For a long time I had a best friend by the name of Spinky, a real person of the punk persuasion and not the small spoty dog his name might lead you to imagine. The story of Spinky is long and convoluted, but I lack the patience to give the convolutions the time they merit so I'll just tear through it as usual and regret the omissions later.
I went through a transition when I was about twenty two, I had lost all meaningful contact with my friends from school and had shed most of my friends from college somehow. I had also just broken up with my long-term girlfriend and although our friends were still my friends I felt the need to move on. I didn't know it then, but even though I had all the time in the world for them, the scene that those friends created was not my natural habitat, I was just such a good chameleon that I didn't realise it.
All this is retrospective of course, at the time I was just mad for the craic and other people and the way you might force your way into their social circles. I wouldn't have the balls to do it now, but then I'm sober most of the time now so that might have some bearing on it.
The Hairy Fella is the most constant friend I've had since I started college at seventeen, and when I hit this transitiony time I made an effort to catch up with him more often because Hairy knows everybody, even you. Seriously, if I used his real name here you would either know him or one of your friends would know him. Unlike the connections between all other sentient beings there are only two degrees of separation from Hairy; either you have met him, somebody you know has met him or you have never met anybody and exist as a free-floating consciousness spontaneously arisen from a coincidence of electrical charge gradients across the wet leaves of a forest after a storm.
I called into Hairy one halloween friday, just for the chat and maybe to attempt putting the submission on his fully-automated self-twisting rubber arm for pints. But a plan was afoot, and it already involved the pub, which saved me the very inconsiderable effort of engaging the self-twisting arm. First we headed to a gaff on Caple St. where we were to meet people and eat the mushies they were rumored to posses, there was also rumors of fly agaric, reputedly the strongest of strong juju. There wasn't any fly agaric (for sharing), as it turns out, but waving possibilities like that around adds an atmosphere of high adventure to a half-cut stroll across town.
The folk resident in this house on Capel street were proper tokers, so there was nothing brief about the visit as it takes tokers bleedin ages to do anything at all, especially if it involves leaving the house. They were, and still are, real good people, hippie grunge types in the main. I took to them immediately as I was also a hippie grunge type and because they appeared to find it funny when I got loud and offensive, I love it when people react like that because then I don't have to feel terrible when I wake up the next morning with fuzzy memories, the Fear and card-sharp shuffled 12 second snapshots of crying and shouting, the bad kind of shouting.
We headed out to a comedy improv in the Hapenny Bridge Inn where I remember some good natured heckling and some pretty ropey comedy, which is only to be expected as most comics are shite even when they have a script. The details are irrelevant really, I went out with a gang of strangers and had me a good ol time. It's the follow up that is interesting; a week or so later I rock up to that same house on Capel street all on my lonesome, insinuate myself onto the sofa and pretty much declare that "youse people are now my circle of fwends, get used to it hippies". I think I may have used those exact words. The fucking cheek of me. And you wouldn't think it if you met me in real life, as mild mannered as Clark Kent with a migrane.
It worked a treat though, the poor auld soft-touches proved suitably compliant and I've held onto them as my main crew* for something scarily close to thirteen years.
One of these good gentle folk that I met was Pony, and it was in his house that I first met / found Spinky, installed on Ponys sofa, smoking big bongs and talking shite.
*I'm pretty sure they don't see themselves as my crew at all, but thats just another aspect of our relationship that they are not consciously aware of. Goddamn preposition.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Parallels and also divergent quests for truth, and shit like that.
I have been reading a few atheist blogs recently, as evidenced by the blogroll to the right there. I have always been a big fan of reason and the pursuit of truth, and as I lack the patience to think anything through to it's logical conclusion myself it is great to find that other people have done it all for me and presented their findings in a concise, readable and even entertaining fashion.
It is not solely the conclusions themselves or even the structured rationale that leads to them that interest me, as a child I presumed that nobody else believed any of this god'n'cheebus carry on either and that there must be some other reason why we all went to mass, so the arguments in favour of what I always found to be self evident (or more accurately self not-evident) are necessarily a bit predictable.
No, its the arguments from the theist apologists, and the dismantling of these arguments by science and logic, that interest me most. And not for the obvious us-versus-them cheerleading tribalism either, although I can knock a bit of craic out of that too for a while before it gets old.
To be a good thesist apologist requires an ability to understand and use rational thought and also the ability to willingly and consciously abandon it when it leads in the "wrong" direction, replacing it with emotionally derived and fanciful anti-rational thought. In short, a good theist apologist practices a very obvious form of self-deception. And self deception is my new hobby subject, not least because I have certainly been guilty of it in the past and possibly in the present. Which brings me to another field which can parallel this one in almost disturbing fashion; the martial arts.
Where the theological discussions dance around "Is there a God?" and one side bases much of it's argument about an ancient book that states that there is a God and also backs up this statement by claiming that the book is in fact the word of God and so cannot be wrong, the martial arts dance around various themes of "does this technique or training system work?" and some of the many sides base much of their training about ancient traditions of movement that have little obvious relevance to defending oneself or fighting in general, and then try to rationalise how these movements are useful.
While I sit smugly on the side of the rational in the former discussion, I flounder on the side of the traditional apologist in the latter. The similarity between the theist apologist and the traditional martial art apologist is that we are both using rational argument to justify positions that we did not arrive at through reason. If you assume the answer and then proceed to steer the question so that it leads to that answer then the whole exercise spontaneously morphs into a stinking pile of dishonest horseshit.
I now need to dig myself out of this position, because if I am going to deceive myself about something, I'd prefer not to know about it.
There is light at the end of the sewer however, the traditional arts may yet prove to be valid and useful training tools.
The most obvious honest direction for martial arts is very close to the MMA approach; take all your techniques from proven combat sports like boxing, Muay Thai and wrestling, and dump everything else. The reality-based approach is another honest martial route, this is the direction taken by Krav Maga and numerous other "street" martial arts and consists of a very reductionist philosophy, essentially trying to keep to a minimal set of simple techniques that can be adapted to many situations, the simple approach ensures that a technique is easy to learn, execute and, theoretically, its effectiveness is more predictable.
But to outright abandon the traditional arts raises the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Somewhere back in time what are now the mysterious dance-like moves of the traditional arts were almost certainly a form of shadow boxing or shadow wrestling. That is, the person throwing the moves knew exactly what they were and had learned the techniques by doing them on another person, the shadow stuff was just solo practice. That we no longer know what the original intention for most of those moves shouldn't stop us from trying to either reverse engineer them or experiment with the application of traditional moves in a realistic setting to see what might be learned. This is the direction I am now pursuing and it is proving to be full of surprises, not least of all that it seems to be leading to a style of self defense that may well be more practical than the reality-based systems, particularly when combined with those systems.
One of the best sources of inspiration in this regard that I have found is Dan Djurdjevic over on The Way of Least Resistance. Dan's blog has had a big influence on the direction I am taking my own training in, and in general he is very rational and healthily skeptical in his approach to martial arts. One exception sticks out however, he refers to hydrostatic shock in a couple of places in relation to empty handed combat. Hydrostatic shock is a phenomenon related to high velocity bullet impacts, and not to relatively low velocity punches. This is more a misapplication of scientific theory than flat out pseudo-science, but it trips along the ledge (where can be seen the worth of poorly supported conjecture, or something), and that gives me comfort in an odd way, like the inverse of Morriseys "we hate it when our friends become successful", it's good to know that none of us are unique in our internal quests for truth.
It is not solely the conclusions themselves or even the structured rationale that leads to them that interest me, as a child I presumed that nobody else believed any of this god'n'cheebus carry on either and that there must be some other reason why we all went to mass, so the arguments in favour of what I always found to be self evident (or more accurately self not-evident) are necessarily a bit predictable.
No, its the arguments from the theist apologists, and the dismantling of these arguments by science and logic, that interest me most. And not for the obvious us-versus-them cheerleading tribalism either, although I can knock a bit of craic out of that too for a while before it gets old.
To be a good thesist apologist requires an ability to understand and use rational thought and also the ability to willingly and consciously abandon it when it leads in the "wrong" direction, replacing it with emotionally derived and fanciful anti-rational thought. In short, a good theist apologist practices a very obvious form of self-deception. And self deception is my new hobby subject, not least because I have certainly been guilty of it in the past and possibly in the present. Which brings me to another field which can parallel this one in almost disturbing fashion; the martial arts.
Where the theological discussions dance around "Is there a God?" and one side bases much of it's argument about an ancient book that states that there is a God and also backs up this statement by claiming that the book is in fact the word of God and so cannot be wrong, the martial arts dance around various themes of "does this technique or training system work?" and some of the many sides base much of their training about ancient traditions of movement that have little obvious relevance to defending oneself or fighting in general, and then try to rationalise how these movements are useful.
While I sit smugly on the side of the rational in the former discussion, I flounder on the side of the traditional apologist in the latter. The similarity between the theist apologist and the traditional martial art apologist is that we are both using rational argument to justify positions that we did not arrive at through reason. If you assume the answer and then proceed to steer the question so that it leads to that answer then the whole exercise spontaneously morphs into a stinking pile of dishonest horseshit.
I now need to dig myself out of this position, because if I am going to deceive myself about something, I'd prefer not to know about it.
There is light at the end of the sewer however, the traditional arts may yet prove to be valid and useful training tools.
The most obvious honest direction for martial arts is very close to the MMA approach; take all your techniques from proven combat sports like boxing, Muay Thai and wrestling, and dump everything else. The reality-based approach is another honest martial route, this is the direction taken by Krav Maga and numerous other "street" martial arts and consists of a very reductionist philosophy, essentially trying to keep to a minimal set of simple techniques that can be adapted to many situations, the simple approach ensures that a technique is easy to learn, execute and, theoretically, its effectiveness is more predictable.
But to outright abandon the traditional arts raises the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Somewhere back in time what are now the mysterious dance-like moves of the traditional arts were almost certainly a form of shadow boxing or shadow wrestling. That is, the person throwing the moves knew exactly what they were and had learned the techniques by doing them on another person, the shadow stuff was just solo practice. That we no longer know what the original intention for most of those moves shouldn't stop us from trying to either reverse engineer them or experiment with the application of traditional moves in a realistic setting to see what might be learned. This is the direction I am now pursuing and it is proving to be full of surprises, not least of all that it seems to be leading to a style of self defense that may well be more practical than the reality-based systems, particularly when combined with those systems.
One of the best sources of inspiration in this regard that I have found is Dan Djurdjevic over on The Way of Least Resistance. Dan's blog has had a big influence on the direction I am taking my own training in, and in general he is very rational and healthily skeptical in his approach to martial arts. One exception sticks out however, he refers to hydrostatic shock in a couple of places in relation to empty handed combat. Hydrostatic shock is a phenomenon related to high velocity bullet impacts, and not to relatively low velocity punches. This is more a misapplication of scientific theory than flat out pseudo-science, but it trips along the ledge (where can be seen the worth of poorly supported conjecture, or something), and that gives me comfort in an odd way, like the inverse of Morriseys "we hate it when our friends become successful", it's good to know that none of us are unique in our internal quests for truth.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
An apparent contradiction.
Hundreds of great bands have appeared since the evolution of rock and roll, and out of those great bands a few shining stars have blazed much brighter than the rest. Led Zep, Nirvana, The Beatles, Echo and The Bunnymen (yes, really, go listen to Ocean Rain you fucking Philistine).
So how come none of them are fit to kiss the arse of The Jesus and Mary Chain, a band that shouldn't be considered all that special by any sensible measure ?
Must be the morning thats in it.
So how come none of them are fit to kiss the arse of The Jesus and Mary Chain, a band that shouldn't be considered all that special by any sensible measure ?
Must be the morning thats in it.
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