Episode 7 in the enthralling series detailing my experiences as a novice in the local kendo dojo. The action this episode takes place on the Wednesday following the St Jerome's Laneway Festival and the Trainspotting-inspired job interview.
This is the week I arrive 45 minutes late because 1) I'm flat-knacker at work, having to launch my site in 10 days time, and 2) I seriously can't be arsed. It's one of those things, when you've got a shitload to do, you can fit more stuff in, and when you're bone idle, the day flies by and you realise that you haven't so much as washed the dishes. Yes, that means we don't have a dishwasher chez skander. Well we do, and his name is skander. So over the last few weeks, I'm working like a bastard, doing mega-hour days and still fitting in enough time for the good things like alcohol and pot and food . So, at this point, I seriously can't rouse enough interest to get me to the dojo on time. Can't rouse enough interest to leave work, and so I do one of those deflection things were I blame someone esle for not being able to make kendo on time when I know full well that it is my fault and my fault entirely. And this is basically because they have that Japanese-inspired self-responsibility thing going there, where you're just plain expected to be together enough to get there on time, every time, else you're showing disrespect.
So, I thumb my nose at this crappy mantra that reminds me somehow of Anthony Robbins, and rock up 45 late. At least I fronted. But so late in fact that I've missed the warmup all together and the seniors make me go and do a mini version all by myself, most probably just for their own amusement. After I've gone through the motions, I get to join the group again, and notice that our usual instructor has gone AWOL, and we're being taken by a very obviously kiwi-bloke with a huge gap between his front teeth. And he's got us doing kiri-kaeshi. At this point I should say that it took me a long time to find the correct spelling of kiri-kaeshi today because it usully kiai-ed loudly and quickly before we enter into kiri-kaeshi, and usually something like "IKISH", which for a pedantic former Japanese scholar is truly frightening. So now Robbie, our kiwi instructor- for-a-day makes this word sound more horrific than I had previously thought. And he's got a helluva different training style, which is something we don't really learn until the coming Sunday when they try to unlearn us half of what he's had us do.
And so the big thing he tells us is that we need to swing our shinai around more, getting more angle into our 45° men cuts to the head, so that we're looking more and more like helicopters. The opther thing he does that is different is that at the end of the class, he selects 5 students he thinks have best picked up today's instructions, pull them out the front and gets them to demonstate to the rest of us. Ha! Particularly when they are the ones pulled up the next session for doing things the wrong way. Oh the schadenfreude!
And schadenfreude is a very good thing to take one's mind off one's own traumas, which this week, apart from terminal disspiritedness, include that pair of blisters the size of 20cent coins, one on the ball of my left foot and the sole of my right big toe. Yes, my feet, a pair of otherwise unremarkable size 10½s, have a habit of getting themselves into trouble. Like when I fell down the stairs last September and broke my big toe. Yes, the same toe that now lives half in agony and half in fear of agony as a result of its ingrown toenail, which itself is half dead. And so unbelievably attractive. But when you're sliding around on these particular parts of your feet with large flaps of dead skin hanging from the sole, proving the only cushioning for the ultra-senstive tissue below, it gets kinda dangerous. In an anticipation of pain kida way. And then you realise that is why everyone else is wearing these funny martial arts style sockette things. And that the guy who gave you the advice the first week about the blisters becoming calluses was right. And that the kiwi guy is urging you all to find a beach to wade in at 10pm on a Wednesday night—in Melbourne. He clearly doesn't know much about Melbourne to be urging us to put our feet in Post Phillip Bay at all, let alone in the DARK). Now that's a recipe for an infectious disease.
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