Personal Best

This morning Rey called to inform me that in addition to picking me up to go for our usual day at the dojo in San Francisco, we would be performing at the Fil-Am festival in Daly City afterward. Daly City has a large Filipino population and holds a Fil-Am festival every year, with various booths, activities and performances - music, martial arts, dance. Last year there was no stage, just a bare area on the floor. The green room was wherever we stopped to put our stuff down - part of the beauty of traveling light.

The day was fraught for a drive into the City, though. President Obama AND Kanye West were just leaving downtown as we were trying to traverse it; the Blue Angels were performing for Fleet Week, and traffic reports were warning to expect major delays as crowds fought for the best viewing locations. Oddly enough, traffic was much better than usual and we slid past Market Street with nary a presidential motorcade in sight.

This year the festival was in the same gym but had a stage set up (way down at the end where you see the three guys are standing. You can't hear it, but they're rapping in Tagalog and English). 

Being on the stage makes it a little easier for people to see what you're doing; having weapons go flying off into the audience every so often helps keep them alert. The occasional scream of pain from the stage is also a great way to win back an audience's wandering attention and often results in additional applause. However, I am particularly pleased to report that this was the first performance I have done where I did not get injured. This is a real personal best.

Having written that down, I realize it will mean nothing to most people. Let me put it another way: I've been doing martial arts of one kind or another for about a quarter of a century. At a certain point I stopped being motivated by gaining rank, since it was really training I was after. I often wonder how good my training is, since I can't devote nearly as much time and energy to it as I would like. However, today for the first time since I began in this art five years ago I managed to take on my teacher without getting injured. It may be a fluke, but it's still my personal best so far.

For our efforts we got meal tickets to the assembled food trucks. Roll Revolution promised something called a mac and bacon roll, which appealed to my Berkeley sensibilities and love of cheese. It also had the shortest line. This is what I got:

In my defense, I would like to point out that I had gotten up early that morning to make a very healthy slow cooker vegan casserole with stewed atragalus root, shiitake mushroom, yam, winter squash chunks, etc. However, the salty fries with ketchup on them were just what the doctor of divine dining experiences ordered. Those little eggroll-looking things actually had mac and cheese with flecks of bacon inside and were insanely delicious. The little pot of yellow is actually warm, melted cheese food product, which sent this child of Velveeta over her own gustatory waterfall. For desert, there was that long thing wrapped in white. It was basically cinammon, sugar and carbohydrates - sort of a snickerdoodle gone wrong. Called a churro or something.

Whatever it was, I had earned it.

After hanging out for a while after our performance, we headed back to the East Bay.  Traffic on the highway was strangely smooth for a Saturday afternoon. On Highway 80 coming up on the bridge to the East Bay, the Blue Angels were going directly over us. Being the passenger, I got some really good looks as the planes screamed overhead. For one of the passes they were low enough and I was in the right position to see just how close together they fly those planes. Let's just say it was extremely alarming and made me want to jump up and down and shout.