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One of the reasons I'm studying Escrima (Filipino stickfighting) is to meet people and one of the senior students asked me if my son and I had practiced together anywhere in public yet. With a smile on his face, he assured me we'd draw a crowd ...

My son and I were in his mom's backyard¹ yesterday, running drills. It's a nice big yard with lots of room to move around, to strike and block and feint with abandon, to advance and retreat a hundred feet or more. There we were swinging the sticks when I hear a voice calling, "Who teaches you Kali?" which is another name for Escrima (as is Arnis; the systems are also called Filipino Martial Arts or FMA).

Her yard is separated from the neighbor's by a high hedge rather than by a stockade fence and you can see through it if you look carefully. Our questioner's attention, however, was drawn by the sound of our sticks. If you know what you're hearing, you won't mistake the rhythmic smack of rattan sticks against each other for anything else. We were working four-count drills, click-click-click-click, and six-count drills with its waltz-like click-click-click, click-click-click pattern, and so, "Who teaches you Kali?"

I told him and asked if he studied. He never did but says he studied some Jeet Kun Do in Seattle under somebody who came out of the Dog Brothers stickfighting academy, which itself came out of Dan Inosanto's school. Inosanto is an FMA master who studied JKD under Bruce Lee and I've found that a lot of guys like to talk up the lineage of the systems they study, pointing to Bruce Lee or Wong Fei Hung wherever possible. It's like a dick-measuring contest.

We started the conversation through the hedge but moved on to the driveway so we could be face-to-face. We shot the shit for a few minutes and only introduced ourselves at the end; his name is Tommy. At the time, I assumed he was the new neighbor but on reflection, I think he might have simply been visiting.

Either way, these random social connections always energize my curmudgeonly soul. It's why I style myself the gregarious misanthrope.

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¹ - She and I are still friends and it used to be my yard too, but all this is an aside.

I've been mired in a bit of a writer's block. It happens sometimes when I don't have a deadline or other external goad. When it does, I'll often shun the keyboard for some TV or a bit of Warcraft. This time, I tricked myself. Two weeks ago, I went out and bought a guitar and now I'm filling the blocking with chords and scales and tab sites.

My son has a guitar and used to take lessons and teach himself to play. Then he slacked off because he's a teenager. But while he was playing, I remembered the lessons I had taken as a teen and wanted to pick up his guitar. But the boy is a lefty so it just wasn't happening. I wasn't sufficiently motivated to go get my own and he let his pretty little low-end Les Paul, red with an orange sunburst, sit untouched in his room for months.

A whim took me to Sam Ash and Guitar Center, which are literally across the street from each other out my way, and I came home with a guitar. And brought it back the next day and traded it for a different one but I'm like that. I've been dicking around with it since then, loving every second of it. Plus there's this very cool and wholly unlooked for side effect. My son has taken up his guitar and is playing again.

It's a headache he knows well, the one that comes in the dark, not letting him sleep nor yet quite waking him. He gives up in the gray dawn. His feet swing out of bed and the rest of him follows but they take him no further than the shower. The knots in his shoulders and neck melt in the heat but that just adds clarity to the pain behind his eye.

He shuffles from shower to jeans to sofa, grabbing meds along the way. At best, they dull his pain to a steady ache but this morning, like him, they're not at their best. It could be worse, the world could want things of him. But this is a hard-won day of solitude and he can count on being left alone.

With cable news on low in the background, he rides the sofa with an arm across his eyes, slowly letting the pain dull then fade and almost disappear.

The roar splits open his reverie. Diesel generators growl below the screaming of the wood-chipper. The pine and red maple that, until last week, had stood in front of the house next door, were being fed to steel-toothed rollers, the shriek of wood surrendering to metal tearing through the air and reigniting the pain behind his eye.

Then the rains come, sheeting down, slapping the asphalt with vigor and volume, quieting the diesel engines and driving the chippers away. His headache recedes with rumble of the trucks and he lays in cloudy afternoon, pain free, and lulled by the rain and gentle thunder.