I live in a very odd place (in case you haven't figured that out by now). I was reminded of this a few weeks ago by a rather strange encounter, strange, even by Santa Fe standards.

I have a friend who is nearly a black belt in Ja Shin Do, a little-known martial art focused primarily on self-defense. This friend kindly offered to teach me some basics of the art, an offer I happily accepted. We finally got together to practice a few Saturdays ago, and had barely started when a yellow VW bug drove up and a couple got out and approached us. The couple, a man and a woman, were probably in their sixties or so and the man came up to my friend and said that he had seen us practicing and wanted to introduce himself since he was some kind of marital arts master or teacher or something. Fair enough. My friend started to make a polite bow to this man, who stopped him saying, "Don't bow to me, I only bow to the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ." Okay, great, fine, I respect that. But then this guy starts talking. For those of you familiar with Dr. Bronner's soap products, you'll have a pretty good idea what this guy sounded like; rambling doesn't begin to do it justice. He talked for a good fifteen minutes at least, about subjects ranging from all the martial artists he knew who were in prison to how God and Adam did Tai Chi in Eden to his martial arts classes. He told us about some black belt he knew, who was "wearing orange pajamas" now for killing two guys. "Bu'cha don't hear any about that, do ya?" he said, "No, all you hear about is ommm, ommmm (chanting in a monotone), Home on the range (breaking into song)." He was quite fond of the phrase "rat bastards," which he applied to the North Koreans, who were teaching us martial arts but all the time pointing missiles at us and to the Mayans (yes, the Mayans, ancient Central American civilization) who made roads but couldn't invent the wheel because they were too busy. . . how shall we say . . . engaging in unnatural forms of birth control. Then he asked if we were Catholic, informed us that he and his wife were, but hadn't always been, and said we should come to his church sometime. That's when he started in about God and Adam doing Tai Chi in paradise. "It says in Genesis that God had fellowship with Adam," he explained, "So what do you think they were doing? Drinkin' beer and shootin' the sh*t? No, they were doing the forms and the animals," (apparently some form of martial arts). "But then," he went on," Adam says to God, 'God, I love you and I want to have fellowship with you and your son Jesus and all, but the serpente (serpente, he wouldn't say snake or serpent) here, he's telling me something different." As he talked about the serpente he made a serpentine movement with his arms. So it went on like this for awhile, as I tried to think of ways to get out of the situation while at the same time dumbstruck at the spectacle. I was considering pretending to go into convulsions but wasn't sure if even that would get him to shut up. So he finally comes to an end with the comment, "So Adam says to God, 'Yeah God, I want to have fellowship with you and all, but I'd really just rather stay here with the b*tch," gesticulating to his wife, who came over to join him with a smile on her face. Then they walked off arm in arm while I just about collapsed on the ground and my instructor stoically tried to pick up where we left off on punches. At that point, however, it was pretty much a lost cause. The scary part is that I've probably given much more coherence to the event than was actually there! Only in Santa Fe!