I spent a lot of time experiencing things that pattern-matched to tropes that were goddamn ridiculous, realizing the actual...
I spent a lot of time experiencing things that pattern-matched to tropes that were goddamn ridiculous, realizing the actual experience was actually like that, and accepting that actual experience was just goddamn ridiculous. Highlights:
1) I hit my head and got amnesia once. It works exactly like all the cheesy plot devices.
2) When I lived in Echo Park it wasn’t even a rough area really. The first guy I remember welcoming me to the neighborhood did end up shot in his car but that was a weird case, and I did see the tags change as Echo Parque and Big Top Locos and some other punks struggled in the aftermath but feh, boys’ play.
Anyway it was mostly an area that used to be rough so the guys who had grown up there still had some street to them ;and I used to watch ridiculous kung fu movies on channels like 57 and 17 and 29 back before they were UPN and WB and even FOX and I thought it was ridiculous the trope where local toughs would show up at the dojo to challenge the students
And I was going to a dojo there and then, boxing/American Kempo/BJJ and this actually happened on the semi-regular - not like they came in gangs with sticks but they’d swagger in individually to show the fancy boys what’s what - and the students would win against some tough beefy dudes for the same in-the-movies reason that we actually knew what we were doing
(gym rats especially. they’d have strong muscles but only punch with a few of them, while the we punched with everything between the toes and the knuckles. anyway, you realized they weren’t used to punching people who wouldn’t stay there while the punch arrived and worse, would interrupt them by punching back)
I wasn’t there for it but there was this one time this wild-haired scraggly-clothed ranting older dude showed up claiming to be a genius black-belt and wanting to challenge our sensei, and the issue was
A) we were close enough to downtown LA (and the concentration of social services that produced Skid Row) that the more ambitious crazies were a regular feature of the street landscape
BUT
B) we were also not far from American Kempo’s “hometown” of Pasadena, where (stereotypically eccentric) CalTech types and JPL rocket scientists were overrepresented as students
and people could not tell how to properly categorize him
Don’t leave us hanging, man.
Seriously, I hate to necro old posts but I gots to know how this ends.
We were getting ready to start a class and the sensei told him to come back later and afaik he never did. It’s kind of an anticlimax.