'Tache News: Part II...

The Boy is home from university for the Xmas break and suddenly it's business as normal with me as the comedy corned beef in his and the Missus's ciabata of sarcastic belittlement.

So the three of us are walking down the hill heading into town and I starts to skip as I walk. The Missus laughs and the Boy looks aghast.
'What the fuck are you doing?'
'Skipping...'
'Why? You look like a little girl...'

The Missus interjects.
'He's doing it to amuse me because I watched a UFC fight with him yesterday and Chuck Liddell skipped into the ring.'
'I bet he doesn't skip like a little girl...'
'Don't be mean to your stepfather.'
'Although Chuck Liddell has got a little girl,' muses the Boy.
I correct him.
'She's hardly a little girl. She's in her late teens.'
'But at some point she was a little girl.'
'Yes. But by using the terms "has got" it suggests present tense which is clearly wrong.'
'Mr fucking anal...'
I ignore the insult. The Boy and the Missus are pedantic over anything so I consider it a small victory in the sometime battlefield of our domestic bliss.

'Anyway... How do you know about him and his little girl?' asks the Boy.
'Because a mixed martial arts magazine I buy had a section on stars and their cars and Chuck Liddell was in it with his daughter and his car.'
'What sort of car did he have?'
'Some sporty-fasty-smally thing.'
'Fuck... You should be on Top gear with knowledge like that.'

The Missus interjects.
'I've told you. Stop bullying your stepfather...'
'Yes. She's told you. Stop bullying your stepfather...'

We walk on down the road. I decide to take advantage of the Missus's sudden concern for my well-being.
'Would you straighten my 'tache out later, honey?'
'Of course...'

I smile. The world is good. Then the Boy interjects.
'Nothing "straight" about that 'tache and never will be...'

The Art Of Learning...

Self-help books? Pile of old bollocks more like where the author helps himself to your hard-earned cash by reiterating the blindingly obvious disguised as some pseudo scientific gobbledy-gook.

I have become a bit more open-minded of late, though, after reading some decent martial arts-type theory stuff. And now The Art Of Learning: An Inner Journey To Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin has nearly got me convinced that some of them even have the potential to be very good. Perhaps even useful.

Waitzkin is a former chess child prodigy and multiple US national champion who left that game behind to compete in the highly esoteric and sometimes quite brutal world of tai chi chuan. And this is the competitive version where it's about flinging your opponent out of a ring or throwing him over on his arse rather than making pretty patterns in the park of a morning.

In his book Waitzkin charts his life as a chess wunderkind and the pressures that lead him to leave his chess career behind before embarking on a journey into competitive martial arts. In terms of a potted biography it's quite a nice read but it really comes alive when the author starts to examine the processes of how he learnt to soak up information and improve in both spheres and the steps he had to go through to compete at the highest levels in both fields.

Waitzkin doesn't really reveal anything earth-shattering in his book and anyone who's looking for the secret key to unlocking the genius inside themselves will be sorely dissappointed that there's no quick-fix solution to attaining greatness. The lesson clearly stated here is that high-level success requires hard work. And lots of it. Constantly.

But the book is very strong when Waitzkin dismantles the mechanics of his learning processes and breaks them down and makes the connections between his chess learning and development and his martials arts learning and development and compares and contrasts the two. You can almost see the lightbulb go on in his head when you're reading the book.

It's good stuff, a good read and written with real clarity. As a martial artist currently stepping up his game with a black belt grading on the horizon it's good to have old lessons, such as 'investing in loss' and 'learning form to forget form', reiterated.

I'm still a long way from buying anything by Paul McKenna yet, though.

'Tache News: Part I...

The Chuck-Liddell-style 'tache I am currently sporting is taking on a life of its own.

And several women, many of them not particularly desperate or on medication or even mentals, have commented on my 'tache in very favourable terms with a bit of a twinkle in their eyes.

One even rather coquettishly asked me how my wife likes it when I kiss her while sporting facial hair. I resisted the temptation to reply 'Kiss her where?' as I am not a total flirt whore.

Even more embarrassingly I got the feeling that a couple of them would quite to like to go on a date with the 'tache if only I wasn't attached to it.

In the 'tache's defence it would probably be more charming and erudite than I could ever be. It would probably be a better lover as well.

The 'tache may have to go. I am not being upstaged by my own facial hair.

The Corner...

The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighborhood is the real-life account of one small area of Baltimore that is home to a continual street market of rival drug peddlars and addicts whose life is reduced to chasing the 'blast' of their next fix.

Written by David Simon and Edward Burns, it chronicles the area over a year by the authors interviewing and following the various people who live and deal on the corner drug markets. In particular it charts the story of one family destroyed by the drugs culture and it is at turns, shocking, tender, funny and moving, without ever losing sight of the fact that the tidal of wave of drugs that is flooding the US and beyond needs drastic and well-funded action to help deal with the carnage it is creating.

As a piece of journalism it's a truly awe-inspiring book, as a polemic it's never less than convincing and as a work of literature it's superb.

Buy it. It's a stunning piece of work.

Pain-ting!

The new From Beer To Paternity Towers is slowly taking shape.

There are two reasons for this: one is that the decor was so fucking awful when we moved in that we both decided we needed to get rid of the offending colours as soon as possible.

The other reason is that Missus is re-enacting Lysistrata, the Ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes in which the women embark on a sex strike until the men do as they are told and renounce warfare.

Exchange 'renounce warfare' for 'decorate the house' and you get the picture. It's evil, it's callous... but to be fair the house is getting painted pretty quickly. Sometimes it even looks OK too.

I threatened to employ the same tactic on her until she bought me a free-standing kickbag and she just laughed and pointed me towards a new pot of paint.

I did have the last laugh, though. I shagged one of the cats when she wasn't looking... Sadly the cat said I wasn't very good and I should stick to painting. For ever.

Making The Grade...

It was rank test day at the hapkido academy a few weeks ago and both the Other Woman and the Other Woman Who Loves Other Women were grading.

It was quite a big day for both for different reasons: the Other Woman was returning to the grading fray for the first time since breaking her arm in two places and needing extensive surgery to piece it back together; while the Other Woman Who Loves Other Women was grading for her black belt.

I wasn't grading so I spent the time being an opponent and generally being thrown around after having all manner of joint locks and strikes thrown at me, which was much more fun than it sounds.

When I wasn't getting flung around I sat and watched proceedings and the Other Woman and the Other Woman Who Loves Other Women were fab and generally impressed the hell out of everyone who was watching. Sadly the results take a few weeks to come through so they're now waiting to see if they passed...

The good thing about this lull in proceedings, however, is that for the fortnight between grading and results classes tend to be focused on reviewing old techniques and basic skills. This is something that is, of course, drilled into all students to do on a regular basis but sometimes in the rush to learn the new you can neglect the old.

I quite enjoy this revisiting old skills because it's a reminder that you sometimes don't know what you thought you did and how well you thought you did.

Fortunately I'm a bit ahead of the curve on this lesson and it was a realisation that my hand techniques needed work that took me to the boxing gym so I could focus entirely on hand strikes and punching. And even though I wouldn't ever profess expert status at boxing I can now run punch combinations off much easier and I'm much more confident at using my fists in sparring rather than just relying on my leg kicks.

Bruce Lee once said: ‘I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.’ I figure I've now probably thrown at least 10,000 jabs on a punchbag so I'm starting to understand how to utilise this strike much better.

I've now got to have the same discipline when it comes to the other strikes and kicks I use and ensure I'm as comfortable doing everything else as I am using my jab.

It's something to play with over Xmas. A cheap present to myself...

Orgy!

A colleague at work has been invited to an orgy. The invite masquerades as something sexual and daring for fun-minded adults but reading between the lines it's an orgy at an undisclosed location.

The colleague in question is a very attractive young woman and she's been invited to orgies in the past, the most recent one being last year when it transpired the only person who attended the orgy was the host who set it up. Orgy for one. To go...

This one, however, is a much plusher and more sumptuous affair and, in the hope of writing a feature about it, she's toying with the idea of going.

So she sought advice and asked me if I'd go if I were in her shoes.

So I told her I don't think I could attend an orgy. Besides the obvious fact that I'm married (and by some quirk of fate shagging other women is generally frowned upon) it genuinely doesn't appeal.

For a start there's far too much chance for rejection. It may surprise readers of this blog to read this, but I was not always the Adonis of a man I now appear. In fact I was never a pretty boy and as a hormone-fuelled teenager wanting a girlfriend I was blown out more times than a windsock. Fact.

So the idea of turning up in a room full of strangers and getting undressed only to be left to amuse myself while the beautiful people rutted among themslves would be too painful to bear.

Also if you did get invited to sample the goods imagine giving your all to your new-found bonking partner to then turn around... and find a naked 16-stone man in a gimp mask playing with a throbbing erection 18 inches from your head.

There are some fantasies better left unexplored. These things are much safer in my head. The reality would probably only be a big let-down.

So if I was in her shoes I'll only stay for a few hours or so...