entirely to my error and restart the clock, that makes it three months, which is still somewhat longer than the slipped delivery of two-to-two-and-a-half months ...

I think Cedar Creek produces well-made and good-looking cases, I like the one I have, but if my experience is any indication, best you be prepared to wait a while if you order one.

Or, "Ho, that's a good one on me!"