Mountain Spirits of Korea

Here is a nice article about the mountain spirits of Korea.  These hero-spirit-shaman-deities have a bit in common with the founder of religious Daoism, Zhang Daoling.  The author, David Mason, has a book out on his visits to sacred mountains in Korea and a nice, somewhat quirky website.

When Singing is like Fighting

I may be having an effect on George Xu.  Recently he compared singing on a stage to fighting.  He said the first time a person goes on stage before an audience they usually hunch up their shoulders look at the ground and sing in a soft squeaky voice.  After years of training and performing when a singer goes on stage before a large audience, it just gets them excited.  The bigger the audience the more heart they put into it.  This is because they have trained their spirit/mind to match the size of the audience, a bigger audience  will automatically produce a louder voice with greater projection and grander gestures.

With fighting it's the same.  The beginning fighter tenses his shoulders up even before the enemy makes contact.  He shrinks and defends, he freezes and thinks of escape.  However, with experience, the fight becomes a moment of excitement.  The greater the challenge, the greater the excitement.  "Oh, look a big guy.  Great!"  "Oh, he has a knife. Even better!"  "What's this? he has a friend with an iron bar coming too?  Wow, my lucky day!"

The fighter automatically expands his spirit/mind to match the size of the challenge.  The bigger the challenge, the more power and agility the fighter will use.  It is thrilling and exhilarating.

Readers may be thinking, "What? Is he talking to me?  I never get into actual fights so how could I learn to turn fear into excitement? And why would I?  I have a mortgage to pay!  I have to drive my kids to roller derby lessons!"

But this misses the point.  For a song to have meaning it must include its audience.  Whether we are singing to our shower head or a stadium of 10,000, the song has to be for someone (or something).  If you are singing to your lover about a bluebird you have to include both of them in the song.  You have to feel both of them viscerally.  To really get good at singing a song you have to emotionally embody it over and over.  After a time the emotions aren't surprising or overwhelming but they can still be exhilarating.  They are still real.

Fighting is the same.  In fact, all movement training works the same way.  If a person is running fast down a hill through the woods spontaneously dodging trees, leaping logs and avoiding pot holes, he is not going to be thinking about body alignment or ankle flexion.  That person is going to have his mind "outside" of his body.  His mind will be spatially excited and agile.  The same is true if you are training in a quiet park, a walled garden, or a serene dojo.  Or rather it should be.  The best quality movement training uses a totally quiet, relaxed body with a wildly active mind.

So now go back and do your cute little qigong exercises or peaceful taijiquan form and imagine you are on the edge of a thousand foot abyss.  Imagine you are surrounded by hungry tigers.  Imagine you just jumped out of an airplane and you are in free-fall.  And don't just imagine it, feel it-- be afraid, be very afraid.

The Better Robots Become, The More We Become Like Robots

Check out Martial Development's reverse co-evolution video essay.  Tai Chi Robot Showdown!

(note:  Make sure you watch all three.)

Turn off the Thumbs!

They say we use only a small portion of our brain, and that of the small part we do use, about 90% is devoted to the functioning of our eyes, tongue and thumbs.  I'm not sure of the actual percentages of brain mass we are talking about here but thumb control uses up one of the biggest chunks.  Thumbs are a huge source of tension because they are full of impulses.  Thumbs carry impulses, intentions, desires, giving, taking, and holding on, they are the root of acquisition.  We use our thumbs for almost everything.  No other species really has thumbs.  If you’ve ever done rock climbing you know that you need thumbs for tying knots and setting anchors, but for climbing itself they don’t add much.  I’ve been cutting back on thumb usage lately and I’m functioning well at about 50% of normal thumbing action.

I’ve also been napping and sleeping with my thumbs folded into my palms and wrapped by my fingers.  This is the first type of fist babies make.  Martial artists never make this type of fist because they say you will brake your thumb if you try to punch something with your thumb on the inside.  It is however used in daoyin for 'closing the channels,' but I’m not sure exactly what that means.  Sometimes meditation itself is described as 'closing the channels' too.

There are so many inventions that fall under the title meditation.  Often they are described as something one does or doesn’t do with the mind.  The problem is that mind has so many possible meanings, heck mind is often thought of as the source of meaning.  In the Daoist tradition I practice and teach, the term dantain is used to transmit the method of meditation.  Dantain literally means ‘cinnabar field.’  It is a spacial description.  The dantian is the space of meditation, it is like a giant square stage (with no corners) in which or on which 'experience' performs.  This method of meditation is simply a posture of stillness.  This stillness is defined less by any particular experience of mind or body, it simply rests on the stability of the dantian stage.  Thus no priority is given to thought or image, sound or sensation.  No priority is given to the heart or the head, nor to the inside or the outside.  The spleen, a passing car, and one’s thumbs are all doing meditation.

You read that right, thumbs meditate. In fact, this seems like a good way to explain what Chinese internal martial arts are.  In taijiquan, baguazhang, and xingyiquan we also begin with the dantian as a stage.  Our bodies move on a platform of stillness, a platform of limitless stability.  Normal activity is turned off.  Any localized impulse is turned off.  Intentions, desires, concepts, and visions, are not rejected anymore than movement itself is rejected--but they are also not fed, they simply come and go.  The method itself is an experiment.

In this experiment all experience takes place on this ritualized mind stage, which we call the dantian. The dantian is not a location in the body, it is not a center.  It is a space larger than the body, usually quite a bit larger.  If it is smaller than the whole body or even the same size as the body, then whole body movement will be impossible, relaxed integration will be impossible.  The mind here is posited to be a spacial experience rather than a perspective.  A perspective of the stage could move from the performers, to a prop, to the sky above, or to an audience member.  Whereas space remains constant and stable.  Focusing the mind on either a technique or a part of the body disrupts the stability of this dantian.  A disrupted dantian doesn’t disappear, it just becomes focused and full.  Fullness in movement is like a fantasy in meditation.  A fantasy requires effort and focus to maintain.  Maintaining a fantasy for an extended period of time is exhausting and it tends to harden our views, leaving us less flexible.  In fact, fullness and fantasy are the same thing.  They are like noise.  There is nothing wrong with noise, noise just obscures everything else and leaves us feeling burned out.  When perception is obscured we have fewer options.  For a martial artist, being empty on a platform of stillness is a state of potent openness--dark power-- like an owl flying in the night.

Thumbs are symbolic of preferences.  The thumbs up button on Facebook is truly the antithesis of meditation.  In martial arts, tension in the the thumb is like a preference which won’t go away.  A lingering desire to control the future.  Thumb work has become such a huge part of our modern lives.  How can we claim stillness, or emptiness, or awareness, or even relaxation if our thumbs are full of impulses, efforts and desires, full of half cooked stratagies, misunderstood text messages, and unexamined preferences?
I say empty your thumbs.  Turn off your thumbs.

Ling

The top Character is Ling

It is with trepidation and excitement that I begin this post. The Chinese term ling is a pivotal taboo concept in North Asian cosmology.  Ling can be translated very roughly as power harnessed from the unseen world.  The character is made by writing rain yu above the character wu, which has three trance-mediums with their mouths open.  Like many taboo subjects it is not the actual word which is taboo, it is the context which matters.  For comparison, the word money by itself is not taboo in English, but discussing personal financial data and decisions is.  Talking about sex is very taboo, but it’s OK to do it with your therapist and it is expected that you will do it in a socially approved way with your children.
Ling has many common usages and I believe it would be easy for a non-native yet fluent speaker of Chinese to miss their origins-- which are in the fear of unseen forces.  Ling is a common word.  In popular usage ling means agile or dexterous and potent or effective.  It can also mean intelligent, clever or tricky.  It means spirit, spiritual, mysterious, elf, and it means a coffin with a person in it.

No two languages or societies have exactly the same taboos but there are enough overlaps that English can be helpful here.  We have the expressions ‘a smooth talker,’ ‘slippery fingers,’ or ‘nimble fingers,’ all of which describe someone who is good at stealing but can also be used to describe admirable qualities in a person.  Someone who makes a ‘killing’ on the stock market can be described as intelligent, agile or ‘sharp as a tack’ because we see him as wielding and manipulating forces other people don’t see or understand.   If you get in trouble with the law you may need a lawyer representing you who is both clever and tricky, perhaps one who can call in favors from other attorneys or officials.  All of these qualities in Chinese can be described as ling, the ability to harness powers from the unseen world.

My dictionary also has this sweetness which will appeal to horror film fans everywhere, “when a television remote control fails it is do to ling.”  The entry does not state to whom this ling is assigned, but presumably it does not belong to the person who is failing to operate the remote.  It is a mysterious unseen force.

Talking about ghosts is taboo in China, rather then say “ghosts” people often refer to them as “our good brothers.”  A ghost (see this article on ghosts) is an intention which is too weak to resolve itself.  These unresolved intentions linger about the living looking for enough qi to complete themselves.  When a person dies, most of what she wants, her will, dies with her.  But obviously some of it lingers on.  That’s why we write a last will and testament, we want to avoid having our intentions distorted after we die.  After we die our will lingers in things we have said to others, in things we have written and in how our actions are remembered by the living.  Without the ‘help’ of the living our intentions would of course disappear.  Certain types of intentions can be passed on to others as strange or negative behavior or personality traits.  For instance a parent who has a traumatic experience with a dog can easily pass on that fear to a child who has had no such experience.  Sometimes quirks are passed on without any obvious content.  In the graphic novel Maus, the son of a Holocaust survivor is obsessive about collecting matches. Even after he learns that his father’s habit of collecting matches developed because matches were a traded commodity in the death camps the son still can’t stop himself. His kitchen drawers are full of match books.  This is a ghost, in the form of a behavior.  These ghosts are often surrounded by intensely conflicting emotions and strange behavior.  Not knowing the reason behind a strange behavior can make it even harder to stop.  Lingering conflicting emotions which have no apparent explanation are often passed on to our children.  Humans are full of weird quirks we inherit from our families.

If I understand it correctly, Chinese religious custom thinks of negative influences from the dead as ghosts, and positive influences as ancestors.  But the principle is the same, and if we could transcend the taboo I suspect it would also be obvious that some positive lingering influence comes from outside the family and some negative influence comes from our direct ancestors.
Most of what I’ve said about ghosts or ancestors up to this point can easily be re-worded into psychological language:  Ghosts are unresolved conflicting emotions which linger on after whatever caused them is no longer there.

However, to understand the concept of ling we must remember that Chinese cosmology does not posit a separation between spirit and substance.  There are no outside agents, all things and events are mutually self-re-creating.  Chinese cosmology understands all thought, for instance, as having some substance tied to it.  Heaven is tied to earth, the living are tied to the dead.  Imagination needs a body to birth it.  When you leave your heart with someone, it’s not just a promise without substance, there is a component of it which is biological-- even if we may not be able to see it with a microscope or a blood test yet.

The substance people leave behind when they die is ling.  Intense commitments, pledges, and contracts are often sealed with blood.  When I was a kid and we played “Cowboys and Indians” we would sometimes make cuts on our wrists and squeeze the wounds together pledging, “We are now Indian blood brothers forever.”  A traditional Chinese contract between sworn brothers requires a smear of deer's blood across the upper lip of each brother.  There is a brilliant depiction of this in the movie “Temptation of a Monk,” about a general who is betrayed during the Tang Dynasty and has to go on the run.  The blood in all these cases is ling.

If you want to make a love potion in Africa, Europe, Asia or America, you need a locket of the persons hair for the spell.  The hair is ling.  Voodoo dolls are ling, so are animal sacrifices and collections of scalps captured in battle.

Every culture has notions of pollution and most cultures have the idea that certain professions are polluting not just to the person doing the job but to his or her decendents as well.  In India, Japan, and Korea butchers and people who worked with leather, and people who worked with human waste belonged to hated outsider castes.  They were pariahs. The word pariah is a South Asian word for a drummer.  (It’s not clear whether this is because drummers played on goat skin drums or because they were musicians.)  In China, leather, human waste, and meat processing were all polluting and the people who worked with these substances were degraded, but they were not pariahs.  They were socially above professional musicians and actors who were truly pariah outsiders, literally “mean people.”  No one seems to know exactly what was polluting about actors, my best guess after reading Chinese outcasts: discrimination and emancipation in late imperial China by Anders Hansson, and everything else I could get my hands on, is that it was a combination of two types of pollution.  First, actors had a degree of sexual freedom and probably took money for sex some of the time.  Second, they were obligated to perform certain expert ritual functions such as exorcisms.

Lingering ghosts are attracted to sexual activity just like they are attracted to fighting.  Lingering ghosts need sustenance to keep on lingering and the possibility of spilled blood is a bit like food for ‘hungry’ conflicting emotions.  I may be walking out on a dangerous limb here but it seems like the strong moods associated with menstruation are traditionally framed as the spirits of ancestors showing up once a month with a longing to continue their unresolved ambitions through a new birth.  “Wasted” semen probably had a similar association.  Sex has the potential to produce abortions or illegitimate children.  It was of course common for women to die in childbirth and common for children to die before the age of 5.  And venereal disease may have contributed something too.  All that pleasure we associate with sex mixes in a potent way with all that conflicting emotion and sucks in ghosts like nobodies business.

Musicians and actors, as far as I can tell, were viewed as having a certain amount of sexual freedom, which made them popular and admired, but also contributed to their status as outcasts.  It appears that they were often involved in sex for money or sex by obligation as an aspect of entertainment services required of them by regional authorities or powers.  Musicians and actors are masters of creating and manipulating mood.  In an animist worldview mood is sometimes viewed as the presence of gods--and the opposite is also true--the presence of the gods is sometimes reified by the acknowledgement of particular moods ("We're all crying, the gods must be here!").  All of this infuses the most potent tools of an actor with ling, masks come immediately to mind, but I suspect that many implements of the profession had some taint of this ling.

So ling is the polluted substance itself, the ability to control unseen forces associated with it, and the power which that ability confers. A powerful Daoist priest is said to have ling.  I suspect ritual implements also contain ling, but can be cleaned.  Both purification and emptying practices presumably would remove ling.  Ritual action, be it for exorcism, a funeral or some other purpose, can be understood as the manipulation of ling.  There are at least two ways of looking at.  Ling, as spiritual power, can be accumulated to wield against weaker ling.  Or apophatically by completely emptying oneself of ling, the conflicting emotions and deranged powers of ghosts and demons have no place to sink their tentacles and there for they can be controlled.  My understanding is that control is not a goal unto itself. The ritual helps ghosts and demonic forces come to completely resolved deaths--or helps them find their way to a realm of safety where they will no longer cause harm to humans.

One of the mechanisms of exorcism is to either destroy ling, render it neutral or brake its link to the living.  It is ling which is sealed inside pickle jars during exorcisms.

In the realm of martial arts I’ve heard George Xu talk about the importance of fighting with ling, which he translates as intelligence.  He describes this intelligence as instantaneous, spontaneously expressed knowledge about the best way to fight.  It is fighting with the mind but it is not a thought process.  It is the ability to wield all available factors like the direction of the sun, variations in the surface of the ground, changing perceptions, leverage, momentum, gravity, sound, emotion, etc...  If you saw the recent Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. he fights entirely with “intelligence,” 007 does it, and so does the character Michael in the TV series “Burn Notice.”  Of course, on the silver screen we see it in slow motion with narration, in real life it happens faster than the human mind can comprehend.  So ling means potency and prowess too.

Gangsters acquire wealth and power by killing, stealing and subordinating people to them.  The unseen forces they manipulate are all tainted with ling.  Con-men manipulate by tapping into our conflicting emotions and our unfulfilled desires, both of which are traditionally framed as the influence of lingering ghosts.  I’ve recently been reading Actors Are Madmen by A.C Scott.  Traditionally whoever was in power had a close relationship with the great performers of their region because performers were necessary for ritual and they provided entertainment for all those important banquets which seal agreements between men of prowess and power (Ling again).  Scott describes Tu Yueh-Sheng a gangster who practically ran Shanghai and controlled all the theaters too.  He was a master at manipulating ling.  Such people are also often known for being extremely generous protectors of those who subordinate to them.  Scott says it was known in Shanghai that if your watch was stolen in the morning you could have it back by evening if you went to the right people, Tu tolerated no competition.  But of course getting your watch back would taint you with a little bit of his ling.  When a person like this dies, people make shrines to him.  At first it is to placate his ghost, but over time people will come to the shrine to ask for favors, a new bicycle, a laptop, a raise.  The ling of a gangster takes a particularly long time to resolve because people don’t forget them, we still talk about Al Capone and Jessie James.

Reishi mushrooms (lingzhi) have ling in the name because they suck in such complex qi spontaneously form the environment and they are blood red.
Lingshu is the name of the second half of the Han Dynasty classic of medicine, it is usually translated Spiritual Pivot.  Here it refers to the ability to perceive the changing nature of an illness and all of it’s causes-- to find the acupuncture points and the time of day to use them which will reverse the illness with the least harm.

Fengshui is not a tool for redecorating your apartment. The purpose of fengshui is to limit the influence of the unresolved dead.  It is the manipulation of ling.

One of the great justifications for anthropology is the notion that in our attempt to learn about another culture we mainly end up learning about ourselves.  This is particularly true when taking on a subject which is taboo in another culture--both because we end up understanding our own taboos better and because our ‘other culture’ informants are particularly unreliable when it comes to discussing taboos.

Wealth accumulates almost entirely through commerce but kings and bandits accumulate it through violence and taxation.  Marx called money “dead labor.”  I don’t really care what Marx thought but it does help explain some taboos.  Marx was restating a common notion of his time in order to make a distinction between money and capital.  Marx’s idea of money was wrong, all money is also capital.  All money represents the value of an exchange which is an extremely complex calculation which factors in all previous exchanges of goods and services.  Money is a steaming pile of ling.

Chinese Imperial magistrates enlisted yamen runners and other toughs to serve warrants, bring in criminals, guard jails and torture suspects. Yamen did not get paid by the court, they got all their money from bribes.  They were also a degraded caste, not as low as actors but low enough that their children were forbidden to marry a commoner or take a civil or military exam.

Exquisite weapons probably accumulate ling too.  Wars were often commemorated with exorcisms and individual soldiers sometimes sought exorcism to deal with the lingering conflicting emotions of battle.  Fighting in wars must have been polluting, but interestingly it was not a polluting profession.  A soldier could reach the highest levels of society through marriage, adult adoption and promotion.

One of the things that makes martial arts so fun is the lively mix of danger and power.  Of course it is about ling. It is about the manipulation of unseen forces, extreme emotions, extraordinary agility, vigor, sensitivity, and surprise.  It is about the possibility of death, guilt, longing, fear, and triumph.

At this point my readers would be forgiven for wondering if there is anything that doesn’t mean ling.  Terms central to Chinese cosmology like ling, qi, jing, jin, shen, yi, xin, de, etc...developed by accumulating layers meaning.  Most people did not read or write or speak the same dialect as the villages in the next valley, they weren’t making distinctions between “characters” in a dictionary.

This language openness has at times been blamed for the retardation of science in China.  Perhaps, but it should also be given credit for preserving a very dynamic world-view which is now giving the rest of the world a much more open idea of what a human body is and what that body is capable of.

Winning Links

Two quick links for your enjoyment.

The League of Extraordinary Dancers is a hot new series.  Younger men may not realize just how revolutionary this is, but in my day dance wasn't very cool for men.  It has been a long fight to bring great male dancers up to the superhero status they deserve, but I think we are winning.

Some people in the U.S. Military seem to really understand the role the military has in shaping all of American society, and they are taking acupuncture very seriously.  This is going to be great for business!

Golden Bell vs. Iron T-Shirt

Hammering a Gong

At the recent Daoism Today conference in LA, in addition to presenting my unfinished paper, I did a participatory demonstration of many of the elements of Northern Shaolin, daoyin, taijiquan, and baguazhang which are theatrical, and appear to be connected to exorcistic rituals.  Most of the responses were positive and encouraging.  I did the demonstration on the first day of the 4 day conference so I had lots of time to respond to peoples comments and to hear suggestions.  Zhou Xuanyun is a Daoist priest/monk who is married and lives in Boston.  He describes himself as Zhengyi (Orthodox Unity) but he was trained on Wudang Shan which is a center of Quanzhen (Perfect Reality) monasticism and martial arts.  His comment, which he made through an anthropologist, was that he didn't understand how I could practice both Daoist (taijiquan, baguazhang) and Buddhist (Shaolin) styles of practice simultaneously--wouldn't the training methods undermine each other?

My first response was that my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying, practiced theater, Shaolin, taijiquan, and baguazhang.  The anthropologists loved this answer because finding an actual person who embodied both traditions and saw no contradiction in practicing them both is their gold standard.  The anthropologist view is that the continuity of culture is unbroken.  To say continuity or tradition is broken is to apply some external idea of purity to a culture which never had it.  So actual informants are king.  I may not be doing them justice but I think that is the gist of their view.  I tend to see the idea that Shaolin (Buddhist) and Taijiquan (Daoist) would need to be kept separate as a contemporary political contrivance.  But I must add here that the anthropologists are doing a wonderful job of gathering detailed accounts of living and recently passed Daoists. This is fantastic stuff.  (More on this in a future post.)

Hammerng by hand

Zhou's challenge is still serious.  He is right that the practices seem different and sometimes contradictory in methodology.  Teaching a lot of Shaolin does disrupt my bagua and taiji practices.  But I think this has less to do with method and more to do with the type of trance and energy expenditure necessary to teach kids classes.  I might just as well ask, how can a person do Daoist practice in Boston?  Isn't the chaos of urban America too much?  I would hope that the answer is no, disruptions are not enough to negate strongly held commitments.

Historically speaking, I could spin this argument a lot of different ways but taking the time right now would be too much disruption of my own practice.  Instead, I can make the argument simply and quickly.

One of the founders of the Boxer Rebellion (Yi He Quan) was a martial artist famous for his "Golden Bell" practice.  This practice was said to be the original basis for what became the much derided Boxer Rebellion claim of invincibility to bullets.  Golden Bell is still a common form of conditioning.  The term conditioning here means a method of developing resistance to, or protection from, strikes to the body.  It is a kind of toughness.

Tuning a gong

The other common type of body conditioning is called "Iron T-Shirt."  Golden Bell and Iron T-Shirt are good stand-ins for the larger argument between the internal practices of taiji and bagua on the one hand, and the external practices of Shaolin on the other; Golden Bell is internal, Iron T-Shirt is external.

The methodological difference between inner/outer or Shaolin/Wudang (Buddhist/Daoist) is resolved by looking at the convergence of these two practices.  Iron T-Shirt is a process of rubbing, pounding, massaging, scraping and hitting the surface of the torso.  Over time it makes one tougher and more resistant to strikes by thickening the surface, strengthening the bones, and desensitizing one to the shock of being struck.  Over time the differentiation between outer toughness and inner softness becomes stronger and more prominent.  At that point the process begins to reverse itself.  The external surface becomes quiet while the inner softness becomes more lively.  One no longer fears strikes to the surface because the differentiation of a lively, soft interior makes it is easy to move the vulnerable inner organs out of the way.

Golden Bell works by the opposite methodology.  It starts from the inside.  One relaxes and empties the torso of all tension, initially testing the torso for uniformity as a container of qi, like casting a bell, or tuning a gong.  The density of the surface of the bell must be uniform, and the interior of the bell must be free of tension, imperfections or obstructions.  Over time, the differentiation of inner liveliness and outer stillness becomes more distinct.  Once this distinction is achieved it is tested the same way Iron T-Shirt begins, with rubbing, pounding and strikes to the torso.  If the process has been completed correctly strikes to the quiet relaxed surface of the torso do not disturb the internal organs because they can be easily moved out of the way.

Learning martial arts, whether internal or external is always a disheveled process.  No two teachers use exactly the same methods.  External and internal methods are both defined by long lists of preliminary, basic, advanced, and extra-curricular experiments or exercises.  Two different schools rarely produce the same fruition, regardless of whether they share the same "internal" or "external" designation.

I see the fruition of martial arts as a type of freedom.  People are very nearly robots, our actions are usually predictable and automatic.  Martial arts training, both internal and external, is a way to become unglued from our robot nature.  Whether we call that robot "inner" or "outer" doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

(more on gongs, here and here)

Bruce Lee Puts Himself in an Opera Context

My vacation at home will continue (family stuff) for a bit so I've decided to go on a blogging spree. It has been really good to just take a break from teaching any big classes and from the crazy push of ideas I put myself through in the run up to the Daoism Today conference in LA last month.
To start off here is Bruce Lee's first Hollywood screen test. The video speaks for itself, anyone who does xingyi dragon or bagua high leg turns will recognized those movements when he is asked to show a bit of Chinese Opera. He falls short of actually explaining gongfu in the context of theater, but clearly he his pitching the animal qualities of movement as well as the human. Then he gives the classic explanation from the Daodejing of water as applied to martial arts.

Vacationing at Home

Been vacationing at home for the last week and a half.  Whatever it is that holds "me" together is unraveling.  Gone on a no wheat, no rice, no potatoes diet--experimenting with all the great fruit and vegetables in season.  Now, slowly going down a list of things to dispatch and discard.
It's a lot easier to walk in the clouds when you don't have somewhere to be.  It's even easier with this new coat I picked up on ebay.

And these retro-shoes--Net 80's, they started making again.

All good, but that which is closest to the skin matters most.  Drawstring boxer briefs from Cottonique.

Uncle!

OK, after 30 years of trying to explain that Kung fu is not Karate, I give up!
I have yet to see Jackie Chan's new "Karate Kid," but I'm tempted to write my review before seeing it--based on the trailer which I have seen more than 15 times.
But I'll spare you. Here is a spoof of the trailer!