Adventure #21 -- A Sunday Outing, Involving Massage and Punching, a Park, and some Socialists

Adventure - Marty

Description: Wherein Marty and Heather attend Systema class, go have a picnic and go see a storyteller.


(Marty's Report):
Ok, after a long hiatus, and at Heather's initiation, we are re-beginning our adventure blog.  It's a trip thinking it was four years ago that we initiated it. I'm sitting here in a Peet's coffee, where I go on my lunch breaks to do computer work.  Today, I'm listening to old-school punk rock, on iTunes Radio, and have discovered someone I haven't thought about for decades. GG Allin, who Heather thinks wouldn't have been helped by therapy.  Probably true.  Strikes me as having that warped purity of a de Sade.

Anyhoo.

I was assigned the task of designing this re-inagural adventure, and I thought I start out small, lest we get overwhelmed.  So we began with what's been our routine Sunday morning, driving over to Alameda to punch our Systema friends on the Alameda Air Force Base, a site tailor made for a post-apocalypse movie.  Ed, our Systema teacher, who, like all these teachers, is a Bad Ass with a Heart of Gold.  Mostly.  One of the strange-n'-true aspects of Systema is that it trains people to do ultra-violence, and in the process lose virtually all interest in doing so.  They are consistently the most kind and warm people I've met, and I've met a hundred or so at this point. Heather said, "No Systema teacher we've met so far has failed."  True that.

So, Ed started us with massage work, which is a far cry from a gentle Swedish massage, but oh so much better.  It often involves standing on each other, and today we worked on breathing while our friend stood on our calves.  When 200lbs are placed on a tense muscle, you can't do much more than breath, fast.  So we did that, and that limbered us up to do striking exercise.  The only other martial art training I have was some judo in college, and a tiny bit of Akido in grad school, so Heather has surprised me that other traditions don't train their students in taking strikes.  But man does Systema.  So we worked with straight strikes, and then with these weird kind of whip-wrist strikes, with which you could direct energy in different ways through the body.  Seriously, you strike your partner in the hip and the energy comes out their neck.

So we did that.  Normally we'd go hang with the homies over a bagel sandwich down the street, but we had to go adventuring, so we hit the Berkeley Bowl in...Berkeley, and packed up a bag of hippie picnic food, en route to the Berkeley Rose Garden.

Now, I cannot bring myself to like Berkeley, or most of the "Near East Bay." I once had a conversation with a Sacramento friend, back in the 90's, where we hypothesized that Berkeley was the site of a Native American slaughter.  Then a few years ago, my friend David, a Berkeley resident, said the reason it felt so off was that it had a psychotic underpinning.  Bingo.  There's a fetidness in the burg.  Which I tried to make Heather aware of, like a public service announcement.  "It's just a college town," she said, obviously in denial.

The blessed iPhone directed us to the garden, and finding no place to spread our blanket, we went to the park across the street and gorged.  Then slept, while the LARPers up the way wandered past, dressed in "medieval" costumes, with padded weapons.  Darling geeks.  Behind us a young woman ran little girls through soccer paces, very patiently dealing with children, which seems like a contradiction in terms, but whatever.   And in the playground area, a birthday party took place, as well as some kind of raucous sing-along.

It was a lively park.  In the hinterlands, apparently, the natives are frisky.  In S.F., we're a more demure and quiet folk.  Just sayin.

It was a nice afternoon, not too adventuresome-like-skydiving-or-attacking-a-bison adventuresome, but relaxing and Heather was good company to cuddle up with under the pine trees.

Then, part three in our Adventure Triptych was "The Life of Mrs. Satan," a storytellin' even laying out the life of Victoria Woodhull Claflin, somekind of aunt to our neighbor, Willie Claflin, one of the country's great storytellers. Who we just happened to move into the house next to a long time ago.  Go figure.

Here's Heather at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley.  It's in an old Victorian-esque house on Telegraph Ave., a beat-to-shit institution filled with an amazing amount of books on socialism, etc., that seems to survive by virtue of renting to such events.  It's a blast from my past, my radical cavortings in my 20's.  It's hard not to feel like I'm at a reunion for a provincial branch of the family, lovable, but still putting plastic checkered cloths over the picnic benches at the regional park.

Willie is stellar.  He's so good at his craft, such a master at what he's been doing for decades, such an artist in an art poorly represented these days, in the form he does it.  He told the amazing story of Aunt Vickie, a shit-stirrer par excellence at the time of the Suffragettes, who she was initially embraced by, then being too radical (and frankly, jamming a sharp stick in their eyes by hijacking an important conference), got literally written out of the official history of the movement.  Then, when she went after a famous philandering minister from New York, she got hounded into jail numerous times.  As Willie made the point of saying, "We romanticize speaking truth to power, but [to paraphrase] power bites back."

So that was our adventure, and when we drove home, I took this picture of the ex-Bay Bridge being deconstructed.  As the Buddhists would say, "All constructed phenomenon is impermanent, annica."  As you can see.








(Heather's Report):

Well, I'm not sure if Systema counts as an adventure, since we go every Sunday.  But go we did, students engaging in Systema "massages", which involves a lot of standing on muscles until you can breathe your way to relaxation, or pressing a fist down into organs...  You know, Russian Massage.  And then the punching.  Learning to take strikes.  I have taken other martial arts, Tae Kwon Do being my main history, some Sil Lum Kung Fu (southern style).  But in none of these forms did I ever learn how to take a strike.  Sure, there was plenty of learning how to do strikes and how to block strikes.  But these are basically sport martial arts.  They are disciplined and pretty but, as I have learned in Systema, basically impractical for real combat.  People ask me, "C'mon, if you were on the street, what would you rely on?"  "Absolutely Systema." I say.  There is no question.  Systema is a combat art.  It's a combat art with a lot of "spirituality" behind it, which really shows itself in the Four Principles of Breathing, Relaxation, Movement and Form.

So, massage to relax, followed by taking strikes.  I know I need to still work on my fear around being struck.  I anticipate, I tense up.  Tension = bad bad in Systema.  I took a particularly hard one to the solar plexus from a fellow student, and followed my very first instinct to double over.  Fortunately, this was followed by my very next action of my brain yelling at me (along with my fellow student and teacher), "Stand up, stand up!! Breathe, Breathe!!!"  I remember working with Sergey, sort of the third in line from our top founders and Marty took a full on Systema strike from this huge Russian dude (Sergey, the teacher) and he doubled up, didn't breathe and passed out.  Systema breath and relaxation truly does work.  I wish everyone could learn it.  I was sore from the one strike later.  I had tensed up enough to leave an "impression" in my body.  Systema teaches you about letting go of the "story" we tend to attach to pain.  "Omgs, omgz, it hurts, it hurts!" usually accompanied by tension and a positive feedback loop only making the whole thing worse.  But if you breathe, relax, let go of the story about pain, it will crest and subside and usually doesn't "stay" in the body.  But sometimes, if still tense, you can bruise or have tenderness.

So, relaxation.  I mean, look at Nathan, our former Systema teacher (first teacher!) and fellow student (Systema doesn't really have "ranks" and you will find other teachers all mixed in with the beginners and veterans in class, another thing I usually don't see in many martial arts).  He's totally relaxed!!  He claims it's the Hippie Tea he is always carrying around with him, but it's probably the good Systema livin'.


Then after class, we went over to Berkeley Bowl, which is a very Berkeley experience (although I think it's rather similar to Whole Foods, but whatever) and purchased items for a picnic, driving out to the Rose Garden somewhat nearishly to Tilden to lay out our blanket and smorgasbord of comestibles.  Cheese and bread, our various choices for main (a chicken pot pie for me, some veggie Chinese option for Marty).  We were rather dangerously near a soccer field and a ball would go bouncing by us followed by a shouting youth.  Marty took a nap, with me lying nearby, head on his arm, watching the trees and birds.  There were lots of screaming spawn in the park below us, celebrating birthdays and outdoorsy type stuff so I listened to the buzz.

We eventually noticed a few people striding through the park in what can only be called LARPer outfits.  I used to be involved in the SCA and these outfits did not seem as elaborate as those, or maybe something was missing, I don't know.  Just seemed more like LARPers than SCAers.  In any case, we wondered if there was an event of some kind going on.  They certainly weren't celebrating National Star Wars Day, which I had only learned of its existence yesterday.  A group came up near where we were laying on our blanket and I watched them as Marty napped.  They talked about fire damage and spells and "rules" about combat.  Yeah, LARPers or something similar.  I watched them until they wandered off and then I dropped off for a short snooze until it was time to head out to our next event, storytelling time!

Now, I grew up with storytelling.  My father told me stories that he made up about Freddy the Frog and his merry band of friends, Deer Girl, Wild Boy, and Gandalf the old wizard (yeah, he borrowed stuff) who were often in some sort of conflict with Mumble Grumble the Troll.  He was a really, really great storyteller.  He didn't do it professionally but he should have.  He's got that kind of voice and powerful presence that just held me rapt, still and eyes wide.  What would happen next!!?  Friends of the family would tell stories to us grouping of kids when we frequented a commune called Skyfields.  Eventually, I was volunteering for the National Storytelling Festival held in Jonesborough, TN, where Tellers from all over the world would come and share their repertoire with the audience.  It was great!  I saw folks from David Holt to Donald Davis to Len Cabral.  But I never ran into someone named Willy Claflin.  But he's a professional storyteller who has attended the Festival as a Teller.

Well, it just so happens, that he lives next door to us.  Over the years, we've developed a friendship with him and his wife Jacqueline.  They've given us various discs and books by Willy and we've seen him perform a couple of times.  He's really great and a really great Teller.  Well, there was an event he was going to Tell, about his Great Aunt Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who apparently was the first woman to run for president back in the 1870s.  I never knew about her.  I was rapt, as I am with all Tellers.  It's like some spell drops over me.  Every time I hear didgeridoo, it's like my nervous system turns to jelly.  Well, I hear a good Teller, and it's like when I used to hold up baby chickens beak to beak and they would become hypnotized.  You could move the bodies, turn them, pull them away from each other, but the heads and beaks would stay at the same distance.  Look, I lived in the country, you did what you could for entertainment.  And let me tell you, hypnotizing chickens is more fun than Call of Duty.  But that's me with a Teller.  Although I admit I was feeling a little sleepy and kept dozing off, to my frustration.

But there you have it, our first "back into it" adventure!!