Rory Miller's Blog, page 46

Why?

I know that in the big things, "Why?" is a bullshit question.  There are no real answers and so there never was a real question.  It's whistling in the dark or a child crying for mommy.  If we only knew 'why' if we could find the reasons and meaning behind the universe...
It's not enough for it to make sense, either.  There is actually a lot of sense in understanding that 'shit happens' is enough why for the universe.  We want it to make sense to us, to have this giant, cold, mostly empty universe have laws that somehow reinforce our little meat animal ideas of good and justice.
So a good man dies-- not just a good man, a kind man.  Intelligent.  Well trained.  Wife and daughter.  Someone I really admired and was looking forward to seeing as he aged and grew and became... I was really looking forward to learning what he would discover in the world.
And I want the why.  Even knowing it is a bullshit question.  There were older, weaker, meaner people.  People without a new baby daughter.  Some people who have done heinous things.  People who never have been anything but a drag on others.  They are still walking around, wasting air, making lives miserable...
Why a good man?  Why not...
That childish desire, to make the world be the way that I wish it, still bubbles up.
Not reveling today in the world as it is.
RIP brother.

Update

Dlshad tasted clam chowder for the first time yesterday, touched the ocean and had a generally great time. The Oregon Coast cooperated with fairly clear skies, a brisk wind and warm sun. Rocky coasts, mighty trees... it was all new and alien and beautiful to a city boy from the Iraqi desert mountains. A good time was had buy all.
Working on a web site update that should include a calendar. February will include LA and Rhode Island, confirmed and Minnesota for a week in late summer. Shooting for New England in August because evidently I have a thing for high humidity. Most dates tend to be a little squishy until things get locked in. I'm sure that's not the case with people who have been doing it for awhile and have a system.
Possible signing at the Powell's Beaverton store in May, facilitated by Mr. Perry...and possibly team-teaching another Savvy Authors class with the same. Which would be great fun, I think.
The current class at SA has a very different feel than the last. Lots fewer questions this time. I suspect it is because the subject (Police policy on using force) is integrated and arcane enough that people feel like they have to go through most of the material before they understand enough to ask a good question. That's pretty true, so the answer is to accelerate the class so that there will be more time to poke at things after the data dump.
Doing a series of articles for Concealed Carry Magazine. The first just arrived. They added some pretty good pictures.
"Violence, A Writer's Guide" is now available from Amazon on Kindle. Just got it up. Theoretically it is also at the Apple I-Book store, but uploading it there was so messy and convoluted I neither know nor really care if it was successful. Muy loot. Kurdish for "Nose hair" the colloquial term for a pain in the ass.

Training In Versus Training For

Sometimes there are profoundly deep misunderstandings when people talk. We assume that when we do similar things, we probably do them for similar reasons, and that's just not true.

200 years ago, drill and ceremony (marching in formation) was one of the most critical skills on the battlefield. Maybe not for individual survival but for expanding a general's span of control so that he could give orders and expect them to be carried out. Good drill training won wars, and winning saved lives.

Now that it is suicidal, and has been for over a hundred years, it is still practiced. I would jettison it as no longer applicable and training in things that don't work is wasted time. But others are not training to defeat an enemy. They are training to be (or create) soldiers. And soldiers know how to march.

Training in a martial art is not the same thing as training for violence. Not at all, and this for years has been one of my blindspots. I had assumed that in the end everyone was training for the dark day when they may have to use the skills. From that point of view much of the training was counter-productive. Some was senseless. Some things were jettisoned that worked in real life but not in play and some things were incorporated that worked in play but not in real life.

And almost all of these deficits could be vastly improved with just a touch of good old-fashioned goals-backward thinking. Study the problem, decide what you are training for and then you can much better evaluate what you are doing in training. Is that attack so patently stupid that you would never do it? Then a crook wouldn't either. So why practice a defense.

A little forethought and you can really streamline both your training and your personal style.

But… and here is where my blindspot hit. A friend, someone I respect very much as a man and a martial artist pointed out that there are insights you get from dedicated training, things that 'click' five or ten years into training.

I agree completely, but (and I was thinking about something/somebody specific) sometimes you get incredible insight into becoming more efficient at things that don't work. Thinks that have no tactical application.

And that was my blindspot. US Marshal Jones said that in order for a technique to be valid it must have three elements. The list now has four, so I must have added one and I'm not sure which it was:

· Anything you teach must have a tactical use. Reholstering quickly doesn't have a tactical use. Outside of handcuffing, breaking a turtle (the judo guys know what I mean) not only has no self-defense use but there's no way to do it without being the bad guy, legally.

· It must work moving or standing still. If you can't hit hard when both you and the threat are moving, you can't hit hard. If you can't put a bullet on target on a moving target while you, yourself are moving, for all tactical purposes you can't shoot.

· It must work whether you can see or not (and this is likely the one I added, because JJ is primarily a shooter and there are lots of shooting skills that rely on sight… but at the same time he insisted that everything except target acquisition be done by touch.)

· The technique must work when you are scared, under an adrenaline dump. If the technique needs a clear head and pinpoint precision to work, it doesn't work.

These are classic, and I apply them to my training…but I am training for things. For very specific things. Not just one thing, either. Getting out of a place alive when things go to shit is a different skill than handcuffing. It's also a different problem armed than it is unarmed. But the skills and training always serve the goals.

This is also probably the crux of the identity problem (not feeling like a martial artist any more) and the 'martial arts can't be a way of life' sentiment.

I'm training for things. I'm no longer training in martial arts. Martial artists do study 'the problem' but the problem is not surviving a dark day, the problem is becoming a better martial artist. It can look self-referencing to me, artificial, a little like navel gazing… but it is just as valid as what I do, and probably more satisfying for more people. Without the dark days, all of my time might feel wasted. I wouldn't necessarily know what was a waste of time. The navel-gazing I see in serious martial artists might well transmute into the fantasy life that is rampant in the RBSD crowd.

There but for luck go I.

One of the Mental Drills

It has been a busy week. Dlshad, my translator from Kurdistan is settling in nicely and making plans for his future. Lots of work on the house. Usual holiday hellishness (I'm not much of a people person at the best of times. Add obligations, consumerism and christmas music and I'm about ready to go into the woods.)
Finished Nano by adding a bunch of unnecessary fluff to the book, then cut the crap out. Need to do a rewrite, have a few friends look at it and tell me which parts suck and then it will be ready for whatever the future holds.
Here's a short excerpt:

WW5 Counting Coup

Counting coup was a Plains Indian tradition. Either through stalking or in battle, young men would show their courage by touching an enemy. It had all the skill of combat with none of the bodycount. This version is a form of urban stalking and you will find that threats, especially young men (aka delinquents) play it all the time. It shows all the skill of mugging but without the legal consequences.

The idea is to get to ideal range on a target, either without the target being aware or with the target fully aware but doing nothing about it.

Public places, especially crowded ones are easy. You pick a target and drift or stalk over to within range. Without a crowd it is far more difficult, and thus more challenging. If you are ready, see how long you can stay undetected in the striking range.

Counting coup on a fully aware target is more a psychological game than a physical one. It has dangerous psychic elements in it that need to be addressed as a safety issue.

To deliberately close into someone's personal space with their knowledge but without permission is an insult. It is a punking. In some places and subcultures if you misjudge you will have to be ready to defend yourself and it will not be self-defense because you started it.

More importantly, if someone has a weak ego and is looking for validation, punking people can be addictive. I've said don't practice losing and don't practice missing, because you will do it under stress. Now I'm saying "Don't practice being an asshole, because you will become one." And not just under stress, either.

You should do it once or twice, partially to notice your own internal resistance to breaking such a cultural taboo and also so that you notice how few people set boundaries in any way. They expect you to respond to the taboo.

See how that works in an assault? Breaking a social taboo indicates that most social controls are off the table…and yet we expect the social controls to kick in any second. Don't count on it.

Another layer, common among criminals who don't have an immediate need for anything but want to stay in practice is forcing. Forcing is used here the way a magician uses it. There is no coercion or violence or threats. You pick a card and the card you pick was chosen for you long ago, you were, without being aware of it, forced to choose a preordained card.

In counting coup, forcing is when you do not approach the target but set things up so that the target approaches you. Look at young men standing too close to a concession stand or slightly crowding an aisle, forcing people, particularly young women, to brush as they pass. Contact. Counting coup.

There are multiple values in this drill. The stalking practice not only lets you move and think as a predator, but the blending will help keep you off the predator's radar. You find something of your social conditioning. Most importantly, you will see how important social conditioning is to how predator's work.

Victims are good people. They don't want to draw attention or make scenes. So they don't set boundaries and they do put themselves in vulnerable positions.

Apostates

This is going to be complex.One of the tenets of Conflict Communications is that people belong in groups.  We are all members of at least one and usually many groups.  Whether that is a tribe, a school, a tradition, a family, a club, a profession or something else.  People don't survive well on their own-- either physically or psychologically.
Groups have rules.  You can call them mores (pronounced moray, like the eel) if you want to go all anthropological/sociological.  A group without rules isn't a group. NOT because rules are the bedrock of social control but because rules are the bedrock of identity.  Dietary laws may or may not have had survival value in the past.  The fact that they continue even when they do not is a sign that their primary value is one of identification.
There is no identification value in common sense.  Any society that survives will value, for instance, trust within the group and productivity.  No society will survive that doesn't value self-preservation (and this is one to look at because what someone says they value or what a group honors, like martyrdom, doesn't actually happen all that often.  The words and the music of many cultures are not truly in accord.)
This means the identity value is in the silly stuff-- the stories and myths and ritual.  A Christian is not defined as someone who is meek and kind to others and honors his parents.  A Christian is defined by the belief that a man-god got nailed to a Roman torture/execution device and quit being dead three days after being buried.  
You can follow every law and rule and live with what people might call perfect Christian ideals, but if you don't believe that piece, you can't be a member of that group.
So every group has mores that are arbitrary if not down-right weird, because those are where the group identity rises.
And this is where the edge-walkers come in.  I can't speak for everyone, but one of the things about almost dying is the way it clarifies things.  Lots of things are bullshit and once you see that, once you see the value of breathing when someone has tried hard to stop you AND you see the inevitability of the end-state of not breathing, your identity doesn't come from labels and rituals.  Maybe, in the end, your identity doesn't even need to be.
So loving your neighbor makes sense, because there is only so much time to get loving in... but heaven doesn't matter.  Heaven is not good or bad or true or untrue.  Heaven DOES NOT MATTER.  The rituals and the myths do not matter.  If I like you, what do I care about the patch on your shoulder or which party you vote for or where your ancestors came from?  If your waiken has forbidden you from eating birds, other than some menu switching, your myths don't affect my friendship (or dislike) for you.
When the edge-walker gets to this understanding, he is neither fish nor fowl.  He does fit into a tribe, in his own mind.  He values what he values- the good works and the people themselves.  He does the right thing.  He will give his life to protect these people, myths and all, and will not feel slighted or ashamed to do it.  He is one of them, on a deeper level than they can probably feel because it is not a matter of ritual and the random chance of birth.  The edge-walker chooses.
But he will no longer be accepted as one of them.  Without the rituals and the myths, the trappings, he cannot be identified.  "Because he serves us and will die for us does not mean that he is one of us."  He hears it rarely, but sees it again and again.  This is the separation, one of the most unexpected and disturbing things if you spend too much time on the edge.

Drills

Nanowrimo did not eat my life.  I'm sort of looking for an excuse, but I can't even say I've been busy.  I tend to blog more on the road than when I'm at home.  Must like it here or something...
The book was effectively done at 38k words two weeks ago.  The challenge for Nano is write 50,000 and I'm not sure the book can support that and I don't want to cheat and  write on a second book for the word count... so I'm still expanding with just under four days.  7000 words to go, which is well within reach for one day when I knowwhat needs to go on paper.
Anyway, without further ado, here is the list of chapters thus far:

Introduction

Evaluating Drills

OS: The One-Step Series

OS1: The One-Step

OS2: Four Option One-Step

OS3: The Baby Drill

OS4: Slow Man Drills

OS5: Dance Floor Melee

OS6: Frisk Fighting

OS7: Environmental Fighting

OS8 The Brawl 

B: Blindfolded Drills

B1: Blindfolded Defense

B2: Blindfolded Targeting

B3: Core Fighting

B4: Blindfolded Infighting

D: Dynamic Fighting

D1:Dynamic Fighting

D2: Sumo

D3: The Hole Against the Wall

D4: Moving in the Clinch

D5: French Randori

F: Fundamentals

F1: Maai With Weapons

F2: Offlining

F3: The Targeting Drill

F4: The Lock Flow Drill

F5: Initiative

F6: Advanced Ukemi

F7: Pushing

GM: Ground Movement

GM1: Roll-over Drill Phase 1

GM2: Roll-over Drill Phase 2

GM3: Roll-over Drill Phase 3

GM4: Roll-over Drill Phase 4

GM5: The Wax On, Wax Off of Groundfighting

GM6: One Up, One Down

GM7: Blindfolded Grappling

PM: The Plastic Mind Exercises

PM1: Animal Styles

PM2: Fighting the Elements

PM3: The Other 

IW: Internal Work

IW1: Centering

IW2: Eating Frogs

IW3: The Game of the Stones

IW4: Lists

IW5: Slaughtering and Butchering

IW6: Ethics and Glitches

IW7: To Save My Children

IW8: The Predator Mind

IW9: The Articulation Exercise

C: Combat Drills

C1: Takeouts

C2: Multiman

C3: Break Through

C4: Bull in the Ring

C5: The Reception Line

C6: Scenario Training

WW: World Work

WW1: The Clothespin Game

WW2: Ten New Things

WW3: Stalking

WW4: Escape and Evasion

WW5: Counting Coup

WW6: Dog Handling

WW7: Global Awareness Exercises

WW8: Legal Articulation

WW9: World Building Exercise

 Should probably add an afterword and I'm toying with an exercise to evaluate training to finish up, but this is the skeleton of the work.

Re-Thinking, Maybe

I've written before that martial arts can never be a way of life, not for me. Then I started working on the damn book of drills and maybe I'm seeing it differently.

Of the nine sections, three are almost entirely mental: Internal Work, the Plastic Mind Exercises and Working with the World. What does this mean?

Some catch it intuitively. I think that Maija and Edwin and Kasey know what I am doing even when I am struggling with defining and understanding it.

Here's what I know:

I live in a world, a big world full of many things. Much of the world is dangerous and almost all of the world is beautiful. You can't separate the beauty from the danger. You live in the world and, as humans, we can separate from the world… but we can't separate from and effectively function in the world.

Martial arts or self-defense or what-have-you may or may not be something you do for the dangerous parts of the world. It might just be fun. But at very minimum, in my mind, it must be something that you do with and in the world. Otherwise it is fantasy and separation. At best masturbation. At the worst, unpleasant sweaty addictive masturbation that you believe is exactly the same as real sex.

So it's critical when learning this (whatever this is that I teach) that you play in and with the world. That you study the world. And because you are part of it, that you study yourself. Not the imaginary self that is constant and true and good. The fluid self that changes when you are hungry. The one that you become when you are afraid or elated. The self bleeding on the edge of consciousness and the self in the cold dark places.

Learn to see. Learn your own mental plasticity and how much you can control that: how much you can choose, moment to moment, who you wish to be.

Touch the world, taste it, smell it. If you ever need to break somebody, it will be one of the most real moments of your life.

How to Read a Book

Asher writes (intermittently, lately) about teaching.  In a recent conversation, I asked him to do a series on how to learn, how to be a student.  Maybe it will bear fruit...
An example:  Once, and only once in my life, did I get a short class on how to read a book.  It wasn't about reading for pleasure, but about maximizing comprehension and retention.
Read the introduction and the table of contents first, then the glossary.  Read the endnotes (all, if they are organized at the end of the book; chapter at a time if they are organized that way.)  If there is a chapter summary or 'discussion questions' at the end of the chapter, read those next.  Skim each chapter noting pictures, reading captions and noticing all words in bold.  Read the sidebars.
Then you begin reading the book.
There is a classic teaching style: tell the students what they are about to learn, teach the material, then tell them what they just learned.  By telling the students what they are about to get, they have a huge head-start on internally organizing the material and identifying what is important.  This system does the same thing with a textbook.
When I was taught this, there was an immediate improvement in understanding, retention and test scores.  And it pissed me off:  Why wasn't this taught in grade school?  Why in the hell did I have to wait for college for a five minute class that improved the quality of my academic life so dramatically?
I want to go in different ways with the rest of this post:
What I think all students should be taught as young as possible: How money really works; advanced first aid; preventative medicine; the scientific method, experimental design and enough statistics to know when they are being manipulated... much much more.
Other tricks and tips for learning, such as the most basic rule: If you don't know, ask someone who does.Throw away comments or short snatches of information that changed life drastically.There are things like breathing and walking and living that almost everyone does and very few people do at a conscious level... very few learn to do them really well.  What goes into learning to live well?Maybe later.  Maybe not.
Off to work on the drill manual.
Notes:I'm working on the calendar for 2011.  If you want a seminar, workshop or private lessons, contact me.  If you're on my e-mail list, expect something soon.
I did a short talk on Anti-terrorism for a local college Thursday.  Definitely not my specialty.  The good news: I actually have a huge amount of data. The bad news: Almost all of it is under confidentiality agreements and I couldn't use most of my primary sources.
Talks coming up Monday and Tuesday at another local college: one on investigative interviewing, the other on roots of conflict.
Teaching another Savvy Authors on-line course starting November 29th.  This one is on Use of Force policy.  

Suspension of Disbelief

One of my close friends is a writer, martial artist, and is exploring some aspects of teaching. After the con we were discussing, as we are wont to do, martial arts, self-defense and teaching methods. I told her of a recent experience where I had declined to do a drill because it had no tactical use. It would only be ingraining a bad habit.
She said, "Beginning training requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief."
Suspension of disbelief is a term authors use. When you read a novel or watch a movie, you have to participate. Not everything will be correct. If the characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy had had 3 digits of IQ, it would have been a twenty minute movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jet Li fight scenes don't follow the normal rules of physics or physiology. Most horror movies wouldn't work without a cast stupid enough to go into the basement alone and too stupid to turn on the light...
Part of the audience's job is to actively ignore the small problems. When the plot holes become too big or the characters too stupid or (my pet peeve) when the plot hinges on the stupidity of characters presented as intelligent (The remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair") the suspension of disbelief is said to be shattered.
Obviously, every member of the audience will have a different threshold.
Check me on this, because it seems intuitively obvious to me and I can't find a counter-example, which either means I'm right or it is too much a part of my identity and is one of my blindspots:
Suspension of disbelief has no place in a valid teaching.
There are some things you will be taught that you can't test right away. Engineers learn the math it takes to build a bridge long before they ever build one. But no place in that learning process will they look at the teacher and say, "This doesn't make sense" and the teacher won't be able to explain why it makes sense and exactly how it works.
If you have to suspend disbelief, if the instructor has to say, "Because it's better this way" and can't say how or (a martial arts classic) you are told that something that simply doesn't work (like hand blocking an attack from a much larger person) will magically start to work after a few years, one of two things is happening:
1) The instructor has no idea what he is doing. He is simply parroting things he has been told but doesn't understand himself.2) Or what you are learning is fiction.
Suspension of disbelief has a legitimate function in fiction. If you are required to suspend disbelief, you are dealing with fiction.
Like I said, check me on this. My gut says if I have to pretend things make sense, they don't make sense. I am being lied to.
And yeah, I see other aspects of our society where I can apply this rule.

Cons

Science Fiction cons, specifically.Cons are not, obviously, my natural environment. Raised mostly without a television. Don't read fiction (much-- a few special requests from close friends). Not particularly interested in dressing up in costumes and my life is interesting enough that pretending to be a dead guy (vampire or zombie) really wouldn't be an upgrade.
But my lovely wife writes and serves on the group that sets up our local convention, Orycon. So I go and, by dint of being published and knowing a little about things that often make their way into fiction (violence and bad guys) I wind up on panels. It's also fun because I get to see friends (Steve and Kai post here sometimes; Bart is always a treat and a few others...) and meet people.
Secretly, I enjoy being the grumpy guy who doesn't read fiction. Perspective.
I have friends here, but I never feel like I fit in. Very much an outsider. That changed a little this time, and that was a big insight: For the last couple of years, Bart and I have been having fun, talking about shared experiences-- two outsiders. This year, Bart brought a special friend and I found a critical mass effect. Two of us are two outsiders... three of us and I started to feel like a separate group. Started looking at the 'others' a little harder, a little less sympathetically. I am far more polite as an outsider on my own than as a member of an outgroup... Good to know, good to feel.
The 'put into words' award: Sometimes you find the line between person and monster when you cross the line. That never makes it right, but crossing the line once is recoverable.
Experimented with a way to teach and explore violence, letting groups of people imagine/create societies to solve problems...and in the process they discovered ritual murder and raiding; war cultures and war for cultures where that is not natural; brainstormed ways to deal with those who become good at war; and decided how to deal with those who broke the social rules...mostly without losing the person as a resource.
Had a very powerful cognitive dissonance at one point: There is a panel about writing across identity lines. Authors are often nervous about writing different cultures, races, genders and classes. They are afraid of getting it wrong, whether wrong is defined as stereotyping or unrealistic details. The people on the panel were good, sincere and experienced. I think I was on the panel as someone who had spent time blending and coexisting with other cultures.
The moderator cautioned newbie writers to actually talk to people of the group they wanted to describe, "If you don't, you are working from things you have only read, which might be second or third hand from other people who have only read about the problem."
Hit me at two levels, the first is that I think this is what has happened in most fiction with fight scenes and crime and motivations and a dozen other things. Very few writers have ever sat down with a bookie in Little Italy...almost all have seen The Godfather, and other movies derived from The Godfather.
The second is that almost every reference mentioned by the panelists was (with only one exception I remember), fiction. Hmmm.
Good time, met some good people. Some time with good old friends. Lunch with Steve Perry. Dinner with Mike Shepherd Moscoe. Kai, Mark, Sonia, Bart, Nisi and some new friends. A few people seen in passing: Mary Rosenblum, Leah, CS Cole...
Very tired.