ER HOT

I had a bad night that was, all things considered, a kind of good night.

Last night I got stabbed in the head. I didn’t get stabbed in the head intentionally, not in that I did not make the choice to get stabbed in the head—who would choose that?—but rather, the guy who stabbed me in the head didn’t mean to, but sometimes, when you’re training knife defense, you get knife…offensed?

What happened was this: After twenty years of training in various martial arts, I never quite found one that fit me¹. Tai Chi was too soft and esoteric; Muay Thai fucked my hips. Learning Bagua—though a beautiful and freeing way to move—ment being surrounded by the very peculiar brand of Chinese machismo that comes from learning from a shifu with good lineage². Learning MMA and other styles more ‘legit’ by western standards ment being surrounded by the American machismo of ‘no homo, dude! Hur Hur Hur! Won’t someone touch me with kindness!? I am a man trapped in a world in which rage is the only emotional currency in which I may trade! Get your gay hands off me, bro! Hur Hur Hur.’

I am at heart a sensitive little sweet boy drawn to the martial arts because I want to be able to protect myself. I am what is referred to as ‘a short king’. I’m strong and have an imposing beard, but at five six³, they don’t stand for much. I also like engaging in dangerous activities like going on walks and going to public places and just existing in a human body in 2025. That all being said, I looked and looked and looked for something that would help make me feel safe but wouldn’t put me around the sorts of people who don’t get that the Punisher is anti-cop.

That’s when I found Systema. It’s the most hands on hardcore shit I’ve trained. Its a slavic martial art with a deep history in Russian culture, and as one of my training partners, Boris⁴, the 6’4 Romanian⁵ former special forces op and current head of a billionaire’s security team loves to tell me, it’s what makes Putin’s bodyguards so scary.

It’s also the softest thing I’ve trained. We end every class in a circle, discussing takeaways mental, physical, and even emotional. We focus on using the transition between tension and dense relaxation as power, and as freedom in the body.

This freedom in the body is something I did not find last night.

I’m normally not available in the evenings, but joyfully I found my Thursday night open and night classes are the best—more students means more seasoned students means harder hitting and getting into the meat of it quicker. It being Winter, fewer people show up so it was just me, Haoyu⁶, another mid level student, and one of our teachers (not saying which one, for the sake of privacy). Me and Haoyu are both about four years in with years of other martial arts in our pasts. We’re like, high school sophomores, lower mid level students. We’re seasoned enough to get straight into things and we started off right away working two against one knife defense.

In Systema we don’t train techniques and we don’t train moves, we train with certain maxims or ideas and let the movements follow from there. Our focus this day was elimination of tension and reacting from a place of freedom in the body, which leads to movement, creativity and good timing. The point of this was to be free and creative enough to use your first reaction to whichever of the knives you react to first, to follow through in your defense for the next. For instance: Avoid a stab, use that motion to push guy A into guy B, hook guy B’s knife arm and use it to block and strip the knife from guy A, etc etc. (There’s little I love writing more than a good fight, but here’s not the time). No set patterns, just play jazz on it, you cool cat.

Training like this you start to notice your own bad habits pretty quick: I’m jumpy when he does x and instead of making me quicker it’s making me easy to read and unable to react. I’m decent at stripping A’s knife and using that to help defend against B and then dropping him to the floor, but I’m missing A’s fist until it cracks me in the jaw. Stuff like that.

One of these mistakes Haoyu and I kept falling into was getting our heads grabbed. Even if you’ve stripped A’s knife, if he’s got you by the neck, B’s not far behind. For about ten minutes we made this our focus while still keeping to the basic two against one drill. Get your neck grabbed, get out. Get your neck grabbed, get out.

The way to do this with Systema principles is to find what it is that’s keeping you locked, and free that area. Your neck is stuck, so relax the neck and use that freedom to not only escape but stay sensitive enough to the guy you’re working on to hit him where it counts, break his structure without him noticing. If you can get him down, do it, if you can get some distance, that’s good too. It’s quicker that way because you’re only using exactly what you need to use and it keeps you loose enough to respond to other inputs.

About half way through the class I got my neck grabbed. One of the other two guys was coming at me with the dull dummy knife (still metal, still with a bit of an edge but as dull as a butter knife) in an icepick grip, no doubt going for my chest in effort to show me where I was locked up.

I did not move from the neck

I got low with it. I moved from the hips.

In a violent conflict, as much as some people want there to be these hard and fast rules, sometimes you have to do something that seems stupid at the time if it’s your only option. One thing that could be a rule though is NEVER DUCK IN A KNIFE FIGHT! Back up, pivot, gum up his works by getting in his guard effecting his body and making sure your either out of the way or getting the knife off him before the next attack. You might get cut, but you’re more in control and less likely to get absolutely wrecked. But unless there’s truly nothing else you can do, don’t duck.

What I did would have been fine had we been going empty hand—I had my guard up in front of my face, I’m quick on my feet so I was moving out of the way. Maybe an overhand punch would have glanced me at worst—but knives have different angles of attack and as it came down—not all that hard—I came up. The guy holding it had it in his grip just tight enough, with an arm just heavy enough that the force of my lifting body did not knock it away. Physics being the cruel bitch that it is, something had to give and that something was my scalp.

Anyone who’s been injured suddenly knows the feeling. It’s a light bulb moment of clarity that says, with the sort of equanimity you only rarely get in deep meditation: “ahh damn, dude. This is bad.”

Right away I ran to the bathroom, put my head over the sink, and started halloween early. It was the most I’ve ever bled. When I looked up into the mirror a Knottsberry farms Spooktoberfest character was looking back at me. It was baaaaaaaad!

But it didn’t hurt. This isn’t me being a tough guy. I’m not tough. I hate getting shots. When my wife picks pimples on my back I yelp. Just that day I had gotten a few skin tags lasered off and I winced and whimpered the whole way through. This cut stung, but that was about it. The bleeding stopped about twenty minutes after, and we looked at it, and figured, “eh, it’s a head wound, they bleed. Maybe I’ll have a scab but how bad can it be?”

When I got home my wife looked at it, almost yacked, and demanded we go to the emergency room.

I still didn’t want to and thought it would probably be fine. Not out of toughness, but because I hate waiting rooms. They’re the places people go to listen to their phones on loud.

I went though, because she demanded. I chose the kind of wife that I trust to tell me what to do⁷ so despite my protestations, I still googled ‘how to go to an emergency room,’ and got in the car.

After getting checked in, the triage nurse asked me why I’d come and I told him I wanted to know if I’d need stitches. He was a jacked and tattooed bro who’d clearly trained himself and I figured he’d probably agree with my assessment, but he took one look and said, not without a little bit of awe, “fuck yeah you do!”

He sent me back out to the lobby to wait. Fine by me, I had a lot of Substack serial fiction to catch up on this was a great chance. I finished James Worth’s Mars in Retrograde (buy it here), knocked off a few chapters of Liz Horsman’s Marsh Witches and started on Wendy Russell’s Brat. It was honestly not a bad time. Four hours go by. Finally, I get called back and undergo the weirdest experience in a day that started with me getting shot by lasers and had in its middle me getting ice picked in the head.

From the moment I got back there, everyone treated me like I was hot.

I’m good looking, for sure—Maybe like an LA 6.5/7 and a Cincinnati 9. I’m not it for everyone but I am for enough people that the six months between my horrible last relationship and meeting my wife were *eyebrows eyebrows* pretty fun. In the words of my semi-pseudonymous character Issac Merman-Berliner⁸, I’m “…like a short intellectual who’d somehow become the wet dream of women who read The New Yorker. A Wes Anderson character in the flesh.”

I am not hot. There’s a huge difference. I have hot friends. I have a hot wife⁹. Hot people get treated differently. Everyone smiles at them. Everyone tries as hard as they can to make eye contact with them. Them just being in the room makes people stop and have a better day.

Suddenly, there in the ER, about to get my scalp stitched together, I was the hot guy.

Why?

You know how when you’re in the airport you always see people who are so damn fine you forget which specific byzantine rulebook this particular TSA line abides by? Well, at the airport you are confronted with a basic truth of humanity, most people are just a little ugly. That’s just life. So, when you see someone there who’s got their shit together, who’s pretty good looking all things considered, compared to the sum average of homo sapiens sapiens, they shine like golden gods.

Well, the ER just might be the ugliest place in the world. It’s worse than Vegas. Everyone is sick, everyone is exhausted, everyone is covered in some sort of something that should still be inside the body. Into this throng I marched in a decent mood, curls slightly bloody but otherwise tight and shiny, and whose arms are still kind of popping from the thirty minutes of training he got before he got the knife in the head.

I got devoured. I got told I looked like Jake Gyllenhaal instead of my regular Jewish dude comp of Eugene Levy, I got smiles without having to tell jokes, I got nine staples in my scalp and a tetanus shot.

This is all to say, I hope I never get stabbed in the head again, but if I end up back at the ER…would that be so bad?

1. I avoid writing about martial arts because rarely has there ever been a good discussion about martial arts on the internet. People get really touchy about it. If this is you, and you’re feeling drawn to slam on your keyboard and yell either something like FAKE FAKE FAKE ONLY HARD BIG PUNCH REAL, or MY SENSI’S ILLUSTRIUS MARTIAL TRUTHS BEAT UP BRUCE LEE!! What if you just didn’t do that?

2. Shifu was here at 5:00 am, why were you not here at 4:30 with tea ready?

3. My wife is yelling at me from the other room that I’m actually five four. I’m yelling back that I’m five four AND A HALF, OK!?

4. Not actually Boris, but an equally Slavic name.

5. Not actually Romanian but from an equally Soviet Block country.

6. Not actually Haoyu but an equally Chinese name.

7. Best choice I’ve ever made.

8. Vibes Detective Agency, give it a read.

9. Not in the Feeld sense, just a wife who is hot. I punched way above my weight.