shanmonster | Karate Neil

While locking up my bicycle last night, I was approached by a very friendly man. He asked me if I was just getting home from work, and I said, "Well, sort of. I'm just coming home from kung fu."

This made him wickedly excited, and he told me he studied martial arts, too. It ends up he's a second-dan black belt in Goju-Ryu karate-do, a style I also studied for a few years. Anyhow, after chatting with him for no more than two minutes, telling him I trained with swords and staves, I went back to my apartment.

I started watching a truly dreadful movie with

f00dave: Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land. Partway through, I thought I heard something at the back door. But since it was quite late at night, and I wasn't expecting anyone, I didn't go see what it was. A few minutes later, and we both heard a definite rapping on the front door.

f00 went to the door and opened it. A tall, slim black man smiled at him, holding an enormous bottle of Colt 45 beer. The man stared in through the door until he saw me, then grinned even bigger. It was the man I'd spoken with earlier about martial arts. "Do you have any size?"

I was completely boggled. All I'd been thinking about for the past half hour or so was the mind-numbing badness of the made-for-tv airplane movie. The man repeated himself.

"Size?" I said, mystified.

"Ya! Size!"

"Oh," said f00. "He means swords."

"Ya, ya!" said the stranger.

"Oh, yes! I have some Indian sabres and a bokken."

"May I see?"

"Uh, sure," I said, and handed him one of my dance swords. He checked it out, staring down the length of it, giving it a few tentative movements. Then I handed him the bokken, and he was definitely in his element.

Anyhow, the man I came to know as Neil made his way inside my livingroom, where we ended up chatting much more in detail about a lot more things, from karate takedowns and his violent upbringing in Kingston, Jamaica to sexually precocious young boys (like his 8-year-old son who has 23 girlfriends) and drug dealing. He also showed me a whole bunch of scars, including a bullet hole in his ankle he got back in Jamaica as a kid.

I'm supposed to do some training with him in the morning. I hope I'm awake enough....