Boxing Vs. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

I've been doing a fair amount of Brazilian jiu-jitsu over the last eighteen months and I enjoy it. A lot. I like the fact that you can 'lose,' that is, get submitted, and start right over again. In boxing, losing generally involves a lot of pain. I also like the fact that BJJ doesn't give you brain damage.

What I like slightly less is the social atmosphere of BJJ. You always have to deal with other people. Classes are scheduled at regular times and even open mats call for a lot of social interaction. I don't like the structured times and places. In boxing you are alone much of the time, even in a crowded gym. Sparring is intimate but the gloves and headgear maintain a distance, not to mention the distrust and caution you need to show your sparring part.

I love people and hanging out but I've always needed to be alone a lot. Like the cafe, boxing allowed me to be alone around other people. Boxers almost always respect other boxers' privacy. If someone doesn't feel like talking, no one talks to him. You hit the bags alone. You jump rope alone. Roland Barthes called it a Jansenist sport. He was right.

The Harbor Freeway, Wedneday 10:15 P.M.

A sign flashes: Accident, Left Lane, Carson Street Exit
Traffic slows, shifting right.
A car speeds through the left lane, turning right just before the blinking arrow.
A flotilla of squad cars gleam along the guard rail.
At the center of the squad cars a bulge of motion and shapes:
a paramedic, a broken car, a glimpse of a plastic sheet
Outlining a human body.

[This was an experiment: I wanted to take myself out of my normal first-person narrative voice. Unfortunately the result was bad poetry].

Entasis Literary Quarterly

http://www.entasisjournal.com/

I'm pretty excited to be working with some talented writers on a new literary journal. It's something I've never done before but maybe it's time to join the dark side and become an editor. The other editors are primarily poets so we're short fiction and non-fiction. Check out the website for submission information. We're also about to start running a blog for the magazine.

What My Father Thinks of Me

Every time I visit my parents, the first time my father sees me making coffee he says: 'You started drinking coffee again?'
I have never stopped drinking coffee.
Yesterday he asked me if I still took a four hour nap every night - from about eight to midnight, he said - and then wrote until morning. He said it like it was something I'd been doing for years. I had no idea what he was talking about.

How My Last Soccer Game this Spring Was Like the World Cup Final

We were in the playoffs matched against a much better team (we'll call them Spain) and spent most of the game boxed up in our end (like the Dutch). Spain couldn't finish though. They didn't have a really creative forward like Arjen Robben. I'd never seen Robben play before this cup. Holy Haysoos, he just blew by people and made the Spanish seem puny and slow.

I was playing sweeper, holding the back, shouting orders. In the middle of the second half, my team started to buckle from the constant pressure. And as with the Dutch, we lost following a ridiculous series of mistakes. First we gave up a corner kick when one of our players kicked the ball over the end line even though I was following him and shouting - 'Don't touch it! Don't touch it!' Later he told me he'd gotten drunk before the game. Then on the ensuing corner kick, one of our players tried to run the ball out of the box. The ball was in the air and he got under it - and brushed it with his arm. Even though there was nobody within five feet of him. The other team started calling for a PK and the ref gave it. The ref was blocked and it's possible that my friend only brushed the ball with his shoulder. Anyway, they scored on the PK and that was the end of us. In a game like soccer, where scoring happens so rarely, pressure almost takes the place of scoring. The more pressure, the more mistakes. You can feel the tide changing against you, and the desperation growing, and as you're only one of 11, it's hard to do anything about it. That is basically how the Spanish navigated their way through the Cup and a series of 1-0 games.

A side note: a snotty kid kept talking trash throughout the game. This was an intermural game but he kept running his mouth. I've been playing for a long time but never seen some behave that badly. I got so pissed that after the game I tried to get him to fight with me. He wouldn't stand up though, just kept looking at his feet. I guess I should be embarrassed about threatening a kid twenty years younger than me, but... Every time I go out to play a pick up game, I look for him and second chance.

Cobblers of the Apocalypse

I like my cobbler. He's a Korean-American guy who moved to the OC when he was 11, early enough so that his English is pure Socal. And he dresses exactly like Don Ho, in lurid Hawaiian shirts. His thick hair is swept back like Elvis and he's got great silver streaks in it.

The last time I was there he told me that when he came here, he was the only Korean kid in his high school. 'And there was one Chinese girl,' he said. Things sure have changed in the OC - probably two thirds of my students are first or second generation East Asians.

Then he started asking me if I thought the world was on the verge of a big change.

What kind of change? I said.

I don't know, he said. But don't you see the signs? I mean, all kinds of things are happening all over the place. War, destruction, market crashes, environmental problems. It's kind of like the end of the world.

I guess you're right, I said. Let's just hope it happens when we're dead and gone. [Apres moi, le deluge].

I realized then that I didn't know anything about my cobbler.

No, he said. I want to see it. I want things to change.

Tom Paine Wouldn't Go to Their Tea Party

AMERICA AS THE NEW THING

(Approach shamelessly heisted from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature).

Common Sense dares Americans to take the next step. In thought and action. It was written during a time of rebellion. Lexington. Concord. The military occupation of Boston. Colonists, not yet Americans, wonder what they should do. They resent the invasion. They resent the taxes and rough treatment by the British government that preceded it. Yet they don’t know what form their opposition should take. Even though they are Swedes, Irishmen, Germans, Dutch, Frenchman they feel a connection to Great Britain. It represents the world they or their parents or their grandparents left. They read its books and treasure its crafts. In the French-Indian War a decade earlier Britain was the older brother and her redcoats fought side by side with the colonists in their homespun. Yet Britain is now treating the colonies like a resource, something to be used, to be exploited. The redcoats now point their muskets at those they fought beside, brothers no more. The colonists cannot decide what to do though. Reconciliation? Capitulation? Or…something else?

Thomas Paine has no doubt as to what that something is. Paine is not the first person to see the possibilities of his New World, specifically the 13 colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. He is not the first person to imagine an independent country there. Nor is he the first person to wish for an end to the bewitchment and privileges of the old order with its kings and lords. What he is, is the first man to say that there is no other option, no other option for the brave. Thomas Paine didn’t invent the idea of a new America but he makes us feel it. What he does is tell his fellow Americans, all American for the first time, that the idea of America is no longer an abstraction but something that has to be realized. Immediately. That there will never be a better chance than the one before them.

Common Sense has an edge. Paine wants to sever ties, to chop through knots of temporization and doubt. The method of argument that Paine uses comes out of the skepticism of Voltaire and Montaigne. In his hands it is acid. It burns through the moldy notions of the divine inheritance of kings. It corrodes the supports that still connect the old and the new. Custom is his enemy as much as the British. Custom and the constriction of free thought (Paine talks a lot about commerce but his most important commerce is a commerce of the mind). Paine says: we are not like them, the citizens of Europe, not anymore; this place has changed us. They don’t understand us so how can they rule us? His weapon was made by the Enlightenment but it is not Enlightenment skepticism alone. Paine believes that men are born good. For Paine men have been deformed by custom, by habit, by the crowded nations of Europe and their ideas of heredity, by history. What he opposed were, in the words of his friend William Blake, ‘The mind forg’d manacles.’ There was a hell for Paine, but we had created it. America was the place where we could escape it. He doesn’t talk about America as country but as a continent. A continent big enough for difference.

These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated

- The Crisis (1775)

Paine, the son of a corset-maker, can write. This is prose that draws on Shakespeare and the Bible, with a directness that comes with a new American vernacular. He is writing in a language that any person of soon to be countrymen could understand. Even people who weren’t literate – and many weren’t in 1776 – could appreciate Paine’s sweep and dramatic oppositions. Common Sense could be read to indentured servants in a storehouse. A man could stand up on a beer cask in a tavern and sway the hearts of rough workers. All the binaries are there in his ferocious attack: old/new, monarchy/republic, crowded/open, despair/hope. These are the terms that would come to define the promise of United States.

Common Sense is propaganda. High level propaganda but propaganda still. Paine doesn’t dwell on the issues that would threaten his new country: slavery, Indian wars, states rights, growth. He hints at them but it is his belief that the revolution, now, will give the only chance of overcoming them. It was left to others, writing for different audiences, to explore the threat of America to itself. Blake, like Paine working-class, the son of a stocking maker, confronts the horrors of slavery in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. St. Jean de Crevecoeur does the same in his ninth letter.

In later life, Paine referred to himself as ‘a missionary of world revolution.’ Forced out of America he returned to England, where he was hounded out of the country by government agents. In France, he became a deputy after the revolution, only to nearly lose his head in the Terror (the American Embassy did not try to save him: he wasn’t an American citizen!). Finally he was allowed to return to the new country he had helped to make. Like Blake, his brother in temperament and idealism, Paine died obscure and alone. That’s what happens to permanent revolutionaries, ones who are lucky enough to die in bed, anyway. Only six people followed his hearse, including two freedman and a Quaker. The cause for his ostracism lay for the most part is his deist beliefs. To Paine, God was a distant abstraction, at best (in this he was most unlike Blake, for whom God was a reality that burned in us all).

American exceptionalism has been debased many times in the last 220 years. After the Iraq War it’s hard not to see America as so many millions in the world see her: as an oppressor, a colonizer, a country that sees the world as something to be used. In 2010 it is difficult to understand just how astonishing the revolution was. Just how important the American contribution was to world history. Paine helps to see again the possibility in America. Common Sense, 235 years old, can still make America new. A country that still accepts immigrants by the millions. That offers, in its internal logic, if not in its reality, the possibility of justice.