Stepping Up To The Plate 2:7 (10/22/2002) in Keeping Safe

“OK folks, welcome back to the game. It’s the bottom of the ninth, Home Team is at bat, the bases are loaded, with two outs. Home is down, the score stands at 3-0 Opponents, and this next batter needs to dish up a miracle.”  

Last weekend I flew down to San Francisco. The reason for my taking yet another hilariously short and expensive little trip was that I was enrolled in a seminar and retreat offered by Bay Area Model Mugging (BAMM). [Bay Area Model Mugging is now Impact Bay Area, and is located at http://www.impactbayarea.org/.] BAMM is a non-profit organization offering self-defense instruction primarily for women, but infrequently they also offer a course for men. BAMM’s course content is geared towards addressing self-defense issues which may be encountered in everyday life, as opposed to teaching martial arts which may be impressive in a structured setting but can sometimes be of little use in a down-and-dirty street brawl.

I first heard of Model Mugging last fall during a fruitless three-year search for a useful short-term self-defense course. Alaska Impact Model Mugging offers only women’s courses, due to the lack of demand for men’s courses. The main reason is that it takes a pretty big guy to be able to admit to himself that he needs to learn self-defense, as compared with the much easier task of admitting to a wish to learn and compete for the black belt in whatever martial arts discipline. Searching the web turned up BAMM’s site last spring, which unfortunately listed a Men’s Basics course which had already taken place. I left them a message asking that I be notified if and when they scheduled a new Men’s Basics retreat.

In early summer BAMM emailed me to announce that they were scheduling a Men’s Basics course during the weekend of October 18-20, 2002. $100 was due to hold a place for me in the class, with $565 remaining for the tuition, but with a $30 discount if I completed payment by September 18. The ticket FAI-SFO-FAI ran another $525 or so, and I booked it to allow arrival the day before the retreat and return the day after, to give some slop time in this uncertain age of air travel.

I had several reasons to take a self-defense course. First, as I have noted in previous entries, if I marry in the future, the odds are high that my lifetime partner will be a divorcee. Few divorces are completely amicable, and a fair number of them leave an ex-husband feeling as if someone stole a prized possession from him, and in a few of those cases the ex will take extreme steps to retrieve that possession - a situation for which I should be prepared. Second, there were some issues in my past which I needed to address. Third, repercussions from those issues were causing problems in my current life; for example, in a recent survey I noted that “I hide: my home, to keep it as a safe place.”

So, last Thursday 10/17 I left around noon from Fairbanks and arrived about 11:00 PM in San Francisco, and rode a series of buses down to Redwood City, where the seminar was to be held.

Last updated January 19, 2015