Never Tell Me the Odds

It's been a while since I've told a harrowing Kung Fu tale. Lately we've been working on grab escapes (what to do when someone is trying to drag you off to the molester van) and things haven't been terribly exciting.

Tonight we got to try out our new found freedom tactics in the circle of truth and wisdom. Wait, let me rephrase that. (Apply movie trailer announcer voice here) The Circle of Truth and Wisdom—where everyone is no one, and we all get, er, grabbed. Wait, never mind, that sounds awful. I lost some air to my brain earlier, so maybe that's the problem.

Really though, we all stood in a circle and put one sucker, er, I mean victim—no wait, maybe student is the best word—in the middle. The soon to be assaulted gets to sand in the circle, close their eyes, get into a horse stance (nice, bent knees), keep their back straight and hold both hands out in front of them in fists.

This is referred to as the “Kill Me” stance.

No, I'm not joking. What's more terrifying is the fact that all of the higher ranks will just drop into this stance the moment a Sensei says, “Kill me stance.” We do it without thinking! If that information got into the wrong hands, all of our upper ranks would be dead in about three seconds. Especially if someone had a projectile weapon. Or a flame thrower. Which is kind of the same thing I guess.

Sorry, distracted. Back to the circle. We've got someone in the kill me stance, and Sensei picks someone else, shows them how to grab the, er, victim and sets them loose.

The white belts get nice, easy grabs like, “Oh, look, I'm going to grab your right wrist with my left hand and drag you away. What will you do?” None of this is said, of course, but that's the unspoken dialogue of the scene. Then the white belt wriggles a bit, maybe throws a punch and perhaps even remembers one of the techniques we've learned and gets out of it. Yay!

Well, uh, being the only black belt in class today, Sensei thought it would be funny to make things a little more challenging for me. One kid (a brown belt) had two people grab him at once. Me? Two wasn't good enough, apparently, so I got three. One of them being Sensei.

Dang Sensei, he put me in a head lock, and two other people each grabbed a hand so I couldn't do anything about it. All this at the same moment so I didn't have a chance to get out of anything before they locked down. First off, Sensei is like a bull dog, or a pit bull or whatever. He latches on and doesn't let go. So my head is being squished in half with his forearm grinding into my cheek bone (he didn't go for my neck, because this hurts way more) and both of my arms are otherwise engaged.

Not sure how I actually got out of it. I kicked something, pretty hard, and wriggled one arm free. The moment it was out I started flailing and hit someone in the face. Oops. Sorry. I ended up pulling on fingers and birthing my head back out of the head lock. I've got rug burn on my face from Sensei's gi. I'm sure there's a better way to get out of it, but at the time all I could think was “flail” and “My hair!”