TABBY CAT Gamespace

One Tool To Rule Them All

ahaha! I enabled comments as an experment and got a message "stupid pussy don't realize comments are enabled". That quality of comment is why I disabled them in the first place. Wish they wouldn't use that word though, as it triggers all manner of content blockers and filters. Millions may now be automatically denied the Tabbic reading experience.

I also got a nice email confirming that the writer, having pondered my post about Tai Chi lacking strikes, does indeed regard me as an "ignorant blowhard" (my own prediction for the emotive reactions of the masses). He pointed out that there is a posture in the form named "Brush Knee and Strike". Doh!

Thanks for reading one and all.

Yes, Tai Chi has movements in which you form your hand into a fist. The characters for hitting are used to describe that in the posture name. So? The use of the Chinese term "da quan" (hit with fist) in a posture name has as much relation to the real content of Tai Chi as the use of the term "Panther" in the Panther tank. There are also postures named after "White Cranes" and "Golden Chickens". There are postures about "Bend Bow and Shoot Tigers". In the sword form, there are postures named after "Rhino's Viewing the Moon", about Phoenixes and Dragons and Rocs... The Chinese are a poetic people. Don't get into a pissing content with me about Chinese terminology - you will lose.

Read between the lines, people. The hand and body can take on any form whatsoever. Just like water (cf. recent post "x2"). But the nature of the energetic interaction is what I described in the original post. That's the secret of Tai Chi. But probably not worth my rehashing. To the wise, a single word is sufficient.

Whole thing is a tempest in a teapot anyway. Because 99% of human relations are governed by weapons-based interactions. From knife to nuke, from Coke bottle to Claymore, from Taser to Tomahawk, reality is ruled by weapons. So we are just playing with ourselves.

The ones who don't like the blog why waste your precious time reading it? Use your remaining earthly hours drilling into something deeper.

x2

Water has molecular structure, and spontaneous kinetic structure, but it isn't a crane or a Lego set. It has no mechanical structure. It's merely a medium that transmits energy flow. And for Tai Chi purposes, that's all the human body is at the end of the day, even before you pull the sheet over the cadaver, you should understand it's just a pile of cells, no one type better than another, what matters for Tai Chi is not their structural/functional arrangement, rather it's their conductive properties that do the trick.

Anyway. Think water.Got that, structure geeks?

But no. I can't expect good citizens of the 21st century to so lightly toss aside their mechanistic blinders. Though I shouldn't paint everybody with the same brush. There are lots of New Age bunnies out there who feel the energy, and who don't know an iliotibial band from a trochanteric crest. Far from being structure geeks, they believe themselves aligned with The Force, yet you can throw such types around easily, by the merest soft touch on their unconscious tension. Because they aren't relaxed.

x

I will go to Detroit tomorrow and train with my teacher there. Actually I much prefer visiting him in his home city. But once in a while an old-time student will set one of these things up for experienced  students and I can't resist. But... DEtroit? In DEcember? DEpressing!

I've heard the Michigan government is thinking about restoring the entire city back to original wilderness, with reintroduction of bears and wolves. That's how bad the economy is. I have a friend in that area though. He was a successful MMA contender in Japan, but recently moved back to MI to run an MMA training gym. He emailed me his school enrollment is doing great. Maybe I will hook up with him for lunch or something.

Anyway, I don't know Michigan well. Maybe there are prosperous suburbs and leafy small towns  and stuff. Hope may flicker still... All I know for sure is, the flight comes in to Detroit DTW airport... if I can make the 30 min ORD connection that is.  I've done this before but I don't remember anything about the location. Actually now I think of it, last time it was a somewhat rural experience as I recall...

Main point though is to hang with my teacher. He's not so young. Make hay while the sun shines.

I will report on anything cool that happens. He will be taking particular attention on this occasion to explain and interpret the Tai Chi Classics to us. It's a rare thing because usually its all just hard work.

Jump to the Beat

I see it's December 1st again. Time for my yearly weigh-in! You might think, due to my constant references to boxing, that I weigh myself a lot, but not so as I just spar with whoever's in the club without regard to weight class. I'm not a competitive boxer, I am only interested in boxing skill per se.

So let's get to it... strip down... jump on scale... aha! Exact same weight to the half pound as I weighed in my junior year of high school, in the Pleistocene ... (Actually, a half pound less...)

That was when the photo at the bottom of my bio page was snapped by my Kung Fu pal and co-demonstrator (at street fairs and Chinese New Year parades... but I don't do that flashy stuff any more. Real gong fu is not show business!)

Getting back to weight, how can that be? Is it that I adhere rigorously to a medically authorized, spiritually authenticated, professionally validated dietary regimen? Ha! I snarf like a pig.  Or, am I possibly a victim of consumption or other dread disease? Or is some Ebola-like microparasite chewing me up from inside out? Those things may well be contributing factors. But the main reason is those two little words that mean so much: jump rope.

Four rounds, every day is all you need. Less than 15 minutes, depending how you set the rest. Don't be taken in by flashy fake diet scam systems! You don't need that kind of expensive crap!

But you do need to keep it interesting. You need to have a cool look and feel while jumping. In short you need a role model. In my case, Mike Tyson. If you go to time mark 4:30 in this Tyson training video, you'll find a good model you can adopt. That's the kind of image I use.

Thaw

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

- Susan Ertz

Now I'm reading the hilarious-yet-true book  Frozen: My Journey into the World of Cryonics, Deception, and Death by Larry Johnson, guy who worked for Alcor, the main pioneering cryonics company in CA and AZ. It's where they decapitate dead rich people and salt away their heads in a sub-zero dewar storage tank. Johnson's writeup is hilarious and horrifying all at once. What a total keystone cops operation! The corpses are processed in a bizarrely amateurish and bungling fashion, not even up to the standards of having an ingrown toenail removed in the ER. Just designed to siphon money off of rich suckers.

Because, like almost everything in American popular culture, the cyronic idea is fundamentally just another Christian allegory. Notice how they assume they'll need the physical head or body? These people are so religiously addled they haven't paused to consider that if you assume a future civ will have sufficient magical techno-powers to revive your amateurishly frozen brain tissue, you can just as easily assume that they could revive you from a hair sample, or travel back in time to fetch you directly or anything.

Anyway, these people do assume that in a few hundred years an advanced and benevolent future-tech society will welcome them back to earth with a smooth revival. But who knows how it would really go? I'm going to write a sci-fi story where these people are reanimated in the future only to find that those future people are torture-porn freaks who delight in re-juicing Alcor-oids so they can sadistically kill off the resuscitees as game-show puppets (stuff like the movies Saw 1-6).

Grand Commission

The Inner Party holds to one basic imperative: make the herd obsolete. They are tired of sharing their planet with garden-variety free-range plants, animals, and humans. Creatures that add nothing (except as potential sex slaves but that may not apply to plants), and in fact wittingly or unwittingly endanger the ultimate bottom line. Yet the Herd is still essential as the raw feedstock of wealth, at this time.

Therefore, the Inner Party has tasked the Useful Idiots of the Outer Party (technicians, scientists, managers, professionals of all stripes) with their own version of the Grand Commission: Obsolete the Herd! This Grand Commission is a bit of a drink with the devil though, because, just as in the case of the Qin Emperor's tomb or other grand Imperial projects, the architects and workers must be immolated at the end. Nothing personal.

Meanwhile the High Command is in charge of ... security... as the Op goes forward.

I know what you are thinking: Tabby always has been a paranoid asshole, and today's post is yet further confirmatory fuel on that fire...

Think that while you are still free to think at all. I have found that women in particular do not much resonate to this view. That's because they tend to be soft-hearted (thank goodness!) and they cling to illusions such as the belief that male conceptions and contraptions like hierarchical authority structures and high tech and so on exist for the ultimate benefit of human beings. Better living through chemistry or some such. After all, what else on earth ... could all that stuff be ... for??

Orwell has already answered this question. Nothing is for bettering human life (and even if it were, why is that supposed benefit always at the expense of all the other creatures?). All is done for Power pure and simple. For some reason, women tend to be sentimental idealists and don't much like to hear this message, therefore usually tune it out. Exceptions being a few brilliant outliers along the lines of  Alice Sheldon and Margaret Atwood.

Anyway, I don't blame them at all. I don't like it either. Doesn't it seem cold, inhuman, creepy? You are feeling the vibe of the Inner Party. I'm going to tune it out too from now on, and just believe in love, camaraderie, self-actualization, music, and fun.

Cornered

Whoever has not seen starvation does not know mankind.

- Anon.

* * *

Bleh. I am sick of blogging. Maybe I should make another of my periodic quit announcements. What:"s the point of blogging or anything else? It"s all totally meaningless. Because we have no power.

People try to find meaning in their dinky-ass little activities, affiliations, and affections. But all that is a translucent veneer over the fact that earth life is a predatory system. Always has been and always will be.

The problem is that we have to eat. That's the consequence of having a physical body. That"s why we are engaged in a bitter proxy war with Nature. Proxy war because at the moment we slaughter one another for cash, but that bloodshed is only a stand-in for the real battle royale between us and Nature to get food.

No matter what kind of philosophy we quote or experiences we have, the fact remains that we have to eat. And so all of Nature and every person is our enemy. May you die today so that I may die tomorrow.

If we could get nutrition directly from the sun maybe things would be different. They say there are Shaolin monks who, after decades of training, learned to survive on a grain of rice a day only. But that kind of training is probably too little too late to save us now. Anyway, even if we were just like plants, living off sunlight and rain, still the vegetable kingdom is also in a constant slow civil war, neighbor strangling neighbor for access to light and soil. It"s all the same.

Richard Dawkins' latest book on the torture-porn horror movie that is the Earth Darwinian system is titled The Greatest Show on Earth. But it should have been titled The Only Game in Town. Because as long as you are biologically active, whether plant or beast, you're fucked.

Take the Hindmost

Today the World,
Tomorrow Tai Chi!

- Tabby Cat

* * *

I've ranted before about Tai Chi structure geeks and posture nazis. (By the way, those terms don't really refer to any particular person, just a mindset. They are meant to be understood more adjectivally than nominally.) (By the way, those who object to my use of the word nazi for this are advised to learn some basic English, I mean it in the sense #3 below:

3.     (often lowercase) a person who is fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specified activity, practice, etc.: a jazz nazi who disdains other forms of music; tobacco nazis trying to ban smoking.

Anyway, these terms are applied by me to the erroneous analysis of Tai Chi in physio-structural-postural terms, things like muscles, fascia, tendons, vertebrae, etc.

But that kind of mentality is not limited to Tai Chi. In Yoga you see the same thing. For example, that's the difference between the Iyengar and Ashtanga mentalities. Iyengar people love to fuss over the nanoscopic alignment of every little damn vertebra. And all those props! You feel like a human construction site.

Here is my classic Yoga Prop Chant:

Yoga Prop Chant

(c) 2007 by Tabby Cat

Block, Strap, Pad, and Wedge
Give us that Iyengar edge.

Strap, Pad, Wedge, and Block
Now we're steady as a rock.

Pad, Wedge, Block and Strap
Using these, it's Insta-Wrap!

Wedge, Strap, Block, and Pad
You don't use them? You're just sad!

* * *

Whereas your Ashtangi's, on the other hand, just love the flow of shaktic bliss. (That's why one funny website characterized yogi's in high-school terms: Iyengar people are nerds, Ashtangi's are jocks. I forgot who gets to be the Goths and Stoners ...)

But I do have to admit, the founder of Iyengar (who learned it from the same teacher as the founder of Ashtanga learned his stuff) is cool in that he still practices at age 96 or whatever.

But anyway, all this is merely to show that I obviously do not practice Ashtanga for alignment. Not in the least. I just like the shaktic buzz is all. And anybody who thinks I am just randomly and anonymously gushing without specifics has obviously missing the repeated times I have posted the specifics of correct practice. Luckily, it's all straight-forward clear stuff, you won't need to be CAT-scanned or MRI'ed, so you may wish to loosen your grip on that Gray's Anatomy.

Yes and No

Reality is always kinder.

- Byron Katie

* * *

I have discharged my Quasi-Professional Obligation to see new movie The Road. I say it's my Q-Pro-O because I am an expert connoisseur of apocalyptic content in any form, fiction (novels, movies, graphic novels), and non-fiction (eschatological internet discussion fora, books on 2012, etc.).

There are actually, as of today's first day of general release of this TR movie, already 99 viewer reviews up on rottentomatoes, and thousands more on other sites. But still I have to get my own words in edgewise, pointlessly.

It's good. Particularly the adult male lead is really good. Of course I've read the McCarthy novel. It's great. An unspeakably powerful piece of writing. So bleak it will leave your heart on the ground. So don't read it. Just take my word for it, it's truly great.

I was thinking that probably the movie wouldn't be able to translate the utterly devastated hopeless landscape to the silver screen without massive loss-of-morbidity. Color movies will do that. But while it's true that the film visuals can't really convey the leaden atmosphere, overall they did a great job, the best that can probably be done.

The trouble with movies, compared to books? Movies are too literal!

But anyway, they came within a hairs-breadth of doing justice to this great work and I salute them for a job well done.

If you do read the book, you'd better just damn will hope that Byron Katie is right in the quote above, that nothing is ever as bad as imagined, as it can appear to our mind's eye before the fact. Because otherwise... 

* * *

What I don't like about the economy (both legal and illegal) is that it is based almost entirely on exploitation of weakness - weaknesses such as our sweet tooth, our desire for escape, ease, comfort, the self-delusions of national identity, intell black psy-ops, technology that corrals us. Why does it have to be that way? The smart ones exploiting the weaknesses of the dumb ones. How sad.

We just need food, clothing, shelter, and basic sanitation. All that stuff we should provide for ourselves locally. Then we can talk about escape mechanisms, like art and drugs and all that. But why do we lock ourselves into an economy based on the few systematically exploiting the weakness of the many?

* * *

If you re-enter the USA after prolonged residence in Japan, you will experience reverse culture shock along many dimensions, including but not limited to the following;

1. Size Shocker: Everybody is just so huge. I mean, you know it already right? But to really feel it you have to be in Japan for a long time and then re-enter. I don't just mean fat (though there is that) I mean big on every dimension; muscley, meaty, massive megatonnage. Tall, wide, deep, broad - just voluminous people everywhere! And this isn't playing off the ancient stereotype of Japanese as super-small. Actually they aren't super-small anymore. They are pretty much normal size as of USA 1970 or so. I don't know what's going on here. Not making value judgement at all, maybe it's a sign of some kind of progress. But makes clothes-buying for a fomerly normal-size adult male very challenging.

2. Service Shocker: In any kind of retail or other service operation, the service is 10x Slower in the USA, across the board. And Slobbier. And Surlier. I know, I got Spoiled. Anybody would be. I have to admit, in this respect the Japanese example is probably pathological. So forget I ever raised the point.

3. Stampede Shocker: As soon as the final scene of a movie flashes over the screen, USA audiences will immediately jump from their seats and all rush madly for the exit en masse. Whereas in Japan, everybody sits silently until the very last little cred line like "No animals were harmed" or whatever scrolls slowly up the screen. To them all that is part of the movie.

No value judgments here - this is Tabby Cat Gamespace! Anyway Team USA still has the best military money can buy!

Snow Day

One cool thing when you get your ki sufficiently cranked to a certain point is you know after a night of heavy snowfall, you go out the next morning and sun is shining, shocking blue sky, but most of all, there's that muffling effect, right? A weird kind of total silence yet within which everything can be heard with 10x normal clarity. Absolute silence, total quiet, everywhere.

Well that"s what it's like all the time once you get really strung out on ki. I feel like the whole world, wherever I am (indoors, anywhere) is blanketed in a thick layer of powder snow. There is absolutely no sound, yet every little whisper is audible. Weird.

I once read, somebody said, silence is the one true voice of god. But that sounds a bit far-fetched to me.