Flogging my Log

When I tell Tessa I’m going out to the garage to flog my log, she knows enough to take me literally. My log is, in fact, a five-foot maple branch six inches in diameter that hangs from the rafters of the garage. It fell during a windstorm some years ago, and I have been flogging it bare-handed for karate practice ever since. My hands stopped hurting about two years ago.

It’s kind of weird, trying to write humor about karate. I’ve been breathing air for forty-three years, and I have yet to find a more humorless bunch of guys than martial artists. But I still love the art, because, for better or for worse, it’s sublimely comic. We train our bodies to hurt people while training our minds NOT to hurt people.

Ultimately, the joke is on yourself. In my first year of training, I thought nothing of popping somebody with a palm strike if he got out of hand. And when I was attacked by fighting bulldogs, I kicked them squarely in the chins until their owner fetched them off the street. But, after years of training and learning control, I’m afraid that if someone tries to mug me, now, the opposing forces in my brain will annihilate on contact, leaving my shoes and underwear on the sidewalk while my body floats away as a greenhouse gas.

All these years of flogging my log, and my hands are hard as bricks, but my brain is as big a pansy as Tessa’s golden retriever on the Fourth of July.

One major reason that martial artists have the sense of humor of roofing nails is that their senior instructors have the sense of humor of roofing nails. This is entirely accidental and is rooted in the tournament system. Senior instructors have spent the mental equivalent of five hundred years in cold, metal judges’ chairs at the edge of competition rings watching individuals of every shape and size, wearing identical clothing, review practice forms. The judges’ synaptic pathways have locked into such a precise data stream that, when you tell them a joke, their brains experience an irrecoverable error and reboot. Or sometimes, they just hold up a scorecard.

As usual, the pleasant exception to this is women. Years ago, I coaxed a female judge to smile once at a tournament. There were about a dozen of us in an “old fart” division. They were letting us old farts compete in the “Over 18” and then they made us compete in the “Over 35” division right away with the same judges. I almost fell on my ass in the “Over 18”, so, in the “Over 35” class, I announced, “I will be performing Pinan Yondan, [pause] correctly this time!” The two male judges nodded stoically, but the woman actually smiled for a second. But only a second.