Rory Miller's Blog, page 38

Pain

I remember, once, laying (lying?) on my back and trying to scream. I'd taken a fall, about twelve feet is all, but flat on my back. I couldn't breathe and I wanted someone to know. It's hard to scream if you can't breathe. The pathetic squeaks that came out never carried past my own ears.

A couple of years later, frostbite. An arrogant teenager it, seemed stupid to put on gloves just to water the neighbor's rabbits. 17 degrees below zero fahrenheit with a stiff wind... when I got home, my fingers looked like they were made from candle wax and clicked strangely when I slammed them together. My mother had me slowly thaw my hands in lukewarm water. It felt like it was boiling as feeling returned. I promised myself I wouldn't scream, but I couldn't stop the little animal whimpers coming from my throat.

Learning sword and buckler, somehow-- still not sure how it happened-- the ring finger on my left hand was crushed. ICES--Ice, Compression, Elevation, Splint-- didn't cut it. Went to the doctor. He said it wouldn't hurt as he heated a straightened paper clip under a Bic lighter to melt through the fingernail to relieve the pressure. It was a lie, but he was sprayed in blood and pus for the lie so, in retrospect, it was okay.

Run on a broken fibula. Liver punches and testicle kicks. Broken ribs and broken fingers. Lacerated eye. As the man says, "Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell something."

Living is a privilege, and sometimes we pay a price to get here.

Recovering Under Overwhelming Force

Will be doing a workshop in a few days and I want to think out loud here. Nick wants me to do self defense law, and that's easy. One of the standards. He also keyed on an article I wrote for YMAA and wants a class on recovering from overwhelming force.

It's one of those things that is so inherent in my assumptions that I hadn't thought about breaking it out. I mean, physical self-defense is what happens when you are losing. Deadly force is justified because you are about to die-- so having a solid base or good structure or room to move or time to think or space and time for feints or a single opponent in your weight class are all really, really unlikely.

So, brainstorming, this is how I plan to structure it:Super brief Logic of Violence intro: Self-defense predicates on a threat doing something bad. The threat will be doing whatever he does for a specific goal and with definite parameters (don't get caught, don't get hurt and two more). His choice of time, place victim and specific situation derive from the goals and parameters. His choice of time, place, victim and situation also completely drives who the victim will be and what the victim must defend against.Quick talk that most crimes involve psychological dominance rather than injury for very logical reasons, at least in this country. Signs of psych dominance, signs it might go bad, decision points and the one thing you absolutely don't want to do.Then the actual elements of physical dominance (speed to freeze your brain, power, compromised structure, constant movement... that kind of stuff) and what to do:Beating the OODA loop-induced freeze.Fighting emptiness: Not the direct skill needed under an assault, but a habit and way of thinking that helps with other direct skills. It sounds esoteric, but fighting emptiness is just ignoring our primate instinct with other humans to try to match force with force and instead use our force on the undefended place, or get to the flank or squeeze out of a lock or wall pin through the gap... it's a pretty universal principle.Which leads to exploitation of the threat's momentum.Pocket structure: Finding and training places where you can create structure to hit hard with only some bones in alignment.Trying to come up with a name for this one. "Gift-blasting?" Often, the thing the bad guy does to compromise your structure, (like whipping your jacket over your head and forcing your head down) gives you something cool, like a powerful falling shoulder slam directly into his knees if you can see it. It plays a little off the fighting emptiness concept because most people instinctively try to rise directly against the force and fail to see the gift.If there's time we might go into the fighting the mind stuff, but it already looks fairly ambitious for the time slot.

Does that look like a good intro?

Anyway, if you're going to be in the Boston area Friday:http://ymaa.com/seminars/boston/selfdefenseAnd, for that matter, Saturday in Rhode Island:http://www.damajkd.com/camp.html

Uechi

I'm not sure if I can ever really explain how much George and the Uechi crew mean to me. Martially, I'm a bit of an outcast and an orphan (cue the violins for the sad, self-pitying music. Naw. I like running alone.)

There are a lot of people I play with, like and respect in the martial community, but as far as family... Dave retired about a year after he ranked Bo and me. Bo moved away. Don't want to hurt any feelings, but the few yudansha who continued to teach didn't come close to matching Dave's depth or intensity. It was easy to drift, looking for that level of play.

Found a few training partners, but never did, outside of the Team, find another 'home.'

So my first time at Uechi camp was like an orphan being invited to an Italian family dinner. Then just kind of accepted.

So, brawling and everything aside, the Uechi crew have a special place. I'm a little bummed the weekend is over.

Darin told stories, and so did George. Bill brought a friend, an impressive martial historian who will have his brains picked in the future like a baby at a zombie rising. Patrick and Sara and one other person of unknown name worked on my shoulder. Robb was Robb- big brawling profane and devilishly intelligent. Van and I talked, but not enough. Never enough. Someone shared things that neither of us normally talk about. Mike and Harry shared great talks, even when I was close to drifting off to sleep.

It was a good time.

Uech

I'm not sure if I can ever really explain how much George and the Uechi crew mean to me. Martially, I'm a bit of an outcast and an orphan (cue the violins for the sad, self-pitying music. Naw. I like running alone.)

There are a lot of people I play with, like and respect in the martial community, but as far as family... Dave retired about a year after he ranked Bo and me. Bo moved away. Don't want to hurt any feelings, but the few yudansha who continued to teach didn't come close to matching Dave's depth or intensity. It was easy to drift, looking for that level of play.

Found a few training partners, but never did, outside of the Team, find another 'home.'

So my first time at Uechi camp was like an orphan being invited to an Italian family dinner. Then just kind of accepted.

So, brawling and everything aside, the Uechi crew have a special place. I'm a little bummed the weekend is over.

Darin told stories, and so did George. Bill brought a friend, an impressive martial historian who will have his brains picked in the future like a baby at a zombie rising. Patrick and Sara and one other person of unknown name worked on my shoulder. Robb was Robb- big brawling profane and devilishly intelligent. Van and I talked, but not enough. Never enough. Someone shared things that neither of us normally talk about. Mike and Harry shared great talks, even when I was close to drifting off to sleep.

It was a good time.

Landed in Boston

Couldn't nap. Red eye flight. Didn't want to sleep during the day and mess with sleep cycle... so the answer was coffee and constant movement. Jeff and I walked for six hours yesterday (his estimate) constantly talking. About martial arts and martial artists, fights and psychology, early criminal behavior, and Boston. He talked about training in China and Thailand (and he really needs to write a book, not on the training so much as the personalities). I showed him what I meant by 'fighting the mind' and now he wants to gestalt slap somebody. He gave me some exercises for an old injury that seems to be getting worse.
Then a hookah lounge with Mike and Tia. Very nice company but the music was too loud for conversation after a certain point. Good talks as well, and Boston traffic, which makes all driving sort of funny.
Then sleep.
Teaching first class at 0900 tomorrow. May have to experiment.

Packing

Today will be a prep day.  Packing.  Laundry.  Going over lists.  Just a few.  Nothing in the next two weeks requires armor or special equipment, but I should bring the knee brace and the wraps.
Catch an all-night flight tonight, then ten days or so in Boston, Plymouth and Providence.  I love two of the groups I'll be working with.  George Mattson is one of the Grand Old Men and it is always fascinating to watch this group of people that he has created.  Strong, serious, talented and each individual very different, and George cherishes the differences.  The Summerfest is always a blast.
Raffi Derderien is good.  I've only taken a couple of classes with him and been very impressed, but a long time ago I quit watching instructors.  If I want to know about the instructor, I watch the students.  I love hanging with Raffi's students.  Smart, quick, skilled and they laugh and think and question and change.This will be my first time at Raffi's summer camp and I'm a little excited.
Somewhere in the middle I'll meet with four of my favorite self-defense instructors in the area.  Jeff Burger is a fighter, an obsessive martial artist and hasn't always been one of the good guys.  His perspective is invaluable.  Erik Kondo is one of the most dangerous men you will ever knock out of a wheelchair. He knows the real problems of self-defense from a perspective most martial artists can't grasp.  Bill Giovannucci is a Uechi guy who thinks deep and makes me grateful for good armor.  Jake Steinmann is a PDR instructor who thinks, experiments and uses words like pedagogically.  Want to bring your game up?  Surround yourself with people smarter than you.  Works for me.
The goal is to get these few good men to look over the Logic of Violence concept, evaluate, tweak, and possibly help with one of the sticking points in presentation.
There will also be an evening workshop with YMAA.  It will be my first time at their facility, but with luck I'll see Nick Yang again, and that's always a good time.  Nick asked me to go over SD law, which is pretty a standard by now, but also recovering under overwhelming force.  I haven't considered teaching that as a separate thing before.  It's just sort of one of the background facts of SD: hard, fast, close, surprise.  It will be good to separate it out, I think.
So pack, prep, clean up the house a little.  Say goodbyes, fly.  Should arrive in Boston in time for a breakfast cannoli and a nice coffee in the North End.

Tricks

Anonymous asked about "messing with the mind." I hate it when people use movies to illustrate things, but I'm going to.
There's a wonderful movie called "By the Sword". To the best of my memory, the fencing master in an epee bout with his promising competitive protege suddenly springs straight up and thrusts straight down on the kid's wrist. The kid tears off his mask and screams, "You never taught me that!"
The fencing master screams back, "I can't teach you surprise!"
That's the problem with a lot of tricks, with most of the tactics that attack the mind or the context or the relationship directly. The obvious concern is that if you show people the tricks the tricks won't work as well... but obvious doesn't mean important. You show a trick, people memorize the trick. It becomes a technique. The things that made it work (reframing the question, fighting in the emptiness, social/asocial juxtaposition, feeding expectation....) get lost. I can teach tricks that might allow you to gain surprise, but that's not the same as teaching surprise itself.
Same with the Baby Drill. I took it out of the drills e-book not just because it is more a trick than a drill or just because if you read it, you won't make the same mistakes, but because if you read it you will THINK that you know it... but even people who do the baby drill don't always learn the lesson of the drill. We've demonstrated that again and again.
Reading, hearing doesn't lead to understanding. Even a few experiences don't always. And if you learn something real good, it doesn't mean that you will be able to recognize when you can generalize the lesson.
So, attacking the mind, the no touch parry, the baby drill, knife exposure, super woofing... some of the cool stuff will have to be in person. Not because of the exercise, always, but often because of the debriefing. The no-touch parry looks like magic, but I can explain why it works. More importantly I have a good handle on the personality types it will fail. You kind of need to know that.

More Math

The math thing. Remember that any model is a model, a way of explaining the world and no more. It is not the world. No model is "truth" whatever truth may be. But many models are useful (and, in my experience, useful can be measured by how well the model predicts the future.)
You can represent the problem with knives as math.  One of the cool things about knives (for math purposes) is that they operate so much like hands.  Baseball bat swings have huge dead zones, but a knife doesn't require any more of a swing that a bare hand.  For that matter, it can do more damage with less speed and distance.
So, for our model, a knife is functionally a hand, but say, increases the effectiveness of a threat's attack by 'sixty'.  Part of that imaginary number is damage/lethality, and part is the way people tend to choke when they see something shiny and sharp rising towards their belly.
So, in our completely imaginary, numbers-pulled-out-of-the-ass mathematical model, we have two people with combative chances of o-100.  Hand one a knife and the balance becomes 0-100 on the unarmed side, 60-160 on the weapon side.  Mean is 50:110, for what it's worth.  All other things being equal, the knife is a huge advantage.
There are other things making that initial score of 1-100.  Size, strength, speed, ferocity... it seems like a some of the dynamics on defending against a knife involve trying to amp one of these.  For that matter, a lot of self-defense: "Your natural ferocity is about a 12 out of 100, like most nice, civilized people.  Let's ramp that up to 80 and you will be a far more effective fighter."
That rise from twelve to eighty is huge... but if the threat started at ninety you have only begun to level the playing field.  It's a big gain in an area where it is easy to make big gains.  Lots of skilled martial artists are shitty fighters.  Teaching them to slip the leash is huge.  But that doesn't mean that the threat started at a twelve, and if you are slipping the leash for the first time and he's been doing it for awhile... it's an increase, but it's still a far cry from an edge.
Hmmmm.... and willingness to use a knife (an up-close, messy and personal weapon) usually indicates that the threat has already pretty much maxed the 'ferocity' and 'disdain for human life' attributes.
Controlling the weapon arm is an attempt to neutralize the knife's sixty percent advantage, but it does so at a cost.  If you don't know how to control a limb without hands, it often ties up two of yours.  Do you lose forty or more points of your own effectiveness?  If you went into any other type of fight and decided that you would use both of your hands to keep a death grip on one of the other guy's hands... how do you think that would work out?
The thing with a knife, not just in skilled hands but in any except spectacularly stupid and brain-washed hands, is that the sixty-point advantage doesn't come at any cost anywhere else.  Swinging a club involves a vulnerability in geometry and another one in momentum.  The only cost to a knife is that you can't grip with that hand, and sticking a piece of steel through flesh and under a bone can do almost everything a grip can do.
*Over-reaching generalization alert*It seems that lots of the RBSD out there focuses on increasing one or more attributes (aggressiveness, ferocity, strength, speed) to give one an edge.  I dunno. There are very few attributes you can increase that the threat can't increase as well.  
Traditional martial arts *over-reaching generalization alert still in effect*  tends to focus on precision and technique, which I've found are pretty unreliable in your first few encounters until you get used to what is going on.  But sometimes it works.  The cool thing is that you can work on efficiency for a long time, but there are genetic limits to most attributes. But... there is nothing in here inherently that says the threat hasn't spent more time on his technique than you have... and he damn sure has more experience with good guys than you have with bad guys.
My focus tends to be on changing the game.  Not because a crook can't be better at it than I am.  Aside from prevention, I find the big gains in in messing with minds, because far more people have practiced or trained with their bodies and weapons than have even considered playing with their own minds.
It's maybe only a few points, but it doesn't cost anything and fewer threats are prepared for it.
-------------I'm tired, and very soon I will be tired of doing serious posts and having the posts (or parts of them) taken seriously. There was a rule I used to teach rookies: You can take yourself seriously or the job seriously, but never both at the same time.
Life is cool and complex. If you aren't laughing at something, you're probably missing the point. Plus being serious all the time isn't good for you. Ulcers and such.

Before Math

I want to do a post on math and odds and factors. It's one of those things that is very true and consistent, but isn't necessarily real. Like math. 1+1=2. As long as you are talking about rocks, anyway. Talking about rabbits and given a little time, not so much. The thing is that numbers by themselves are not real. They are just a way to count things that are real.
You can have two rocks or two rabbits, but you can't simply have a two. That's why we distinguish numbers from numerals. Same with odds. A coin will flip with equal possibility of heads or tails. The odds are 50:50, but the actual flip is either heads or tails. Odds are 50:50, reality is either heads or tails. 100 or 0. No fifties.
So before a future post about math and odds, let's look at the rocks.
Thomas, a young German cop, asked me last night about some of the things I'd mentioned here, fighting the mind and my high percentage options and such, and we were able to play with them.
Knives are not mathematical fictions. They are real things that cut and maim and kill. In training, they can be introduced for artificial reasons: "Let's see what works against a knife." Then you give a student a knife and have them fight. Just like sparring but with a knife. It adds a level of difficulty, but it is artificial.
In the real world, knives are used for concrete reasons.
1) A knife can be used to kill people. One of my adages is "Knives are not used to win fights, knives are used to kill people." This goal dictates how it is used. Stealth. Sentry removal tactics. Close range. Weapon out of sight. Control the victim's arm or body or head. Training comes into this. People who learned to kill in jail or prison will do it differently than those who trained in the military. But not that differently. The reason for the kill matters as well. If it is just about money, that changes a few factors. Different than if it is about revenge, or establishing a reputation or a hit...and whether the hit is about removing a problem or sending a message changes things as well.
But in any case, hard, fast, brutal, surprise. Maximum effect and shock, minimum reaction time for the victim. (Survived this once, so luck or not, I know it can be done)
Knives aren't always used to kill.2) Intimidation. If someone stabs you and you die, the crime, in most places, will be investigated thoroughly. If a threat shows you a knife and you hand over your wallet and no one is hurt, that will not be investigated nearly as thoroughly. Criminals know this. They also know that showing a weapon is more likely to intimidate than being polite.
So knives are used as intimidation displays. The only reason to let you see a knife is if the threat intends NOT to use it. This can go bad, but usually only if you are stupid. Challenge the threat's manhood, try to save face, dare him to use the knife and he just might. This is also the only scenario where a knife defense might look like it does in many classes: a half-hearted knife thrust from well out of range. The regular class stuff might work here, as well... but you have to be stupid to escalate it to here. (Survived this once)
3) The live knife. A trained knife fighter deciding to slice and dice on an unarmed man. This is the training artifact mentioned earlier. It's a challenging tactical problem, but does it happen? I know lots of people who train and play at it, but I don't know any experienced knife thug who would even consider it. The assassination route is safer if you are willing to go there.
4) Rage or fear. You absolutely should practice against certain 'stupid' attacks. Enraged people do sometimes grab the nearest knife or pair of scissors and charge screaming in an icepick grip. Or in fear, pick something up and slash wildly.  Some of the old-school stuff, like the figure four armlock, works here.  But the same tactics are sometimes rejected because they fail so miserably at category 3.  So if "The live knife" as described above is your bench mark, you might not appreciate some things that work in the far more common fourth category, rage and fear.  (Survived this once.  Overhand scissors to be specific. That 'once' keeps coming up.)
5) Monkey Dance gone wrong.  Sometimes the threats escalate and an insecure person draws a knife.  It is almost always a dominance display, display being the operative word.  Particularly common if the person perceives himself to be out numbered, sees it possibly escalating to a Group Monkey Dance.  Thomas described a situation where a friend reassuring the threat that it wasn't a group thing and just a friendly fight talked the threat into throwing the knife away and voluntarily engaging in fisticuffs.  Sometimes people amaze me.  
Big ego or honest fear of death can also trigger someone to pull a knife when losing a dominance fight.
There may be more, but I think these cover the scenarios I've seen, at least in broad strokes.  So, next post when I talk about knife math and knife odds, keep this in mind.  Knives are used for purposes and it happens in the real world.  Any talk about abstractions, including math, can be a distraction from the world.  Be careful.

"Who Will Guide Us...?"

In a comment on the last post, AF1 made a comment that gets to the core of what I see as a major problem. AF1, this isn't aimed at you, but aimed at an attitude that I see throughout the martial arts world.
AF1 wrote:The Straight Blast Gym guys use the S.T.A.B system of knife defense which focuses on controlling the weapon arm.

That gym is famous for banging it out. In fact if I'm not mistaken it was them who first coined the phrase "alive training."

So if they say it really works, and you say it doesn't work, who are we to believe? Is it possible that there is more than one way to skin a cat?
The point is not whether to believe me or to believe them. Either way, it is an "argument from authority," one of the classical logical fallacies. (Especially annoying, if I am the authority in question.) All it means, whichever you decide, is who you have chosen to do your thinking for you. It has nothing to do with being right.
That's getting really close to the essence of one of the things that has been bothering me. Martial arts, self-defense, whatever label you put on this endeavor is supposed to make you better. Stronger, fitter, and, in my mind at least, smarter and tougher and more independent as well.
That means thinking for yourself. Observing for yourself. And sometimes challenging ideas from people you respect.
So if you want someone to do your thinking for you, go with the other guy. You've already missed the point of everything I have to say. There are lots of people out there actively looking for acolytes and yes-men who will welcome you with open arms.
And, to be glib, when we are talking about knife defense, it's more accurate to say that there is more than one way to fail to skin a cat.