My Ego

I went to Japan because I wanted to gain a better understanding of myself and Judo. I felt I didn't understand either well enough before I left; and now all I feel is the vast emptiness of my ignorance. I had trained long in Australia; and I had watched my own resolution crack. I would go from binges where I would regularly train 6 days a week to other times where I wouldn't go at all. I did not understand my resolve; I only used it when I had it. I saw that my approach to learning was unlikely to be sustainable.

And so I hoped Tokai University would make me ask myself why I train. I have seen some other students give similar amounts of time to Judo as I have and quit, after achieving more results. I had no reason to presume I had any more determination than them. I wanted to force myself to answer; will I continue or will I quit? A highly experienced Dutch player in my club gave me some advice after I told him my plans to go to Japan. He told me to be careful. If I went in naive and unprepared, it was likely that I would quit. Training at highly skilled Japanese clubs is usually emotionally grueling, and he warned me of this.

Before I left, I had thought of quitting seriously at least once a month and sometimes once a week. If it was going to happen; I was going to do it in the best Judo club I knew of. I love Judo. I felt that if that was going to happen; then I owed it a flashy exit. If it was time for my Judo to end, my Judo was going to get obliterated in a Michael Bay-eske display of fireworks. I intended on leaving Japan completely broken, dead, or a skilled athlete. I didn't come back any of these things. Instead I came back with an idea.

My few weeks back here have been strange. My style feels weird; in the "not feeling so good" sense. Everything I did I learned from trial and error; they were my only guides. I found ways to throw people; but it was based on pragmatic need only. And so when I succeeded in my drunken style often I became capable of throwing unconventionally without being able to understand why. Back in Australia, I can barely use anything I learned. The imaginary average Japanese Judo player seems to hold their balance in a different way to how the equivalent westerner might. There is a reason why Kuzushi is translated as "breaking" balance as opposed to say, "bending" balance or "warping" balance or "manipulating" balance. From what I have seen, Japanese players seem to hold themselves in such a way that when you take their balance from them it shatters as if it was brittle. People in my club don't seem to do this. I am starting to learn that balance is not an all-or-nothing concept; where you have it or you don't. There are nuances in balance that seem to be applied differently in different countries Dojo's. I can force Australian players to react to my drunken approach, but even though I have moved them; they still throw me.

So my most powerful technique, the "corpse whip"; became pretty much useless overnight. I used it in Japan to move heavier opponents when they tried to defer to Jigotai. I did it by deliberately ignoring the conventional Judo standards and applying my own ideas to balance as I understood it. I had rapid gains in a short amount of time; and so I felt confident that I could replicate this at home. I failed to do so miserably. It is becoming clear that I don't understand how players in Australia balance themselves. I need to get back to the yoga ball; it took me 45 minutes daily to learn how to imitate how a drunk moves. I don't own one here; and the one on offer in my home club isn't really available for those lengths of time. I need one; soon. I am getting countered all the time because I fail to move properly. My ego took a battering. I wanted to return victorious and instead arrived worse than when I left.

I "corpse whipped" a guy in training a few days ago. The concept is that if you pitch your body weight into your opponents shoulder at the lapel they will be forced to turn; in anticipation of a Uke Goshi or some sort of hip attack. When they turn to Jigotai; they sometimes give you access to their feet; which you can then use to throw them. I tried this; he didn't resist me as I expected he would. Instead he rolled with that force and loaded an explosive Kata Garuma into it. The "corpse whip" looks almost exactly like what Uke does in the Kata version of Seoi Nage, where s/he does that weird punch into Tori's imaginary helmet. His throw was almost perfectly fitted for my crude approach. But I was also deliberately acting drunk. We clacked into each other like Newton's cradle balls. My left cheekbone clashed into the back of his skull and started bleeding.

He helped me dress my wound in the change rooms. He commented on something to the effect that my drunken Judo was working in some regards but probably needed a good pruning. I was mad enough to try training in Tokai and I was rewarded there for being a lunatic. I can't make my lunacy work so well back home. I taped it up; there was some communal talk by other people that it might need stitches but I had no means of going to the hospital; didn't want the embarrassment of asking anyone to take me there; and didn't want to stop training. It stopped bleeding pretty much instantly, and I did not feel concussed. Much more painful was the blow on my ego. My most powerful attack was clearly garbage.

I took a break for a day, and then walked into my first Shiai in several months. It was a relatively small and casual affair; it was what I needed to see where I was at technically and what I needed to focus on. I had a four month old style; and I intended to use it against a sport and a martial art that was more than 100 years old. A century is long enough for enough people to have taken and edited Judo to a point where its approach is decently cross checked and tightly applied. My drunken Judo was much more rough around the edges; but I was convinced I could win. I wanted to try even if I couldn't. I turned my mind to drinking heavily the night before. It is surprisingly difficult to emulate being drunk without actually drinking. When I drink the night before my balance becomes much easier to maintain. But I am also sick of relying on alcohol to succeed, so I didn't. I asked my brother to film what I did; thankfully he spared me that embarrassment.

I went into the change rooms 5 minutes before the formal starting time. The smaller Judo competitions here usually run at least an hour behind schedule, and so I didn't anticipate them to start soon. I wanted to chill out and prepare myself mentally. I have lost Judo competitions because I stressed out about arriving on time; ended up hanging around in a tense state of stasis waiting to start; and expended either too much or too little time in warming up. While I was in the change room; my round was called up. They read out my name 5 times before I heard it; they didn't pronounce my surname in a way I recognized. So I had to run out and ask them to give me a little more time. I was still in the process of putting on some light bandaids to my prior cut from the last training. They told me I had 30 seconds. 30 seconds in which to apply some cover to my face in front of the head officials; one of which had seen me get this injury and had recommended that I get stitches. I bowed my opponent on without warming up and started the round.

My opponent looked to be a relatively experienced Dan grade. I felt healthy and a little bit buzzed from the adrenaline. This was terrible news. I can usually only do my thing when I am a sweaty hungover mess. When I smear across the mat like a viscous stain, I stop trying to pretend to be drunk and start actually moving as if drunk. It takes a "stuff it" attitude; a feeling of hopelessness to be able to separate yourself from any belief of control over the negative consequences of what is going on around you. When you hit that feeling; then you can abandon your body to it and become completely loose. That round, I felt springy and light. I was going to have to fake the movements and see if the feeling of the flow of it all would come to me. It didn't. I have emulated the flow of it without a hangover but it usually takes me time to be capable of getting into this mindset. I usually need a few rounds of Randoori before I can become indifferent to pitching my balance into my opponents' balance. I had no time, I had now.

I got about three corpse whips into my opponent before the referee stopped us and asked me in a dubious voice if I was ok. I answered "I'm fine; it's a technique I developed". He didn't sound particularly convinced but let me continue the round. The best aspect about the corpse whip is that its meant to be unreadable. Giving my opponent the time to consider my weirdness and calibrate his attacks accordingly was a massive disadvantage to me. I lost the only benefit I had by using it. But I had spent a lot of time in developing it and I knew if I went for a traditional grip I would be beaten by my opponent quickly. He wouldn't have to work hard if he was experienced; which I presumed he was. I had gambled everything into getting a quick and bizarre force flowing through him before he could use anything he had trained to do. But the referee intervened so as to protect my safety. I was upset but must be grateful for that. Probably the main reason why I was allowed to do what I did in Tokai was because there was no looming threat of a lawsuit. There was nothing for them to be concerned about. And truthfully I can't say that I was all that concerned about my safety either having decided I was going to train there. It's nice to know someone is looking out for me.

As the round went on my hands started shutting down. My lungs had turned to mush; I was running around a lot needlessly because my balance was not fluid like it needed to be. I corpse whipped my opponent again; he attacked me in that motion with Uchi Mata. In our struggle to maintain our posture we moved out of the contest area. My mind was full of wasp like thoughts. I knew I had everyones eyes on me. I cared what they thought. When I moved like this in Japan it took me a few throws before people realized what I was doing and why I was doing it. Here I had no ability to show that my ideas worked, I could only throw once or get thrown once. It would be deeply embarrassing if I failed to land this competition. All anyone watching could see was some lunatic who had pitched himself into his opponents throw. I was also thinking about the border of the ring; I was trying to remember what the rules were. Was the movement of the throw null and void once we stood over the line, or was it when the momentum of it had ceased?  Because I was trying to think about two things at once I neglected to turn my mind to the pertinent issue at hand; my opponents Uchi Mata. He Ipponed me cleanly.

I have come up with a drunken Judo defense to this throw. When you feel the position you throw both your knees forward and shut down all resistance in your body. If you time it right your body slams into your opponent as they are pulling you off balance; and your momentum breaks the motion of their throw. You end up landing on top of your opponent as if they had thrown you but you land face down. For a right handed attack, when they rotate their balance breaking left hand off their left foot; you can deny them that as an anchor by slopping through it and taking their foundation away from them. Its ugly as sin; but I think its a good way to turn a Uchi Mata attack into Newaza. I did it by pure accident against a 60 or 70kg player. I have an idea of why it works. Because people work their techniques to apply against resistant Uke's, it completely breaks the movement of the throw if you passively flop into it as if indifferent if you will be thrown or not. But summoning that indifference is difficult unless you actually feel it; and it is for this reason I have only achieved it while hungover.

Afterwards one of my Judo teachers came up to my first opponent and me, as we were standing close to each other and had a casual conversation about my bizarre movements. My prior opponent wouldn't look at me. My teacher said to me jokingly "You will never do that again."

My second and last round was against an ungraded player. From the way he moved and loaded himself he felt like he had some sort of grappling experience; I guessed maybe BJJ. He felt strong. I was humiliated from the prior round; but I had come this far. I had come up with drunken Judo as a way to counter Judo students that were better and stronger than me. I wouldn't be able to exploit the presumptions Judo had given him, because it was unlikely that Judo had left many for him if he hadn't been training for long. But he was stronger than me and I had developed answers for that.

I made a point not to look at him. I let my head loll around me as if I didn't have control over it. I learned that just as you use rotation of your head to aid in the momentum of certain throws (for example Seoi Nage or Soto Makikomi), so too can you use it to let your balance move in directions you choose. I let my balance flow around the mat. I deliberately crossed my feet. My balance felt better in that second round; the shock of the first round was enough to wake me up and get my mind closer toward what it was I was asking of it.

It was a pretty unremarkable round. I won by Osaekomi by pulling Mune Gatame and scoring Wazari in it. I feel I did a little better in impersonating a drunk in that round. The crowd was unsympathetic. My brother said he saw one guy drop his head into his hands. It was a bad impersonation; I couldn't feel the flow. If you nail it, you can take any casual movement, pitch your balance behind it, and turn it into a powerful force. But I was getting somewhere in the way of mimicry. I wanted to empty my mind so I could decide on an attack to use against my opponent but I kept being vacuumed into doubt. I couldn't believe that something I drilled could work; that if I shut the resistance down in my body and flopped against him then I would be able to wash through his grips. My mind was pretty much everywhere but on the task at hand.

Conventional Judo gripping works because the gripping methodology is refined and practical. Drunken Judo gripping can work if it is committed to and completely loose, but I find that I have to totally commit to it without really caring if it will work or not. The second I care, I lock up, my muscles tense and this provides a structure for my opponent to pivot my balance on and throw me. If you fall somewhere between these two you arrive at neither. The same Dutch player I spoke to before; he chastised me for being too passive when I tried my drunken Judo against him. But I honestly believe that throwing him once by using my ideas was better than anything I could achieve with normal Judo. It will be of course different when the shido's change how I need to move.

I got one throw on my second opponent that at least indicated the validity of what I am trying to do. He came in for an O Soto Gari and loaded it with his strength. He got his right hand under my head and pushed to break my balance. I let him do it. I allowed him to push my head off center. That force registered on him, so he hopped in for the leg sweep. I bent my knees quickly; enough that my feet came off the ground by a small invisible distance, and so I straightened up my neck and recovered my balance by repositioning my falling feet. Jigotai works by positioning your balance from your feet up, this works in the opposite way, by using your head and your neck position to elastically snap yourself back into a balanced position. I recovered my balance and loaded him onto my hip, and I rotated into him and threw him in Ko Soto Gake. I didn't get him cleanly enough for the Ippon; but that I got him at all by deliberately allowing him to break my balance was good. I was happy that I had done some small scrap of drunken Judo. Had I pushed to throw him more tightly, it would most likely have been too tense to work; I needed to be completely loose to be able to move within his attack. I doubt anyone else watching would agree with my description of how I did that. They would most likely say that he failed to break my balance; that I got lucky; that if he been more skilled he would have gotten me. My answer to that is; I have thrown Islam Bozbayev using this technique; in Ura Nage. I got lucky by practicing leaning backward while standing on a yoga ball for about 3 months of training while seasoned martial artists mocked me and prodded the ball with their feet. Excuse my strident pitch. I am quite frustrated with myself.

I think I may have had a third round; but the competition ended before I went in it. I was moving like I didn't have that much control over my movement; and I had some bandages on my face from my prior injury. The officials responsible for organizing the event decided it was likely I was suffering from a concussion. They had to intervene to protect me from my opponent and vice versa. I was told this by my teacher; I answered that I may be mentally sick but certainly not mentally injured. I also got told by one of the referees after my second fight not to shake anyone's hand before I started. I said back to him apologetically that I did it because I wanted my opponent to know that everything I did later was intentional and not the result of actual drunkenness or head trauma. It was a habit I developed in Japan as a way of showing my gratitude to my opponent for the opportunity to try my drunken Judo. They were fine with it in Tokai. I will have to re learn the etiquette to be able to play the game without penalty. I left that competition feeling completely disgusted with myself. I considered quitting Judo again. I didn't really take myself all that seriously though, I have told myself this a thousand times before.

I take nothing as seriously as I take drunken Judo. I am trying to set up my work and uni schedule around it. I don't know anyone else who sought to be bilingual so they could train in a sport. It's a little bit macabre and douchy but I considered writing my will before I went to train in Tokai. It would be pretty much unnecessary anyway because I have nothing worth giving. I worked in the most homophobic electorate in Australia, with a boss who first casually made homophobic slurs to me and then I suspect paid me less then I was entitled to. I lived hard and saved frugally, so I could study Judo. I pushed myself to my furthest limits. But they don't seem far enough.

I went from my second last training in Tokai; where I threw my 80ish kg opponent 4 times in 3 minutes; when he couldn't throw me at all, and mocked me before we started for asking to do Randoori with him too politely; to going to my first Shiai in Australia; in the same division; and being thrown in 2 minutes or so in a simple Uchi Mata, by someone I know has not trained half as hard as some of the people I have beaten; and who then thought I did what I did as a way to insult him. Whatever it was that I tried to do against him; it very nearly cost me my soul to be able to do it. I may be insane; but I am not so petty as to throw something of that value to me away merely to insult someone I don't know.

Drunken Judo has some advantages if it is applied well. It is not just about being unusual; but that is an important part of it. I have beaten people who have watched me train for months. In my shiai, people in the crowd were shaking their heads. I knew that I had lost the respect of some people that I have known for years. They think its a joke. They are right. My commitment to this joke is beyond anything I have ever done before.

It has the anatomy of a joke. For example;
'Two fish are in a tank. One looks over to the other and says "Do you have any idea how to drive this thing?"'

You can set up a presumption; violate that presumption with contrary evidence as to an actual state of affairs, and these two imbalances crashing together somehow creates humor. I have thrown people as they were laughing at me. If that is a dishonorable way of throwing someone then I feel any understanding of what "balance" is in Judo will always be constrained. I believe that balance and imbalance extends beyond peoples bodies. I have done my thing in Tokai and have been asked what my ranking was in Australia. I want to earn that question again.

This style takes a level of commitment from me that I have never asked of myself before. The train of thought that led to drunken Judo happened because I invested years trying to train in conventional Judo and got nowhere. My teacher asked me after my Shiai to commit to attacks more. I have heard the same thing over and over for years. I know he is right; I need to be more aggressive, more proactive. I have heard this for years. I will keep failing until I address this problem. It's been 7 years. I've decided that I don't have the time to learn how to be confident in using my attacks by repetitively drilling them. My mind seems to always gets in the way. Drowning out my doubts with mechanical training hasn't worked so far; another 7 years could pass and maybe I will be in exactly the same position I am in now.

I no longer think of this issue as I used to. I used to feel that if I wanted to be able to do Judo badly enough, I would train hard enough, and I would get the skill. But I feel this approach is limited. It may be true that you might fail in your goals because you didn't have the determination to pursue them until their fruition; but it ignores all other problems, and treats them as being capable of being overcome with training. It pivots on blame; if you fail it was only because you didn't want to succeed enough. I think a good analogy could be stomach band surgery or gambling addiction treatment. You can tell someone who compulsively overeats that the reason they are unhealthy is because of their own failure to eat normally. Or you might tell a gambling addict that the reason they are suffering is only because they fail to control their behavior. You choose the light you want to look at the issue. Of course it is true; A causes B. Remove A, B is now gone. And yet doctors have come up with medical interventions to help people despite the fact that they are injuring themselves with their own behavior; why? Governments have invested lots of money in gambling addiction services, despite the fact that individuals could change this problem for themselves; why? The issue is simple; all you need to do is change your habit.  It is the source of the issue; change your behavior and your problem will disappear.

This approach is convenient if you want to blame someone who suffers from these problems for what is happening to them. It is less useful if you want to help them avoid what is happening to them. If you want to help someone who is in need of help; working on the problem itself might be better than attempting to limit it by chastising their inability to control themself. Blame is only useful after the negative consequences have eventuated. You need to be indigent or dangerously unhealthy before anyone can tell you that you caused your own problem. I don't want B, I don't want to have to see it before I can address A. Being told what your problem is doesn't fix anything. It just blames you for it. Action, not blame, is what is necessary to overcome an obstacle. If I repetitively fail to drown out my own thoughts by training them out ; it is likely that I may never be capable of doing so. I need to fix it. What I have tried so far has not worked.

It was really galling when I returned home; and couldn't use what I learned. People must presume I was lying or deluded when I wrote about the things I did. Maybe I am. I am questioning if drunken Judo wasn't just a vivid and bizarre dream. There is too implausibly vast a difference between what I wrote and what I can't do.

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I remember I was maybe 10, I went ice skating with my family for the first time somewhere when we were on holiday. I had never seen so much ice in one place before. I was a weedy and pasty child; my physique was catered for video games, TV and snack food. I was very uncoordinated; I didn't have much control over my body. When I tried; I fell over a lot. I was having a lot of fun trying it out, I had never experienced anything like skating before.  I was moving at maybe 1/3 the speed everyone else was as they rotated around the rink. My mother filmed me. She found it hilarious. I came home battered and bruised. There was a recording of my skating on VHS in our house; I remember her asking to watch it so that she could laugh at my failure. I remember at least once that she asked to watch it with some friends while I was in the room so they could all communally laugh at me. I remember my sense of burning shame; my anger at myself for having failed to be better. I had fallen short of what I was supposed to be. 

When I was 12 I was sent to boarding school. I had spent most of my childhood basking in the radiant glow of the TV screen; video game characters were my friends. I did not know how to talk to people. I quickly fell into the exploitable group of students that the others could use for their amusement. When people came and riled me up; I reacted badly. I threw a chair once. I would emotionally explode in public; it was excellent theater for the other students, they didn't have to try hard to make me do it. Once or twice the older students would grab me and another of the younger students and make us fight each other for their amusement. I had things regularly stolen from my room. The boarding house had no way of controlling it; that many students in that many cubicles was almost impossible to police. They couldn't check everyone, it was too hard and too inefficient. Things easily got taken and hidden. They dealt with it by telling the student who had lost their things that it was their own fault for leaving their own things in such a way that they could be taken advantage of.

I retreated into some sort of two dimensional fantasy world to deal with this. This was happening to me because I was special; because the world was against me, that I was somehow worthy of the world being against me. It took me years to discover that I am completely unremarkable. I thought the world was against me and so I sought to avoid it. I didn't know what I had done, but it clearly blamed me for something. And so I blamed it back for everything it had done to me. This got me nowhere.

These experiences were incredibly hard on me; but in retrospect I am incredibly grateful for them. I learned that emotional pain did not come from any external source, but from my own internal reaction to what happened to me. I strongly believe that you cannot make anyone feel inferior without their own consent. I learned that my emotional foundations were subject only to my own intervention. I feel that I learned much about how emotion works and how to use it to gain advantage. School students did it to me and they were wildly successful. You can blame what you think the source of your suffering is; or you can fix the issue. I tried blaming others for my experiences, it got me nowhere. I fortified myself mentally in the expectation of more attacks, and I became stronger.

I feel that I understand more about myself internally than most people I know. But I know that my knowledge is yet incomplete; and how really can an individual understand them self? I feel that it is cyclical and impossible. I don't think it is particularly practical to use your own mind to understand your mind . It's too self referential a process. The best you could achieve is that you might come closer to some understanding, but you will never have enough perspective to do it well.

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If I get lucky, and manage the balancing process well, I can use hangovers to gain dramatic increases in Judo ability, both when I try conventional Judo and my own bizarre style. I suspect that if I were hungover in my Shiai, I would have committed to using the drunken Judo defense to my opponents Uchi Mata. But that is not how it works. You don't get to cast your eyes over your past experiences and say "oh, that wouldn't have happened if I did X, or Y, or Z". It is the past; it is gone, there is no applicable "if". There is only now.

Conventional Judo uses rote learning and constant repetition to remove players thoughts from the process of successfully applying throws. When someone has trained enough, they no longer need the mental energy to identify when their techniques apply. Drunken Judo uses apathy. I did well in Tokai because I was going against skilled players that I felt I had no chance of beating by using normal Judo. I would bow someone on and be indifferent to the consequences that resulted. My options were "get thrown if you use usual Judo; most likely get thrown if you use drunken Judo". I suspect that was why I did better when I was hungover. I no longer cared what would happen. I let go of any sense of control over the situation. I lost all of my doubt and fear because I no longer felt any responsibility over it. I could never do drunken Judo when I wanted to throw my opponent. I needed to commit to move, but be indifferent to anything else. It was how I dealt with the embarrassment of being watched doing my thing; it was how I dealt with the level of commitment it took to allow other players to break my balance before I tried my own attacks.

Judo training is set up to create "muscle memory". What it does is it takes the ego out of a players technique. When a player has trained enough, they should be confident enough in the validity of their technique that they can rely on it without question. It sounds amazing; I have chased it and gotten nowhere near it. I don't know if I can do it. Also, the concept makes me feel a little uncomfortable. It all seems a bit like "duckspeak" for me. I don't feel comfortable about this approach for two reasons. 

Firstly;

Socrates

"The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being"

I feel that deferring to an exclusively mechanical approach to Judo is little different than the mechanical way in which parrots can speak. If I were to own a parrot and train it to talk, I could do this by using repetition. But it is just sound, not speech.  I can be envious of how well it speaks, but I will never try to learn how to talk from a parrot. I consider words more than just the performance of rote learned sounds or symbols. They are the vehicles of understanding. A parrot does not have an understanding of its language beyond "If I do this, then food happens". Even if it speaks perfectly, if all it is is the repetition of what a human being said to it verbatim, then there is no meaning in the parrot's words that the parrot has any grip on. And so I feel a parrot can speak but cannot communicate. If I were to listen to the parrot it is an act of communication between myself and the parrots trainer. I feel about Judo in a similar way. I want to understand Judo; not just know it. These are important to separate as concepts. I do not consider these to be completely opposite concepts. But I believe that they are different, and that the former is infinitely superior.

 

Part of the amazing opportunity of being human is advancing and developing your mind. Deliberately limiting it seems to rob you of that. If you focus on Judo as entirely consisting of a set, rigid list of physical movements there is little to distinguish you from any other coordinated organism. A bird can fly, it doesn't know or ask why. Monkeys can brachiate to a point where it resembles flying; but they don't know or ask why they can. And maybe after a lot of Uchi Komi over years I could throw my opponent in Uchi Mata after a successful combination technique, but if I don't ask why I can, then I don't think there is anything important separating this skill from the other examples I listed. I am not saying that I ignore the need for repetition in training; techniques must be practiced. But I am saying there is an important place in Judo for human thought. One of the few advantages, and by far the most advantageous adaptation humans have over all other lifeforms is the ability to think. Lots of people can do Judo. But they were only capable of doing so because someone first thought up Judo. This is why human beings can do it, all the repetition is secondary. This is why animals have coordination and human beings have Judo.

If I had to make a choice between the two, I would rather fail in trying to understand Judo than succeed in knowing Judo. I want to be a magician; not a conjurer.

Secondly;

I have tried the muscle memory approach to learning; it it was going to work for me it would have done so by now. I have spent more than double the hours in Uchi komi than some students I know who are much better than me. I spent 6 months where the only throw I tried to learn was Tai Otoshi. I am still incapable of it in Randoori. I guess I could invest more time. But by the time I catch up to where the other students are now; if they invest any time at all in training anything they do; they will still be ahead of me. I spent 7 years trying a normal conventional approach to Judo. I regularly get beaten by people who have trained in less than half as much time as I have. If I continue trying to learn as I have, I will need to expend more than double the amount of time as my opponent in training to be capable of throwing them. I believe this violates the very foundation of Judo. It's not efficient and the energy expenditure is enormous. More than anything else I hope that "coordination" and "Judo ability" are not synonymous. I have seen that another way is possible.

After 4 months of coming up with my own ideas I could wash through stronger players. One of my goals for drunken Judo was to get around Tokai players grips. Their Kumikata was completely unanswerable. Once I was capable of throwing people using drunken Judo entries; I no longer needed to break grips. I could use my body weight and my balance to roll through their arms. They tried to control me with the strength of their upper body; I countered it with my balance; body weight; and strength in my lower body. This works in Newaza as a way to attack Uke when they defend for Ude Hisigi Juji Gatame. I have taken this concept and applied it in standing techniques.

Also, by thinking about what training offered and why, I found out that just as my opponents sought to grip me; they also needed to grip their own training experience to apply against me. If you take a Judo player into a situation where their drilled techniques cannot apply, then you can sever the link between their experience and your own physical balance. I could break that grip without exerting much force at all. All it took was a few loose footsteps and a lolling head. Judo exploits physical balance. My ideas in drunken Judo expanded on that concept and also exploited mental balance. I think that is why a lunatic was the first person to come up with it. You have to know what it feels like to have your emotional foundations reefed out from underneath you, and then learn that that power only comes from your own reaction to it. You must understand that before you can learn how to make other players do that to themselves.

My major problem is that I relied on hangovers to dampen my inner thoughts, so I could become capable of applying my ideas. It was difficult to summon the necessary indifference without it. Occasionally I could move properly without being hungover but for the most part I really struggled to believe my ideas could work; and so I would get mentally strangled with doubt. And so more or less I am doing the same thing as what I feel is the weakness of rote learning memorization. I am impairing my ability to think, thus negating the advantage being human affords me. Ignoring my own qualms and inabilities about repetitive training I will die sooner than I need to if I keep drinking excessively. My own rantings aside; I am mortal and messing with my health. But the benefit of trying a different Judo by dodging repetitive training is that now I understand why I fail to achieve what I train. The weight of my ego is dragging me down.

So how do I address what happened to me in my Shiai? I felt doubt and fear when my opponent Uchi Mata-ed me. Then I wasted precious time and energy in my skull when I should have done something. If conventional training didn't work for me; then repetitively drilling drunken Judo techniques probably won't either. I don't want to have to use a hangover before I can be able to act on my own attacks. How do I override my own ego? How do I erode my inner voice impairing my ability? I feel finding the answer to this question will require a level of commitment I have never asked of myself before.

I anticipated that my first Shiai using my own techniques was going to be hard. How you feel and flow in Randoori is very different to Shiai. I got no voice from Obi Wan Kenobi this time, telling me to use the force. But I made a Dan grade work to get me; and I did it by violating most of the norms Judo has. I feel this implies some kind of understanding of what Judo is, I would not have been able to do that if I had not first tried to understand Judo and where it can be developed. A single Wazari is not particularly good; but it's something. I can improve and build on that.