A Malaysian guy joined our practice at the park last Sunday, and we ended up practicing tuishou together. His movements puzzled me, his hands making little jabs at me instead of being used to push. It seemed to me that he wanted to hit me instead of push me, but when I asked if he had a boxing background, he told me that he’d studied ba-gua before. I got used to his style eventually, though; it was just a matter of taking these predilections into account. I told him he should practice with Little Mountain Pig, who was more into that kind of thing, but when we got together, Pig told Malaysia to practice with Teacher X’s son first. He drew a ring in the dirt around them with his foot.

Once surrounded by the ring, the Malaysian guy just wailed on Teacher X’s son, jumping into the air and jabbing at him left and right, quick spinning hits and chops raining down on him. After a short time the kid’s face was streaming blood and his hand was sprained.

Little Mountain Pig had a talk with the Malaysian guy and then they went at it, this time much more peaceably, mostly because Pig knows a lot more about this kind of thing.

Meanwhile, a tall, skinny foreigner had approached Teacher X and was grappling with him, using all of his force and seemingly know knowing when to quit. He paired off with Mr. V, which I felt might be a mistake, but at least No Lose Guy wasn’t around. I was talking with Teacher X when the foreigner and Mr. V came crashing down nearby, Mr. V’s head nearly hitting the concrete wall.

I practiced the sword form; I feel I’m getting rusty and should probably re-learn some parts of it. I should also take my sword up the mountain in the morning so I can do that as well as the empty-handed stuff.

The next week, I went to practice at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, to find only Teacher X and his son there. I practiced with Little X, whose hand was bandaged after his bout with the Malaysian guy. “It’s strange; we learn all this stuff and then find it’s useless,” he said. I held my tongue, as, at least for me, Little X’s skillz aren’t exactly at the “all this stuff” level yet, though he has improved.

Teacher X showed me some useful tuishou approaches, and later on Little Mountain Pig showed up, but it was late by then and I had to go. Before I forget, Little Qin has a Youtube page with some videos of him doing forms and tuishou.

I’m a few days late on this, but as of April 22nd, I’ve been writing in this thing for eight years. Thanks for all of you who supported my bid for a second term in office with your cries of “Four More Years!” last time around.

That said, I’m afraid I’ve become somewhat of a lame-duck blogger (or even more so, anyway). In fact, I’m beginning to think that most bloggers are (even more these days) lame duck bloggers, thanks to the plethora of instant microblogging social linking sites that have sprung up recently, added to the increasingly portable nature of Internet access these days. Who, after all, has time for lengthy descriptions of someone’s breakfast when they can get a play-by-play on the details and thoughts of some stranger throughout the day?

What bothers me a little bit about all of this, and I sound like an old fogey when I say it, is the growing feeling of obligation to pay attention to these things, these mundane matters that everyone (including myself, I must add, lest I be labeled a hypocrite in addition to everything else) is attaching so much value to these days in lieu of actual accomplishments. It was ok and kind of neat to have access to this information when it first became available, but I have to suppress a small shudder when I consider having to monitor this kind of thing all day, every day. At some point I missed, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter became necessary items, like TVs and radios before that. But unlike the old media, which could be passively observed, this time you have to participate and work at it. This was supposed to be a Good Thing, all the educators and socialogists said, this was supposed to be what TV and radio couldn’t give us because it was busy rotting our brains. For the office-bound employee with an Internet connection, it is a welcome distraction, of course, and that was indeed my inspiration for starting this account back in 2001, when I had such a position full-time. But these days I find it becoming a little irritating, all of these niggling little things to take care of online as well as in real life.

Or it could just be that it’s an incredibly nice day outside and I am inside here typing this dribble. Ah, well, screw it, I’m going outside, where I can Twitter that I am passing a 7-Eleven or something similarly inane.

I was up in the Minsheng Community area returning an old Yashica Lynx to Brian Q. Webb this morning. The last time I was there a few weeks ago, I strolled around my old neighborhood, past the buildings on Minsheng East Road and Xinzhong Street where I used to live so many years ago. It was eerie, part of a different life, a different existence and yet still there.

This time I walked over to G’Day Cafe for lunch. This was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong: the food was delicious and the service great, but going there dredged up a bunch of memories I’ve been shoving aside for a good while now. In general that whole area tends to bring around such thoughts, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise. But that particular restaurant, more than any except possibly Hooters (but I’m not going to test that hypothesis), made me feel a strange combination of nostalgia and awful over what happened between me and one of the best friends I ever had, the person who used to be known here as Mindcrime.

I won’t get into all that now; suffice it to say that we used to eat there a lot. This was back when we rode motorcycles everywhere, seemingly an age ago, and…

Oh, fuck it. I don’t feel like going over all the stupid shit we did, so I’ll just get to the point: I miss him.

The park was full of tourists when I got there on Sunday morning, including several foreigners. Teacher X even walked over to talk with a couple of foreign guys sitting and watching us practice. It felt like summer. I warmed up with some formwork and then practiced tuishou with The Dentist, whom I am thinking deserves the moniker “Mr. V” more than Mr. V himself these days, as he is all about trying to overpower his opponent. It was tiring. UPS guy was in the fighting ring wrestling with a guy from the other groups, and a fighting class practiced nearby.

It was one of those rare times where Little Qin showed up, so I practiced with him for a while. He is always full of good ideas about technique, and showed me how just one touch with one hand completely changes and strengthens the dynamics of the other. I commented about how hard it was to grab and maintain a hold on his shoulders, and he said that most tai-chi practitioners end up with thick shoulders, or as he put it, “A back like a turtle and legs like a stork,” as someone described Master Zhang San-feng at one point.

Later on, an older guy in a yellow shirt came up and told Little Qin to hit him. He did, and the guy kept saying, “No effect!” He was really proud of his ability to be hit and not feel it. Then they did a kind of tuishou stance, and the guy in the yellow shirt would throw Little Qin off with such force the Little Qin’s feet would actually leave the ground. If you know how not little Little Qin is, you’d know that this is no mean feat, though I suspected he was doing it for show. I took some pictures of this and a line of us all trying to push the man in the yellow shirt. It was pretty funny.

Saturday was a day of good eatin’. Went up to Tianmu with a friend around noon to eat at a sushi stand in the fish market on Shidong Road. This involved standing in line for over half an hour, and the place is apparently really popular, and then standing at the bar to eat dish after dish of whatever the guy behind the counter gives you until he asks “Have you had enough?” Then you pay and leave. It’s an interesting operation, and the sushi is absolutely fresh and fantastic, but I’m not sure if I’d make a habit of going all the way up there just for that. It is worth the one visit to see how the guy flicks little balls of wasabi onto the counter like a fourth-grade nose-picker.

After walking around Shilin enjoying the nice weather, we ended up at a ritzy restaurant made out of a former Japanese official’s residence off Nanjing West Road. I’d passed it several times before and figured I should give it a try. Also, I was tired from all the walking and didn’t feel like looking for someplace else.

The interior of the 2/5-story building is all stark white, with mirrors lining the edge of the ceiling in the same place where most traditional houses have plaques with characters mentioning good fortune. They also had tables outside in the front yard, but large Europeans were smoking there, so we ate inside. The food was expensive and delicious, and the waitstaff very helpful. It turned out that one of the waitresses was also a bassist. We talked about music for a bit, and I mentioned our band, though I’m not sure the Muddy Basin Ramblers would feel at home in such an environment.

After lunch the next day I headed out to Keelung with a couple of friends. Ray was excited about a plethora of international cruise ships massing along the harborfront, and Steve just wanted to get out. Keelung, of course, was cool, windy and full of rain. Two ships were moored at the harbor, The SuperStar Libra-sized Nautica and the much larger, more impressive Diamond Princess. Small groups of pasty pink Europeans were making their way through the rain back to the latter vessel, which was scheduled to depart at 6 p.m. We walked up the dock to take a look, and it occurred to me that Keelung, despite its glaring ugliness, really does have the potential to be a pretty nice place, or it would if a lot of people decided to do something about it. Perhaps when all the cargo facilities are moved to the new Taipei Port things will improve. I should spend more time exploring the city, though.

As we were walking back, I spotted a patch of white underneath the hedge in the planter along the busy street by the harbor. A small ball of white fur with black spots was pulsing rhythmically beneath the hedge. I couldn’t see a head, but it seemed to be a small cat or dog taking refuge from the weather. I covered it with leaves to help it keep warm, whatever it was.

We went to the harborfront Starbucks for some hot cocoa and to get out of the rain for a bit before heading back to the car. The Diamond Princess was gone, on its way to Hong Kong as we ascended the ramp leading to the highway and back to Taipei. After stopping in Neihu for some good Cantonese food (it’s been a long time since I had such good changfen), we drove through town and over the river into Sanchong. What could we possibly want to do in Sanchong? You ask. It seems a friend of Steve’s, Black Bear, was having a housewarming party in his apartment in a new luxury high-rise. We parked deep down in the 6-floor basement levels and took two elevators to the 37th floor, a very high floor for Sanchong, where Black Bear’s place overlooked the city and the river. He paid a bit less than twice as much per ping as I did for my place, in cash (!). I should add that Black Bear works in the solar panel industry, and no, he’s not single. Steve and Ray watched bad programs on a good TV and chatted with people as I leaned out the balcony window taking pictures of the city skyline.

You may have noticed that this account isn’t updated in as timely a fashion as it once was. I blame things like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and my other four blogs. But come on, it’s been eight years this month. I for one find it hard to believe I’m still writing this thing at all, much less in basically the same infantile manner in which I’ve always done.

Last Saturday I hadn’t really warmed up when someone pulled me over to practice tuishou with a little older guy sporting exactly two (2) teeth. He was skinny and very flexible, and kept advancing as he pushed, but he didn’t get much of anywhere with me, at least during that session. It was educational, though; practicing with people outsider of our group pretty much always is.

This Saturday I was warming up when another stranger walked up to me. One of his eyes was smaller than the other, and he wore a hearing aid. “Are you the foreigner I practiced with yesterday?” he asked. This gave me pause. How could he actually not know? I hadn’t gone to the park the day before in any case, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“That foreigner said he had practiced tai-chi for 20 years,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me,” I continued. “That guy is probably older than I am.” But he just looked confused at the concept of some people being older than others.

“Anyway, you foreigners don’t need tai-chi, you’re all so big and strong that you just pick us up and throw us!” he said. I glanced at Little Mountain Pig, who is just one of our students who is bigger than I am, and concluded that this fellow wasn’t quite right in the head.

The other groups were fighting in the circles, trying to push each other over the lines in the dirt. One of the guys wore a t-shirt that read “I (heart) giving blood.” I hoped his opponents didn’t take that too literally.

I practiced the forms and sword work in an empty space nearby for a while before noticing that Teacher X’s son was fighting in one of the rings. Not tui-shou, but actual boxing, it seemed. I walked over to have a look. The kid was staying well away from the boxer, who was slapping quick jabs in and jumping around. Afterwards, LM Pig gave it a shot, using tuishou and taichi to deal with the boxer, engaging him and pushing him around in between blows. It was interesting to see how the two dynamics interacted, but I think I’ll stick with tuishou, for now.