Adventure #24 - Day Four -- Las Vegas, NV

DAY FOUR - Las Vegas, NV - Systema Seminar Day Two

Description: Wherein Marty and Heather attend Day Two of the Systema Seminar!

(Marty's Report):

Morning in Las Vegas:  blue-blue skies, a scrubbed clean apartment complex, standing with Alex on the balcony wondering why all his car doors were open.  He'd gotten a rental car, which he'd parked next to ours, and when I wandered onto the balcony to take in the dry, tree-less hills to the north, noticed that all four doors were open.  He came out and we wondered if there were a button on his car dongle which opened the doors for your.  Neither of us had heard of this, but you know, it seemed less bizarre than any other option.  Which it was, because the real explanation was that a man who lived in the complex had decided to open the car, wander off, and then while we were watching, come back to the car and get in.  There's not really a protocol for this, at least that either Alex or I had been trained in.  He had a "I have multiple diagnoses, including substance abuse, vibe," and I eventually said, "Hey, man, could you get out of the car?"  He did, and shut the doors, and wandered off like that was a pretty normal morning in LV.  (You know, come to think of it, this may have happened yesterday morning than this morning.  But please see the prior entry for my reasoning why this isn't important, and if you're some kind of linear narrative fascist, go blow a gopher.  Well, to give you some range and autonomy, you can choose any ground dwelling rodent.)

When we left to go to IHOP for breakfast, the guy was wandering about again (throwing leaves on cars, as we saw later), Alex stopped, since he'd found his phone charger was missing.  The guy apparently had put it in the back of the car, so the two cars full of martial arts practitioners didn't need to beat up the addled drunk guy.  Which was probably for the best.

Breakfast at IHOP is not an experience I've had in some time.  San Francisco just doesn't have these places, these real breakfast diners.  I know it's a chain store, etc., but the patrons and waitresses were the real deal.  In SF, this place would have been ironic performance art, or like some kind of animate wax museum.  Ironic.  But here, in fact, in LV in general, no irony.  It's a land and landscape without self-reflection or self-conceptualization.  It's like a land of Being, but a pre-personal rather than a trans-personal expression;  it's Being without having ever looked at what that Being actually is.  But unlike Burning Man, it makes not pretensions or claims to introspection.  It's simply too hard to introspect while your high on cocaine, getting blown by a prostitute, firing a .50 cal machine gun into the desert.

Our waitress was a very un-ironic, very heavy-set woman missing teeth, who called us honey in a very pre-ironic way.  One more piece of Las Vegas surrealialia.  Not to strip her of humanity, but it seems like this isn't a town that particularly encourages a practice in self-analysis.

We drove up to class again, and worked with more subtle technique than yesterday's knife work (although that was fairly subtle as well), which was actually stuff Ed had been training us in these last months.  We're all like, "We got this!"  And we (the Alameda group) were better than the other students, and I was able to tutor a few of my partners in the subtle work.  A new-ish thing was to watch Mikhail be able to exert force through the holding points in a person's structure, and take them directly down without having to start and stop, like the rest of us.  It's pretty remarkable to watch, and is nothing that you can take notes on.  You have to practice this over time for your body to understand, and that's where it comes from, a training of the body to the logic of Systema.

If you are looking at it from without, it doesn't look like a martial art.  Martin Wheeler, the LA instructor, says that when it is done well, it's a boring thing to watch.  It happens quickly, and simply, and without a lot of fanfare or twirling arms.  Lazy at its core, energy-conserving, and therefore growly face and lots of noise just burns energy uselessly.  So undramatic and relaxed.

That's what we did for five hours, and we ended at about 4p.  Patrick went to the hospital again and came back with a diagnosis of severe dehydration (which we learned in a couple days, after the workshop, was actually a stroke brought on by an aorta tear, which had a 50% chance of killing him, and which kept him in Vegas for several weeks after an emergency operation--poor dude, there was nothing we could have done, but both of us fretted about whether we should have paid more attention, etc., in other words, the bargaining stage of grief).  Another guy was pushed so hard in an exercise that he fell and tore his shoulder, and was going to require surgery.  But that was it;  other than normal bruises and scrapes, there were no injuries, which is normal for Systema.  People don't really break from this practice, which Nathan tells me is not the case with other martial arts.

After we finished and did our final appreciations (many went to get punched by Mikhail, or get pictures taken, or both), we headed for dinner at the Thai place around the corner from our apartment.  All of us were there, except Alex, who had to get to the airport to let him get to work tomorrow morning (he's a psychiatrist).  Good solid food, and Heather and Nathan carped at each other...but they do that.  Anthony nee Dante was quiet, but wittily involved when the moment called for him to be.  Then home to hang out, rest from the day.  Jenny and Nathan and I went to the pool (through an immaculate complex--how does this happen?) and Jenny and I talked Systema philosophy, and then I left them to be a couple-in-a-pool and went back to shower and read before drifting off to realms of right-brain splendor.  I forget who, but someone recently wrote, "Dreams are metaphors gone feral."