Alecmusc's blog

It was Friday and I was counting the minutes for night session at the dojo.
Fridays we get to play. There are no classes, just the old timers, and I have the honour of being the most ancient. Friday is for fighting, plain and simple. This Friday I knew that I would face three black belts, a shodan (no dan), one first dan, and one coral, (6th dan).
But I was still teaching my undergraduate class, and there was on more to go, not to mention meetings and other such work shit. By the middle of the afternoon I could almost feel the gi scraping my skin in the way that it does mid-flight.
But soon my purgatory time was done. Heaven beckoned. Streetlife watched wryly as this short thick old man scurried along in his baggy white pants, and black T like a sugar obsessed kid let loose on the sweetshop.
The dojo lives upstairs, white and warmly welcoming and impervious to it's own violent purposes. Three other fellows were already there. We greet each other with real and true happiness. Despite the unspoken intentions, we are very close friends.
This is how it goes on those warm Fridays in that upstairs heaven.
Warm up.
Some rolling to loosen the daytime muscles.
Ready.
A picture in which four great friends try to choke and twist each other. An arm is twisted. An arm is ripped. Either will do. And yet it is fantastic. Truly fantastic.
Now I am fighting the Shihan, the coral belt. He is trying to choke me. But I have DNA in my favour.. I have good traps, a thick neck -47 cm -and I know how to tuck it, to hide from human view. Nobody will choke me, and this would not be the Friday on which my DNA was about to let me down. He is trying everything, his mind scanning that vast encyclopedia of knowledge. But nature protects it's own and there is no choking me!
Suddenly the fight is stopped by those watching from the sidelines. There is blood in the white of the sacred ground, my blood. My right ear is bleeding.
Here, in my heaven, I let the fight continue a little longer. I have not yet washed the bloody gi, I keep on looking at it and thinking of the countless times this has happened. Sacred memories lost in prayer in the quiet side-chapels of my mind.
I think of my lost memories and cannot avoid a smile, and a tear that I allow to run unarrested over my chubby face and down to my white beard.
There might still be some fighting lest in this worn out old body.