Not In This Dojo

As the sun sets on my court-mandated, rehabilitative, community program that I playfully refer to as cocktail college, I thought that I would reflect on a discussion that we had last Monday. The exercise was to write down some things that you enjoyed as a child before you started drinking to assist you in tapping into that joy of life that you had as a child without involving booze. It's to prove to you that you can have a good time without boozing. You then have to pick one or a few of the things that you wrote down and try to do them in your near future or day-to-day life. Tag or a BB gun war, anyone?

Sadly, my list of things I did as a child were predominately things that I do now. There were some throwbacks in there, though, such as sidehacking and muddogging. Those would probably get me in trouble or maimed nowadays. Sidehacking is basically hanging as much of your body outside of the passenger window of a car while your friend drives erratically. Muddogging is taking snow toys to a hill of mud in the rain and treating it as if it were snow. Muddogging is brilliant.

So, we've got this venture capitalist guy in the group and he went down his list. He tries to be funny, but it always fails completely, so it's a tough read usually. Anyway, he went down his list of like chewing wood, eating Necco wafers and whatever and then said "doing karate." Motherfuckin' karate. The balls on the fucker. He then followed it up with karate as being the thing that he would like to get back into, "but it's complicated" he said.

I perked up and asked "Did you kill your sensei?" and waited for an answer.

He didn't answer. It was like he really may have killed his sensei, which we all know is never accepted in any dojo. Mercy? Not in this dojo. Failure? Not in this dojo. Killing your sensei? Not in anyone's dojo.

So now you know about proper dojo etiquette.