Mazinger Z!!

When I was a kid I was into karate!! What a tool!! Who the hell is into karate?? Tools are!!

Being 18 is maybe a somewhat workable excuse. Yeah, that's it. Karate is lame!! Lame!! But you knew that!!
How many bands on Matador or Minty Fresh have members that are into karate?? 0!! Zero, yo!!! You know who's into karate? Dirk Diggler from Boogie Nights! But now I have to tell you how I removed karate from my life like an unsightly mole!

'Cause it's funny!!

So, there was a lot of stuff about karate (I like how in Boogie Nights they put the accent on the last syllable for that final cheesy touch) that was good. The three-mile barefoot run through the woods ROCKED. The stretching, the meditation, all good stuff. Man, was I in shape. Only problem was the getting hit thing. I could never warm to it. When yer doing sparring/blocking exercises you're supposed to stop short so you don't actually remove teeth. And then there was the 4-day long Special Training thing you had to do to get your black belt and I knew Goddamned Well I was never doing that shit. It sounded awful. Holding a stance for an hour, all sorts of uncivilized shit. Fuck that.

Final straw came one day when this black belt fucker clocked me full in the mouth and broke my tooth which I had to root canal and crown a few years later to the tune of 6 zillion fucking dollars. Asshole. I would've kicked his ass if, of course, I could.

So, then and there I figured that was it. This kind of crap won't fly. I didn't want it that bad, and hanging out with these idiots was getting old. They was So Into It. Me, I'd recently spent some time realizing It's All Connected, if you get my drift, and fisticuffs just don't fit into that.

There's this thing in Karate (karaTE) called the "ki-yai" which is the yell you do when you do your big strike. You know- "HAI-YA!!". It's gay as hell. It's like a mantra: you pick one and make it your own. It's Very Important or something.

When I was a kid the cheesiest of all cheezy Japanese anime cartoons was "Mazinger Z" about this big robot that this li'l pussy kid sat in the head of and drove. Mazinger Z.

So, at practice, during sparring, I started going "MAZINGER Z!!" for my big yell. It was awesome. "MAZINGER Z!!" Can you picture how funny that would be? The sensei dude got pretty in-sensei-ed. So they told me I had to change it. I said I wouldn't because it gave me more ki or whatever. and then I quit and I acted like it was about that. Ha ha.

"Mazinger Z!!"