I found myself unexpectedly in tears while watching Cobra Kai S1E5 earlier while having lunch eating chicken rice.
I’m only a few episodes in, but I have to say Cobra Kai is shaping up to be a lovely example of one of my favorite things happening in modern storytelling: the idea of “picking up where we left off”, often years later. Before Sunrise was one of my earlier experiences of this sort of media, and there actually quite a few examples of this sort of thing.
This trope really gets me every time, this idea of this tired, weary old guy who’s basically kinda giving up on life… turning himself around and sorting his shit out because there’s some earnest young fool who looks up to him. I remember having a lot of feelings about this when I watched Logan on my flight to SF.
There are so many ways to think about this… one is that the student helps the teacher just as much as the teacher helps the student. The student gives the teacher a reason to “keep fighting”, to stay in the game.
There are a few scenes that evoke this in Cobra Kai. When we first meet Johnny, he’s old, battered, washed up. Life just hasn’t been good to him. He’s divorced or separated, his wife and son dislike him, his teenage rival (Daniel LaRusso) runs a successful car dealership and has a nice house and wife and kids. He gets his car wrecked and towed. He gets fired from his shitty handiman job, and he’s basically a few steps away from becoming outright derelict. But then he witnesses his annoying neighbour kid get victimized by bullies, and he decides that he’s going to restart Cobra Kai (the name of his old dojo). The pilot is just really well done in capturing the sort of descent of an individual having a series of bad things happen to him, and then decide to fight back.
What I like about the subsequent episodes is that the struggle continues. Things just don’t magically get better overnight, there’s more pain to be had. And I like that even Daniel is struggling in his own ways – to connect with his kids, and dealing with his own frustrations at work and so on. In E5, Daniel visits the grave of his old sensei Mr. Miyagi and has a flashback to some advice about balance. Daniel decides to recreate a karate training space in his home, and I found that scene really moving somehow. In both cases, with Daniel and Johnny, I was moved by the sight of these slightly older men revisiting and re-embodying the material of their boyhood. There’s this sense that karate is not just something you do for a while and win trophies for, it’s a whole way of life.
It made me want to come back to these word vomits, and for that I am really grateful – to everyone, to Daniel and Johnny the characters, to the actors, the producers, to everybody involved in getting this message to me. I find myself sitting with the thought that it’s not about the number of words that I write, but rather the state of being I am in when I write.
Variations of these thoughts have been on my mind for some time now. I’ve been struggling with my second ebook, INTROSPECT, for basically over a year now. It might be the right amount of struggle – it’s easy to look back and say with a sort of critical eye “oh, it could’ve been done so much faster, so much more easily” – but then I’m reminded of my friend Michael Story’s quote about dysfunction: “Mistake I’ve made many times: seeing someone with a simple problem and thinking “not to worry, this just needs a quick fix and they’ll be on their way!” instead of “what level of hidden dysfunction is keeping even this simple problem unsolved?”
In seeing the actors put on their old Gis, I found myself thinking, yes, that’s it. Stop avoiding it. Stop avoiding the pain of the grind. It doesn’t even hurt that bad once you get inside it.
I’m amusingly reminded of having faced a version of this as a teenage musician. I remember that I enjoyed the music for its own sake when I was starting out, and then when I started a band, started writing songs, etc, I got swept up in all these “bigger”, broader and wider concerns, and in that process I lost touch with my most important priority, my most immediate love for the music itself, and how it moves me, and how it helped me connect with others.
Something similar has been happening for me with writing. I used to just write every day because I wanted to make sure that I was always writing. I still tweet a lot every day, so maybe I’m being a little harsh on myself – but at some level I have been avoiding doing this longer-form writing that I just know is something I “have” to be doing. Not because of any coercion or obligation, but because it’s a way of being that’s right for me. When I have been writing lots of longform work, my soul is at ease, my mind feels limber and loose rather than constricted and tight. I have been constricted and tight for so long. I’ve been doing it to myself. It’s really quite funny.
Anyway, here I am, in the last 100 words of another wordvomit. Completing the project would be nice, but completion isn’t the point. I’ve been trying to understand this for 20 years now, and maybe it’ll take me the rest of my life to get it. I’m learning that this is a lesson that I will have to learn over and over again. There is no one trophy that you can win to be done with it. The battle must be fought anew every day. And that’s the beauty of it, in a sense.
The other thing that’s really resonating with me is this sense of… how much the physical reality of things is a function of the psychological reality of things. It goes the other way too. I was excited to start lifting weights in November, and I almost immediately hurt my lower back from a bad deadlift – I think it’s almost fully healed now, but it definitely left me morose and grumpy and frustrated. I’m just thinking about talismans, reverence, the body, sleep, exercise… people get hung up on the details, I get hung up on the details… but it’s really about the story. It really is really about the story.