Good Gung Fu Turns from Survival to Selling
We all know about good Gung Fu. It’s when you can take that idjit who’s hittin’ on yer girl and do the smackdown on him without hardly raisin’ a sweat. Right?
What we don’t know is about my mother’s can opener.
The knowledge how to make the Martial Arts really work!
Now, before I tell you about my mother’s can opener, let me tell you what the word gung fu means. Gung fu doesn’t mean ‘hit ‘em harder,’ or ‘the killing art,’ or anything like that. What it means is ‘skill.’ Specifically, skill earned over time through hard work.
Now what the heck does that have to do with my mother’s kitchen implements? Well, in my usual fashion, let me slide in on that sideways.
Have you ever walked into a store, bought something, and taken it home only to find out…you can’t open the package?
You beat it you cut it you tear it…and the stupid thing grins, all shiny and new at you from within it’s shiny, hard plastic.
Please inject a few curse words here, and I know that ALL of you have encountered this.
What is really funny, if you’ve got a sense of humor like mine, is to call the store manager and tell him you will buy his fancy all wrapped up tight doodad if he can open the thing for you.
He won’t even try. And you’ll all laugh and grin. And then you might buy it or not. Depends upon if you have a sledge hammer at home.
The other day I bought a bottle of vitamin water. My wife and I are driving along and I ask her to open it.
“I can’t,” she groans in frustration, trying to unscrew the SOB.
So I steer the truck with knees and struggle with the B.
F!
So I pull over and get out of the car, brace all my 45 years of gung fu muscles, summon up my inner chi, give that sucker a twist, and it laughs at me.
I try, I try, all my might, and I am defeated by a bottle of vitamin water.
Grrr.
I have lost the battle, but I am about to win the war.
BAM! I throw that bottle down and it explodes on the pavement.
Insert curse words here, and I get back in the truck and drive off.
And it doesn’t help that my wife is trying to stifle laughter.
So for the next month wifey keeps suggesting that we go to the store for a little vitamin water.
Insert curse words here.
That month the vitamin water people lost money.
And, to this day, I will grab brand x before I grab a vitamin water.
Now, we know there is a method to the madness here. Companies wrap their crap so tight to defeat shop lifters, or maybe it is even a marketing ploy. People will buy a problem, you know? The water tastes sweeter if you have to work for it, whatever.
So, if I had had my mother’s can opener I would have twisted that top off and guzzled the sweetness within inside of a half second.
My mother’s can opener was made back in the thirties. When things were trundled across the country and had to be sealed solid.
But housewives couldn’t open the bottles, so they came up with this sweet, little device that works like a charm. It is a handle, a mechanical ratchet that closes the grippers the harder you turn.
Believe me, when you turn that sucker, the bottle opens. If it doesn’t, the gripper digs in, and you got the leverage, and any housewife, no matter how weak and slothful, can open any bottle known to man.
I don’t care if it is a jihad bottle made by a mad arab, it opens.
The terrible truth is that these can openers are unknown. They are a forgotten technology. They are not sold in ANY store I have ever been in, or even online.
‘Not online?’ you gasp. ‘But Al…everything is online!’
Not my mother’s can opener.
My mother’s can opener, you see, is good gung fu.
It is the product of a people struggling to survive, fighting injuns as they progressed across the prairies, braving hurricanes in their little clipper ships as they criss crossed the world, and taming a vast wilderness filled with unfriendly critters.
This was a product that was made by a culture steeped in the concept that everything had to work, or else their very lives were at stake.
My mother’s can opener.
Now, let’s look at your good gung fu. Or Karate, or taekwondo, or kenpo, or whatever.
The stuff you are learning at that strip mall dojo used to work. It had to work because it was necessary to fight off the bandits, defeat the hordes, stand up to the emperors troops.
It was the stuff culled from the battlefield.
It was the stuff that enabled you to live, while the foe expired under you, bleeding and screaming even while he succumbed to your superior skills.
Why doesn’t it work know?
Because civilization has turned from survival to selling.
To earn a buck, Jimmy Dojomaker has to make sure the kids don’t drop dead in his class, so he gives them rubber knives.
He has to make sure Janey Studentmother doesn’t take her precious little Johnny out of class because he was crying over a boo boo, so he sells protective gear. (Which doesn’t really work, but it fools Janey into thinking it does).
He has to compete with Johnny Kwoonhead down the street, so he tailors his techniques into tournament fighting stuff that is great…on the mat. But doesn’t really work on the street when the SOB is bigger, is swinging a baseball bat, and was (shudder) raised up in a ghetto.
And there are all sorts of other reasons your good gung fu, or karate or aikido or whatever, wouldn’t work on the street.
Now, you think I am dissing everybody (except my own sterling art), right?
Nay.
I am telling you that hidden inside your strip mall McDojo are the seeds of my mother’s can opener.
That art you are sweating over came from somewhere. It survived bandits and wars and back alleys and all manner of confrontation.
The trick is to get the shiny packaging off it so you can find the workable can opener inside.
So, here’s the product push. You can stop right here, if you don’t want my solution.
When you do the Master Instructor course you get the can opener.
You don’t get the deadly, stick ‘em in the gut technique…you get the method by which you can find that technique. And find that technique in virtually everything you do.
When you do the Master Instructor course the stuff that doesn’t work bubbles off. The poser techniques stand revealed. A mere glance will tell you what is wrong with a technique, and whether there is real good gung fu inside it.
Now, some people think I am talking trash on other arts, and that just to make a buck.
Nope.
Think about the price of my course, and read some wins on the testimonial page, and you’ll understand that’s not what I am doing at all.
I LOVE the old arts.
But I understand that they have been mangled by culture and language and religious beliefs and all manner of crap.
So I am not trying to throw away old martial arts, to replace them with my shiny, new invention…I am giving you the exact data, the actual knowledge, as refined by over 45 years of experience, of how to make ALL arts work.
I am not saying taekwondo is bad, I am saying you can find the Korean Karate principles that are underneath.
I am not saying that Aikido is terrible, I am saying you can analyze the techniques and find the samurai killing art hidden under the surface.
I am not saying kenpo is a trashcan filled with Ed PArker’s bad dreams and whimsy, I am saying that you can understand what he was doing, the evolutions he was undergoing, and you can distill kenpo into what it actually is.
Under the glitter and the ribbon.
Behind the concerns of tournaments and over protective mothers.
I am saying that the Master Instructor Course is the real knowledge of how to scientifically analyze the functions of the body, and the workability of the technique.
Have you noticed that I have been selling this stuff for near ten years, and NOBODY has been able to argue with me?
Instead, I get wins, over 600 pages of wins and counting.
Everybody says, ‘Oh, I never saw this stuff before!’
I think the only guy who said he had seen it had studied some 12 different arts for 35 years, and he said that he had seen the stuff, but didn’t understand it until he read how I organized it.
Yes, you’ll have come across bits and pieces, but not the whole, and even then, there is the problem of organization.
So, end of push.
Go ahead and study your art. Please do. There is gold in there. But if you want to mine the real gold, find the motherlode…if you want to find my mother’s can opener in the mess, then there is one, and ONLY one course in the world that enables you to do this.
The Master Instructor Course.
And that is the story of my mother’s can opener, vitamin water, and good gung fu.
You can find out more about the Master Instructor Course at Monster Martial Arts.
A Truth not shared is No Truth at all!
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