NODding Out Chapter 38 has dropped!

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So, last week, I mentioned the phrase “Loosen your perineum.” and said I’d say more about this, and about precognition.

After my stepbrother Jan died, I had a lot of dreams about him. I’d have ‘visits’ with him where we’d hang out, shoot the shit, stuff like that. I also had a dream (after the event I’m about to relate) wherein he told me to stop smoking pot, because, as he intriguingly put it: “it’s slowing down my transition to the next place, the next thing I’m supposed to do, and it’s gonna do that to you too.” I ignored him on that, stubborn bastard that I am, for a long time, well into my 40s.

After Jan’s death, I got a job where I used to reverse commute from NYC to Rye, NY. I had a grand old time too. I was paid well, and the trains were almost empty both ways, as I was going against the rush hour tides.

Literally for years, Jan had urged me to study Chi-Gung and Tai Chi on many occasions (yes, I know, they’re both seemingly spelled a hundred different ways, including in NODding Out - but who wants fealty to consistency? Not me).

Jan had studied, sparred, and even taken part in martial arts exhibition events at this place on second avenue upstairs in this amazing squatter’s building right near the corner of Houston street. The place was called the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association, and it had lived there for quite some time (like, way before the Wu Tang Clan ever got their name!). It was an amazing place, with a giant Bagua painted on the floor, and tons of interesting people from all walks of life from fringey East Villager Nei Gung groupies and aficionados to super-wealthy stockbrokers.

I’d gone a few times, sparred with Jan, who was tiny compared to me, and not as strong, but way, way faster and more skilled. He always won.

I’d even gone to a few parties there, gotten stoned, and watched real fighters fight. I liked the place, in a way, but never felt I fit in, which doubtless had more to do with my internal discomfort with myself than with the scene there.

But, truth be told, it also felt a bit too martial and macho for me. The founder, Frank “The Snake” Allen was covered in tattoos and, truth be told, he kinda scared me. He looked so badass and tough, and hewas tough, but I learned later just what a gentle and nuanced teacher he could be (and they’re still teaching in Manhattan, although, OF COURSE, big money eventually succeeded in getting them evicted once the neighborhood became gentrified - but you can find out more about the school and its history wutangpca.com).

at any rate, intimidated by my own projections about the place, I’d drifted in and out a few times, but never really got into it, and never took a class.

After Jan died, my father died of a heart attack shortly thereafter. And something shifted within me. I’d been living with ever escalating and quite severe lower back pain since a freak trampoline accident at the age of 16, and finally after my dad died, I think I quite unconsciously finally felt able to be vulnerable, to admit to myself and my wife that I couldn’t carry the pain any longer and needed help.

So I went to my father’s doctor, and then to a specialist, and got an MRI for my terrible back problems. The MRI showed major damage, something called a “sequestered disc”, which basically meant that my disc was neither bulging, or even herniated. No, consummate over-achiever that I am, I had actually blown the bottom disc in my spinal column, the L5-S1 disc, to smithereens.

I had tried a lot of alternative therapies to ameliorate this situation. I did not want surgery. But, unlike a bulging or ruptured disc, the imaging showed that I had hundreds of free-floating fragments of disc, adhered around and compressing nerves. The diagnosis convinced me that surgery was the only game in town, and so I eventually did get an L5-S1 lumbar laminectomy, late in my 30th year, but before I did, I’d started working with a Canadian healer (kind of a chiropractor on steroids) who worked on me both before and after my surgery.

And a funny thing happened: this guy had only been in NYC for a little while, and he was from friggin’ Alberta, but he strongly recommended that I go to this strange place called the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association and study Chi-Gung with this ex-boxer, mystical interior martial arts master, Frank Allen.

Well, when the universe rhymes at me like that, I pay attention. So, although still intimidated by the prospect, I signed up for an introductory Chi-Gung class.

And one day, in my 31st year, the day upon which I was to attend my very first Chi-Gung class, I was on a train to work in Rye in the early morning hours, and I fell asleep, as I often did.

And Jan came to visit. We sat and talked. We shared a joint, and some beer, and a sandwich, hanging out just like we had a million times in the old days in my funky rehearsal/recording studio in the “Music Building” on 8th Avenue, Treebear Music. It was a nice visit. As usual, I forgot he was dead, and we just hung out, just like old times, except that just before he left, he did something funny.

He stood up to leave. He was standing with his back to me in front of the crazy beat up patchwork front door as if he was about to open it and walk out.

But then, he stopped and turned around and stared at me for a second, placidly.

And then suddenly, as if he’d noticed something while looking at me, his stare became concentrated, his expression almost quizzical.

He crossed his arms, leaned forward a tiny bit and cocked his head to one side, and sort of squinted at me, as if trying to figure out if something was awry.

“Loosen your perineum.”, he said to me, and then he turned, opened the door and walked out, left me alone in the dream theater version of my dearly-missed studio, well, really, my dearly missed brother, band, studio, life.

I woke from this dream, kind of laughed off at the bizarre random oddity of it, and got off the Metro North train at Rye. I put in my hours programming, and then got on the train to go back to NYC, and then got on the subway to the East Village for my first class with Frank The Snake Allen.

But when I got there, Frank was out sick, and a substitute, another friend of Jan’s from the neighborhood, Susie Rabinowitz, was teaching instead.

All of the other members of the class were all small, slender, middle-to-senior-aged women. She got us all into Standing Meditation posture. And, yeah, all those women stood stock-still, their tiny legs like stone pillars, while soon enough, my massively muscular (former bike messenger, still avid bike rider) legs trembled like leaves in a monsoon.

Susie went around to each student, gently adjusting our posture, and then returned to the front of the class and observed us as we stood.

And damned if she didn’t cross her arms, cock her head to the side, squint at me, and say “Loosen your perineum.”…