A blog whilst I intern at MAD Magazine

There’s always something to do in New York City. And unfortunately, there’s always some weirdo close by while you do whatever it is you’re doing, even in the morning.

During the summer Tai Chi classes are taught free of cost in a local park. I am currently an invisible-belt level Tai Chi practitioner. Basically this means that I bought a Tai Chi instructional DVD a while back, watched it once, and perform the moves I remember when I have some time. I’m not really looking for street fighter cred. I’m just looking to calm down a bit.

These Tai Chi classes start at 7:30 am. That seemed like a nice harmless hour. Why not get the day started out right with some one-legged rooster stances? The class was outside and consisted of around thirty people, most of them old. I welcome such company. You would too if you had to walk through clouds of smoke and obscenities just to get to and from your train stop.

One person in particular, who was not part of the class, was milling uncomfortably near all our bags. This made me nervous because my bag had my laptop in it and, for some reason, I fear that criminals and weirdos have x-ray vision and can see the valuable contents within the vessels I lug around. I’ve developed a defense: pretend like there’s nothing of value on my person. I imagine that I’m hauling around shredded junk mail and ketchup packets. This fakes the bad guys out.

So this guy starts getting angry with the entire group for practicing Tai Chi. He begins challenging us as a group to do more push ups than him. Then, without accepting the challenge, he proceeded to do several sets of push ups. While mildly impressive, the effort was altogether unnecessary. Then he challenged us to beat him at karate which, according to him, he was an expert in. In fact, at one point he said, “I’m as good as Bruce Lee! I AM Bruce Lee!” The louder he yelled the less everyone paid attention to him. Strange, but one would think that meeting a resurrected Bruce Lee would illicit more fanfare…

It is important to not respond to crazies. It is more important is to not look at them. Eye contact is the gateway to a one-way insane conversation and/or berating. Yet I really wanted to look at this guy. He was performing various karate kicks that looked like they would be humorous. Then he would switch to doing push ups, followed by getting up close to some old guy to challenge him to a fist fight, then go back to random roundhouse punches and kicks. Then, of course, he would return to push ups and the cycle repeated.

What’s funny is that 95% of the class were novices – ungainly and stiff in their movements. Not only were we not skilled in any discipline that involves physical beatings, we could barely touch our toes. Did he really see us as a threat? Perhaps. But after many unmet challenges, he decided to leave. Poor guy.

Was this guy crazy? He did push ups like a sane person. And he dressed like a sane, albeit not very fashionable person. Where did he go? Who knows. Unfortunately we just cared that he was out of our midst. I’m pretty sure he went to harass some chess players or maybe even “called-out” some mahjong tournament participants. Maybe he is now wrangling with the ghost of Bruce Lee. Hey, in this city anything can happen.

Share/Save

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 1:05 am and is filed under Blog.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.