“OK folks, welcome back to the game. It’s the bottom of the ninth, Home Team is at bat, the bases are loaded, with two outs. Home is down, the score stands at 3-0 Opponents, and this next batter needs to dish up a miracle.”
Last weekend I flew down to San Francisco. The reason for my taking yet another hilariously short and expensive little trip was that I was enrolled in a seminar and retreat offered by Bay Area Model Mugging (BAMM). [Bay Area Model Mugging is now Impact Bay Area, and is located at http://www.impactbayarea.org/.] BAMM is a non-profit organization offering self-defense instruction primarily for women, but infrequently they also offer a course for men. BAMM’s course content is geared towards addressing self-defense issues which may be encountered in everyday life, as opposed to teaching martial arts which may be impressive in a structured setting but can sometimes be of little use in a down-and-dirty street brawl.
I first heard of Model Mugging last fall during a fruitless three-year search for a useful short-term self-defense course. Alaska Impact Model Mugging offers only women’s courses, due to the lack of demand for men’s courses. The main reason is that it takes a pretty big guy to be able to admit to himself that he needs to learn self-defense, as compared with the much easier task of admitting to a wish to learn and compete for the black belt in whatever martial arts discipline. Searching the web turned up BAMM’s site last spring, which unfortunately listed a Men’s Basics course which had already taken place. I left them a message asking that I be notified if and when they scheduled a new Men’s Basics retreat.
In early summer BAMM emailed me to announce that they were scheduling a Men’s Basics course during the weekend of October 18-20, 2002. $100 was due to hold a place for me in the class, with $565 remaining for the tuition, but with a $30 discount if I completed payment by September 18. The ticket FAI-SFO-FAI ran another $525 or so, and I booked it to allow arrival the day before the retreat and return the day after, to give some slop time in this uncertain age of air travel.
I had several reasons to take a self-defense course. First, as I have noted in previous entries, if I marry in the future, the odds are high that my lifetime partner will be a divorcee. Few divorces are completely amicable, and a fair number of them leave an ex-husband feeling as if someone stole a prized possession from him, and in a few of those cases the ex will take extreme steps to retrieve that possession - a situation for which I should be prepared. Second, there were some issues in my past which I needed to address. Third, repercussions from those issues were causing problems in my current life; for example, in a recent survey I noted that “I hide: my home, to keep it as a safe place.”
So, last Thursday 10/17 I left around noon from Fairbanks and arrived about 11:00 PM in San Francisco, and rode a series of buses down to Redwood City, where the seminar was to be held.
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