Jeet Kune Joe

i told my best friend i was thinking about taking a martial arts class and he asked a simple question:

why?

or maybe it wasn’t so simple, since i launched into a longish story about how i’d always wished i’d done it sooner but finally realized i couldn’t do it any sooner and that if i was ever going to do it at all now was the time, etc. , etc.

so i set about trying to find a school with classes that fit my upside down, work-at-night schedule, within easy distance, that didn’t require leaps into the air and/or head-high kicks.

my ambitious goal: become a black belt in 5 years.

points in my favor included a reasonably good health and fitness level, all things considered; a fairly athletic background; and a determination that can border on obsessive/compulsive disorder.

points not in my favor included a near-absolute absence of any type fighting experience or knowledge.

but this, i was later told, could actually be helpful, in that i have no bad habits to unlearn.

so, after exploring various options including aikido (i liked the taoist concept of non-aggression, but not the required one-year financial commitment) and brazilian jiu jitsu (i found the idea of fighting while lying on the floor unappealing) i settled on a school teaching jeet kune do, the simplest explanation for which is that it is the martial art of bruce lee.

i am now three months month into my training and enjoying it thoroughly. it is occupying much of my physical and mental attention, since i am the type who supplements doing with reading about doing. and talking about it. the other day a work colleague asked if i could kill him now. i said that, if he stayed still and offered no resistance to multiple assaults, i could probably bruise him up pretty badly.

The Offer

i was heading for a late train, walking down eighth avenue, when i saw her on the sidewalk in the distance.

she looked as if she might look good, and the closer i got, the more she did look good, which is something that doesn’t happen nearly enough. i can still picture her face; she reminded me of some female comic i’ve seen on tv with dark hair and kind of new-york-sounding whose name won’t come to me.

she smiled real big as we neared and i thought, that’s nice, something else that doesn’t happen nearly enough, and then she spoke:

ya wanna date?

whoa, ouch. for the first time in my life i had been identified as a man who might be willing to pay money for sex. in other words, desperate.

i suppose there is another explanation, that she was in fact suggesting that we go to a movie, or drinks and dinner. maybe even that, since she brought it up, she would be willing to pay. or to go dutch.

it seems unlikely, though, even if i try hard to believe it, and the thought didn‘t cross my mind at the time. nor did a clever response, though anything would have been more clever than what i said, which was:

no.

then i went home and told my wife, who for some reason found this much more amusing than i did.