Everyone's Doing It

So yesterday. Wait. It's Thursday now. So Tuesday at lunch, I head into the academy for JKD class, and as I'm heading back to the dressing room, my instructor, LaDell, stops me, shakes my hand and without letting go, gives me this real serious expression.

"I need to talk to you after class."

"Uh, okay."

He looks like this, by the way:

(he's the one on the right getting ready to knock the stuffing out of the flailing guy.)



And then he said, "Just kidding," and gave me his big, goofy smile. I started to walk off.

"But I do need to talk to you after class."

So we have class, and it was sort of a strange one for us. Instead of practicing punching, we practice retracting our punches as fast and as powerfully as possible. The way LaDell explained it was that one of the reasons Bruce Lee was so fast was because he obsessively trained every aspect of each of his punches. Not only did the punch go out like a whip, it came back the same way.

In traditional Wing Chun gung fu, each martial artist stayed in close to his opponent looking to make contact with the arms so as to trap (immobilize) them against their body. Because of that, they'd leave their punches out there a little bit, like a sword or a lance or something. Bruce thought that was, not dumb, but unrealistic. He thought that if he whipped his arm back after a punch, they'd have nothing to trap and he'd be free to punch them in the face again. And if that sounds like a boxing jab, well, it sort of is. JKD was heavily influenced by American-style boxing.

All that to say, today, my biceps and the muscles in my back between my shoulder blades are sore as hell. And, that's not why we're here.

We're here because after class, we sat down and I got a good old-fashioned older brother/dad lecture from LaDell. He very much fits the warrior/philosopher archetype. I find him very wise and insightful in some things. When you call him a martial artist, he actually lives the artist part of that title.


He started our talk by saying, "I really believe that nothing happens by accident, that people come into our lives to serve a purpose." And then he made a reference to Nick Fury and the Avengers, because deep down, LaDell is a 44 y.o. comic book super geek. He's also very much a disciple of Bruce Lee, and I'm not just talking about the punching people in the face parts.

See, about two weeks ago ... Or maybe it was last week. My concept of the passing of time has been ... fluid ... the past couple of months. ... I talked to LaDell about the fact that I'm going to have to get a job in Tulsa, which'll necessarily have a profound impact on my training with him. That bothers me. Having done this for more than a year and a half, I've already met a lot of other martial arts instructors, and to my semi-trained eye, none of them have as much to teach me as he does.

So there's that. And then there's the fact that we've become pretty good friends, which is why he wanted to talk to me in the first place. After the Avengers lead in, he hit me with a couple of plans for how I can continue training under him even though I've moved. But that wasn't why he wanted to talk.

Apparently, the night before, he'd been unable to sleep. There he was at 2am, not being able to sleep, and he's thinking about something he feels he needs to say to me, and it's not about martial arts training. It's about my abandoned writing career.

He and I had been kicking around writing a movie script for a sort of throwback martial arts flick -- think the action of a Bourne movie in the setting closer to No Country for Old Men with a main character that's a sort of modern day equivalent of Eastwood in one of his old spaghetti westerns. We had gone so far as to plan out much of act 1, maybe half of act 2 and a pretty decent ending.

Of course, I haven't written a damn word of it. And I can sit here and tell you, and him, and myself, that I've been so busy with my goddamn unending string of magazine deadlines that I just haven't had the energy or focus to do any personal writing.

But that's not the truth. That's just a justified excuse.

And he called me on it. He told me that I needed to make a commitment to give the writing thing a shot. That I needed to make a plan. With dates. I got the lecture that I'm never going to be happy or satisfied until I try it. That I'm letting the fear of failure rule and ruin (to an extent) my life.

Then he pulled the Sifu card on me, and gave me homework: he wants the plan and he wants dates.

Well, fuck.

It's one thing to let myself down. I've been doing that pretty consistently for 38 years. I've been caving in to being afraid every chance I could. I'm comfortable being afraid and making excuses. It's a lousy way to live life, let me tell you.

But something else came out of that conversation that's typically been a better motivator for me. What I don't like is letting other people down, and LaDell's "pep" talk reminded me that I've been doing just that. By not pursuing these things, I've been letting down my wife, my friends, my family and my daughter.

I'm horrified to try anything because deep down, I believe I'm already a failure, and that if I try and fail, then I won't be able to hide that fact from anyone anymore. How fucked up is that?

Which brings me back to the martial arts portion of this program. In the past year and a half, I've had to confront my fear in a very real, visceral way twice a week. Every time I go to a JKD class, I'm confronting my fear of getting the shit beat out of me. You might as well call me a coward, because most of my life, I've gone way out of my way to avoid any sort of fighting and/or confrontations of most other sorts.

Thursdays at lunch, we spar. I've managed to find a lot of "realistic" reasons to skip JKD class. No more of that shit. Fear is a cancer. I've got to find my chemo and kill this thing before it kills me.

I'm going to start working on fiction again Sept. 12. Help me figure out how to stay with it (yes, that's me asking for help; clearly, I can't do this on my own).

Thanks for reading this far, kids. I had to exercise some muscles I hadn't used in awhile.