Life and the Arts

A thought just occurred to me and i had to record it (and the thought was not to punctuate this sentence correctly) ... In fighting shadow boxing is some of the most important training there is. You work to get your technique down well by yourself and it in turn gets better with others. In life proverbial "shadow boxing" is also necessary. Spending time alone working on yourself before trying to work with people. In fighting and in life we must strive for the being the best we can be,
and it does not always take others to do this, only yourself.

This thought needs some cleaning up but I rather like it,

Music is rather orgasmic id say,

cole

Training is Training. Right?

It seems to me that the least important part of a training session is the location. Did I lose you there? Well some people feel that for martial arts training must occur in a fancy gym or a perfect dojo. It seems that looking back on my training thus far some of the best sessions happened in a garage, backyard, house, or the dungeon like area under my dads shop in pomona. Most of these sessions were just informal exchanges of ideas between martial artist or small sparring sessions. Not the big formally structured "bow to your sensei" classes that you will often times see at commercial schools. I think that over formalization is detrimental to the martial arts. It seems like it gets in the way of the original goal, learning martial arts! Im all for respect, but not the showy respect you see alot of places. I think we should show respect by treating each other right and thats all thats really needed. It does not take a huge fancy gym to do this. I wish more people would just get together and train. No matter if its in a gym or a garage. A dojo or a backyard.

I like martial arts!

yes i really really do, almost as much as i dislike using capitals. training has been great lately. yesterday i taught a friend of mine whose style is muay thai some basic kali single stick. he picked it up really fast. within an hour we were free sparring with the sticks at a really fast rate. i was extremely proud of how much he got done.

Oh and an extremely good thing happened like two months ago. I started sparring at my dojo. my instructor finally decided to let me. every Wednesday me and one of the instructors (gary who is a great martial artist and a really great guy) spar at light but still fairly quick contact. its so refreshing and its just great training. so im pretty stoked about that for sure. i even sparred my normal instructor once and that was great. so needless to say life is good.

Who needs a pound of pretzels?

cole

just checking in

Nobody reads this blog, so in essence im talking to my self. Any way in my last entry i talked about trying to sharpen well. since then ive got decent at it. im trying to get some extra cash by offering a little sharpening service.

ive been doing alot of bushcraft stuff lately. mainly firemaking and cooking. eventually ill make a debri shelter. im hoping to find an accesible trail and do a dayhike this summer sometime. being in the outdoors is so great. im also gonna do a bit of kayaking.

my training is going ok still. boring yet exciting like always.

is orange crush not the most awesome thing in the world???

cole

charp

Lately ive been trying to get decent at sharpening my knives. i cant yet get shaving but am very very close. i need to buy a new set of stones.

my training is going ok. i have been on the bag everyday in the last week and a half. generally 10-15 min or so. been practicing my competion jo form. which reminds me...

I went to a tourny like a month ago. it was fun. heres the vid





im incredibly unhappy with my performance, but its still a work in progress. i got second overall.

zippo lighters are teh badassedness,

cole

tourny

soon ill be attending my first tourny. im going to be performing competition version of my jo kata. here are a few things that kinda pissed me off though. one is there is a padded weapon competition. i have done a fair amount of padded weapon sparring but my instructor shot down the idea of me entering right away. two instead of competing in open weapons forms i have to compete in some "handicapable" division which is way lame. i just wanted to compete in regular events. i didnt expect to do good but i atleast wanted to try. but oh well. oh and btw guns are for show and knives are for pro.

making fire

well, im going to try to make a fire with just a knife and fire steel. hopefully in under an hour. should be fun. wish me luck. the cold steel pocket shark is a bad ass mofo.