crime wave
i was an innocent victim or so i thought to begin with. i mean the acts perpetrated upon me were just plain dark and mean. and all about betrayals. and money
i'd seen it before, yeah, when i was a kid an uncle in my family pulled a major business rip-off on my father. it was ugly. and then a sinister moneytype thing happened again with an aunt suing another uncle and it was nasty. some of the things that went down in harsh words still echo to this day.
but you know more than half of those people are gone now. the aunt who sued the uncle died in '02. the uncle himself died last year. the other uncle who pulled the caper died a long time ago. about two years after the incident. he hung himself. and i got the news from my older brothers bud, eben, a guy with a sort of german bodybuilder accent. the phone rang in my little studio in boston.
"hello?"
"rusty hung himself"
"what?"
"rusty hung himself"
so i was saying i'd "seen it before". but thats why i didnt see it coming this time. i'd been blessed with a slow easement from the past, i wasnt paying attention. but i hereby take full responsibility for slicing off my achilles heel because i was thinking about something else and didnt realize what i was doing with the sword.....
and i thought about it often. because it was a terrible thing.
i went back to boston, to the dojo where i rented a room,
and took up martial arts, lived there, and worked in a restaurant and went to classes.
form and practice, precision, clarity, movement. we worked out with specially carved heavy wooden sticks to approximate shape and weight of a real sword but used the real swords in demonstrations and blackbelt-winnings. to achieve 1st black belt all the forms at all the graduating levels had to be performed with a real sword, a dangerous weapon, terrifyingly sharp, enough to cut a fly in half, a lethal, glimmering sword drawn flashing swiftly from a black leather scabbard and the choreographed sparring began.
only once did someone get injured, he sliced a bit of skin from his heel accidentally in a flying leap over cutting bamboo action (a 2-handed leaping above the swords as you are moving one in each hand like scissors). bloody as well. but it was shameful. stupid even. if you are blackbelt you just have to be better than that goddammit.
the master had no pity
and we took his cue.
if your hand is on a sword
for certain this is true:
you can not be a ninja or a master of kung foo
if you slice off your own foot.
shame on you.
ok, cmon, lets wrap it up with gauze and get you some comfy slippers. carry you on a red velvet pillow to the kitchen and give you soup. the doctor is coming to give you a shot. and then you can go to bed. and fuggettabbouttit. we forgive you, but you f'n better not do anything stupid like that again or someone'll f'n slice off your ear by accident too. namaste. quan yin.
hearts pounding we back out bowing. the things you do for love?
anyway back to me as innocent victim. (whose mind is this anyway?) screening play-by-playbacks because i enjoy them? uh, not exactly... or maybe because i cant help it (i dont know why i sliced off my heel) or some hot button starts flashing and i cant control it cuz i dont have the program even tho i might have rewritten the program like a hacker using virus mire code of past experience because thats how the computer works, stores and/or trashes memories. replays them on demand. from whence came the image on the screen...........press the
restart button.
