I think it was a Saturday, about 7 or 8 months ago. I had a criminal law assignment due in about 5 days, and a Judo contest on the Sunday. I was stressing out of my mind. I hadn't written up my notes from the lectures, and so I had no real idea what the assignment was asking of me. I'm not a fan of criminal law, I just don't really get it. To me, it feels like learning how to reverse park. There are all these arbitrary instructions like "when your passenger side window reaches a 42.9 degree parallel line with the adjacent car, then spin the steering wheel 16. 4 revolutions counter topwise, and you will align behind it". It was making me feel quite queasy, I was certain I would fail and have everyone know I was a failure.
My friends boyfriend is a D.J. and makes electronic music. She invited me to one of his parties. I jumped on the opportunity, I just wanted to forget that the future was something that adults had to be responsible and accountable for. Before I went to that, my room-mates had a different party going on at our house, so I drank some beers at that. This detail is not particularly interesting but it became relevant later. They asked me to stay longer, but I could smell pungent guilt billowing from my textbooks in my room, and so I left with my friend, to get anywhere far away from that place.
I didn't know anyone at the house party we went to. I think it was organized as a birthday celebration. I probably congratulated at least 4 different people for whoever's birthday it was. I promised the DJ I would get the dance floor beyond critical mass. I generally don't dance unless heavily anesthetized. I drank about 2/3 of a friends bottle of vodka. Again, this detail is uninteresting, but it became relevant later.
As a rule, I think less of people who itemize how much they had to drink, because to my mind it is evidence that the speaker considers each drink was a destination, on a gaudy travel itinerary (obnoxious selfies alongside famous landmarks included), the record of which is kept for the sole purpose of bragging to others. I drink to get drunk, not to inflate my vanity. I momentarily excuse myself from my own standards here because what I drank became relevant to me later when I tried to repeat the results that came from drinking that amount.
Anyway, so I was doing my best to rinse my criminal assignment out of my head. I also had a judo competition the next day. I had exerted pretty much all the stress I was capable of while thinking about my deadline, and so I had barely thought about the competition at all. I was drinking to enjoy the moment; and it was helping. I forgot completely about the next day, or about the work I had to do. A law student friend told me, "Law school will teach you how to drink". I understand that statement better now than I did then.
True to my promise to the DJ, I committed to writhing like an idiot on the dance floor. It felt good. I no longer cared what others thought of me. Tomorrow all these strangers would be the same thing they were to me then; strangers. Others merged into and out of the music. I had a few conversations. There was this one guy I got introduced to. He seemed to be the perfect example of the brash American Football college athlete from teen horror movies. I was convinced at the time that I had communicated with a grindr profile that looked like him. If he was who I thought he was, he had offered me swimming lessons over a gay social media app maybe a month or two before. I alluded to it and saw his face convulse for a slight but perceptible moment.
The music wasn't really my cup of tea (I like metal more) but it wasn't bad, and I was impressed by the DJ's skill. I told him so. I got to that state of inebriation that I call invincibility at the time, and others call obnoxious and unpleasant. But in my defense I wasn't the only one making a scene. This guy I spoke to earlier, he was in a similar state of inebriation. And he bore it as obnoxious teenage athletes tend to do. He took all of his clothes off and started making a show of himself.
The party went on. I had a lot of fun with the friend I came with. When the DJ finished his set everyone was approaching my level of intoxication. The drunken nudist had jumped into the pool and was loudly bellowing challenges to all who would accept, in a lord of the rings kind of narrative. I decided to accept his challenge. I stripped to my underwear and jumped in. I asked him what it was he was defending and what the terms were. He answered, from memory it included concepts such as wisdom and bravery. I asked if he was in earnest. He started splashing me. I had not come to play as children do. With his left hand he hit the water with his open palm, to send a wave into my face. I stepped backward out of the way with my right foot, spun in with my left, and used my left upper arm to deflect his advancing arm out of the way. With the back of my hand I lightly slapped him across the cheek, and gave him the dualists' beckon; "do you challenge me sir?". It was a pretty cool movement, Later in randoori I tried for ages to recreate it in grip fighting but can't. I wish I could have done it with a glove.
Preliminary details were agreed on. I took care to explain to him that I wished him no harm, and that I would only try to do to him what he consented to prior to us starting. We agreed that the first to submit lost. Having settled that, he grabbed both my shoulders, like I was a shopping trolley he was trying to compress inward. I had done enough gi-less exercises to know that that approach is worse than useless, especially when your opponent is wet and you have no friction for gripping.
I used my right forearm to pry his left hand grip outwards from the inside. Without that grip as a prop he sloshed through the water onto me. I swung my right arm inwards, and put my palm on the left side of his jaw. I used my left arm to entwine his right, my hand and elbow lifted his right arm into my armpit, where I buried it by sinking my arm down afterwards. I stabbed my head and shoulders into a parallel alignment to his, but more in the way of a rhombus, so that our connecting arms bent out at a 45 degree angle. He was anchored onto my hips. I pushed up with my loaded right hand, and swept his right leg out with my right leg. His head aligned with his right foot; I had control of both, and I flipped him 180 degrees into the water. I gave him a good dunking, and got him to submit to me in a few seconds. He gave me a few more splashings after i let him go, I asked him if he wanted another round. I got another answer, this time with clumsy allusions to Mordor.
As an aside, you may well validly express doubt when I can say that I was in such a state of confusion that I congratulated 4 people at that party on one persons birthday, and at the same time remember my O-Soto Gari to that level of detail. I will try to explain. Judo is a language, but instead of words it has throws. Someone cannot answer you with "I am good, and how are you?" unless you first validly pronounced "how are you?" Whats different between spoken language and this physical language is that it only takes one word to be understood in judo. If you see that your opponent has understood your judo , or, to abandon the comparison, got thrown, then that automatically requires valid performance of the technique. And so because I threw him I can reverse engineer the phonetic structure of what was "said". It took me the prior paragraph to try to explain the pronunciation of that technique. There is a famous Judoka that teaches at my host university, he has written a 96 page book on that throw.
We played a drinking game after that. It was a hell of a lot of fun. It felt exactly like what I imagined University student life to be like, fun and irresponsible. The rest of the night left me in a blur. I got home, went to sleep, woke up to my alarm maybe 4 or five hours later. I spent maybe 5 or so minutes blankly looking at the ceiling wondering why i had set it. Then I remembered I had a judo competition.
On the train heading toward the competition, I groggily looked out the window. ; I realized I had burnt out most of the emotions I could possibly have. I had left my law assignment as late as I did; and so I would fail. This was a complete certainty. I felt no stress. I resigned myself to the future I earned and deserved. When I walked, it felt like I was walking across a water bed; it sloshed and undulated underneath me, and made me feel a little sick. I had to compete while moving like this, and so I would lose. This was a complete certainty. I did not feel any embarrassment, any sense of foreboding of what was to come. I knew exactly what was to come.
At the competition people waited for their turn to compete; and then it became time to warm up. I went through the motions. I just wanted to leave that place, to get it over and done with. I did a warmup with another player, he was in my division. I would be competing against him soon. Conversationally I asked him a question about some kind of hip throw. He joked, but not without sincerity, that that isn't really the sort of question you expect from someone who will be your opponent in a few minutes. I reassured him it wasn't plausibly possible that I would give him any more than a few seconds of competition during our round.
I sat down next to another player from our club. She was quite nervous. We spoke together. I felt unnaturally calm, bored even, like I was in a waiting room for a government agency. I had something unpleasant to wait for, that was all. I had no more stress left to give, my mind was a wrung out sponge. My first round was called up. My opponent was (from memory) a 3rd dan black belt from Croatia. He was likely to be very skilled. I blinked slowly. I knew what I had done last night, and I knew what it meant. I was going to get my arse handed to me, because I deserved it. I shuffled up to the ring and bowed him on.
The match started. I threw an experimental hay-maker-y kind of O-Soto Gari in his direction. My movement was very half-arsed and casual. He pulled his right foot behind him to deny me access to his balance loaded leg. I did it again, he reacted in exactly the same way again. I remember the thought "O-kay...?" passing through my mind. His left leg was shining, like any object you find in a 1st person shooting game. It was glittering, I could see it, it was inviting me to pick it up. I didn't really think about it any more than that. I went for another sloppy O-Soto, but feigned and didn't commit to it. He shifted his right leg behind him again. In that movement, I threw myself at his left ankle. I loaded my right foot behind his left and swept it out from underneath him, using my own falling body weight as the force to do it. I landed on top of him and Ipponed him. It was the fastest judo round I have ever won. I beat an experienced dan grade in maybe 3 movements. I got congratulated by my opponent as we bowed off, then i went to sit with my teammates and they commented on the movement. I felt a mild feeling of disbelief, a little relief that it was over. That was all. It made me as happy as maybe finding 2 dollars in your wallet that you didn't know was there. I went to the sitting area and waited for my next round.
My second opponent was a rank higher than me. I had trained with him before; I knew him to be very strong and quite skilled. We bowed on and started the round. It was a long and hard round. I felt like vomiting a few times. His grips were strong, and he had a strong loading stance to fortify it. His body felt like stone. Mine felt like a garbage bag filled with water. Then;
Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun."
Every force he exerted radiated through me like ripples on a dirty puddle. I realized I could feel the movement through his hands, telling me what he intended to do next. I knew before he committed to any particular attack what it was he was going to do. They call this the "feel" of judo, that people telegraph what it is they intend to do to their opponent by letting their balance flow into their hands. I have felt it less than 4 times in my life. I was standing as if I needed my opponent to support me, he was leaning into me like a 45 degree support girder. It was like, just for a short period, I learned how to read his mind. I knew i would become aware of what he was going to do next the very second he had the idea himself.
I was feeling ill, and wanted the round to stop. I threw him for wazari, or maybe yuko, from a O-Uchi/Ko-uchi combination technique. I won the round, but I cant remember how or why. The win wasn't that important to me. What will be forever framed in my memory is that for a short while I felt his movements, as if they were mine, as if they were forces that I could take and command and use against him. I don't often feel this, something that feels like Judo. If you can do it, you take your opponents force and use it at your own discretion. This realization burnt through my indifference; I had to acknowledge that i had done judo, or something like it, and not some cheaper imitation as I normally do. I started to beleive i had a chance of winning my division.
The third person I went against was a 2nd dan (from memory) that is quite competitive in interstate competitions in Australia. I knew he would be the hardest opponent I had to face. He was the guy I spoke to earlier, the one I reassured that I had no chance of threatening him in this round. We bowed on and started the round. It was hard, harder than the last, and I came closer to vomiting. But there was something about my body that I hadn't felt before. As he attacked me, I slopped off him like a limp, dead, slimy fish. I wasn't doing well, but I was making him work to get me. I would have been amazed that I had gotten this far at all if i wasn't using all my concentration to stay standing and keep the contents of my stomach to myself. I think I got a Yuko for a dirty but acknowledgeable throw on him, he had a Wazari on me for a better one. I started to run out of breath. We went into groundwork. I balled up in the turtle position, trying to buy myself some time and oxygen. I very nearly puked onto the mat (which incidentally results in a disqualification). He took advantage of my distraction, and pried my left arm behind my back with his right arm. He was going to turn me over and submit me on the ground.
It is going to be hard for me to try and explain what happened next, but I will do my best. In that moment, I recognized what was happening to me. He had a strong position on me, and he was about 1 second away from winning the round from it. I was Schrodinger's hungover cat, locked in a box with him. I peered at the dynamite (or acid, depending on which version you use) and knew one of two things would happen. Either the technique would succeed and I would lose, or it wouldn't and I would continue to get thrashed. There were only two possibilities, no more. All other probabilities had been eliminated apart from this binary fork in the road. And so, I existed in two states at once. I had already lost the match right there and then, and I had also lost it later by somehow escaping and being beaten later. I had no control over what was happening. I peered at the dynamite/acid, and one idea went through my mind. One probability would eventuate once this idea was acted on and observed by everyone watching. I acted on my idea and let it flow through my body.
I suicided my balance into cooperation with the direction of his force, and rotated around and behind his grip. Continuing the movement, I rolled through him, got him into Kesa Gatame with a double arm grip and held him out. I do not know this technique and I have never seen it done before. I watched myself do this in the third person. I had no control over it, it wasn't my movement. It was something external to me, happening to someone else. It was as if i had cast a die, with only two faces, and all I could do was watch and wait for the result. The result was that a complete stranger beat my opponent and won the round and the division. Its one of the weirdest things I have ever felt.
I fought 5 rounds that day and won 4 of them. I am not really sure what happened or why; but i think alcohol must have something to do with it. Since then, i have been experimenting with alcohol to see how it affects my judo. The results are hard to replicate, but it does work. At a later competition, I won by doing the most complicated and otiose newaza turnover into san kaku I have ever done, And i think i did it because I took care to drink the same amount I did during the first competition.
A few days ago I drank maybe 3.5 litres of beer, slept 5 hours, and then went to training. I had a 6 minute round against an 100Kgs player from the Israeli national team. In that interval, he threw me once. I unbalanced him several times and was moving in a way unlike normal judo. I moved with him, I felt his balance. Afterwards, the coaches from the Israeli team came up to me, wanted to know my name, where i trained. They told me my style was unusual.
At the beginning of the year me and my sister went to some temples in Kyoto. There, you can buy fortunes from paper vending machines. If you get a good one, you keep it, if you get a bad one, you tie it to a tree. It was snowing heavily, we were standing near the temples and reading our futures from small paper slips. Mine had several things writtten on it. Amongst them was this.
"You will win, but you will be thought ill of" and
"Study hard. Destroy your weak mind"
I didn't tie my fortune to the tree.
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