I got tricked into doing Karate; not by my parents or peers, but by a gimmicky enrollment box a nearby dojo put up in a family friend’s restaurant. They plastered “Win a FREE Karate lessons” in gaudy colors next to photographs of overly excited children throwing rigid punches into the air. But at age seven, the combination of the word FREE and a lack of understanding about commercialism caught me.
Looking back, this may have been the first time I ever won anything. Prior to Karate, I lacked the natural athleticism and physical discipline to succeed at standard sports. On a soccer field, I became more fascinated with finding the animals living inside gopher holes. On a basketball court, height deficiency came into play. On a baseball field…actually, I rarely ever set foot on the field because I sat the whole time. This intrinsic hierarchy in team sports always displaced the bracket I fell into: the physically inferior. Despite what they say, being in team sports increased my self-consciousness. Karate fits my natural disposition a bit more.
Like any corporate martial arts school in the U.S., my first sensei was a lanky white college student with an eyelid piercing and a brown to blonde gradient of hair on his head. Like my father at the time, the smell stained onto his body made him an easily identifiable smoker. Our first “free” lesson consisted of an introduction to Martial Arts basics and the Smashing Pumpkins, (which ultimately became one of the first CDs I ever owned a few years later). Everything about him was undoubtedly improper for a professional setting.
This was my first introduction to martial arts – a kid who, by appearance, butchered the cultural integrity and symbolism behind the sport. I don’t even remember his name. Yet, in these distinct physical qualities that I can recall, the subconscious dichotomy between this kid’s demeanor and my structured life intrigued me to the extent that I stayed at that school for 12 more years. To think, it only took that one-month for some nameless memory to reconstruct my entire life.
