About Me

So, how did I become Rasta.  I stopped cutting and grooming my hair when my father passed away and after my initial mourning period, I decided that I still wasn’t quite ready to cut my hair because I wasn’t really over my father’s death.  I was kind of really f*cked up in the head with his death…he died one morning, my brother and I washed his body that afternoon, wrapped him up and placed him in a wooden box and the early the next morning we threw shovelfuls of dirt on the closest person to me, all in less than 24 hours of his dying…this shit was gonna take some time getting over and a lot of hair grew during that time.  So after some meditation and enlightenment, I decided to allow my hair to just dreadlock.  I had wanted dreadlocks since I was a teenager but the US Marines didn’t look favorably upon them and even after getting out of the Corp, I never had enough hair to ‘let my hair down.’  There were a multitude of reasons that led me to the final decision to allow my hair to dread-lock but mainly I wanted to just let go and to stop trying to control the uncontrollable in my life and to live off faith more.   During a holiday break from work, I decided to allow a friend to “twist” my hair to help the process of dreadlocking.   She made these nice and neat, little curly-twists with my hair and when I returned to work everyone thought it was “very nice” and “interesting.”  My hair was still orderly and the little twists all lay perfectly in rows on my head.  After a couple of weeks I washed my hair and all that ‘order’ in my hair was washed away.  I tried to re-twist my hair the night before work because I didn’t want to return to my job with hair that as my wife described as “looking like rats had been sucking on it” but at that moment I began my initiation into becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable.  I soon (after a year of stares) became comfortable with having unruly hair.  Plus having neatly kept dreadlocks was an oxymoron to me.  I went from the former US Marine with the neatly tapered haircut and well-groomed facial hair (if I had any facial hair) working for the US Congress, to being described as “the guy that hadn’t shaved his beard or combed his hair wondering the halls of Congress”…one congressman used to call me “Black Jesus”….an inside joke we had because of my being black and Jewish…and no, the burial rites of my father had were Muslim…yup…Mom’s Jewish (black) and Dad was Muslim (black)….This is the “About Me” section so you’re getting it. And I guess you also realized Im not Rastafarian either.

I’ve irritated and entertained people in over 30 countries with my being at a lost of language, culture and sometimes direction but there are always a cheer from someone pumping a fist in the air while exclaiming “Bob Marley!!” and hundreds of accolades of “I really like your hair” “let me buy you a beer,” “cool hair” and the question”do you know where I can get some weed?” but the first 6 months to a year of growing dreadlocks, I looked insane… like I had given up on ‘giving a damn.’  When I would talk with someone about something serious, I couldn’t help but notice their quick glances to the top of my head.  It bothered me at first because I felt like I couldn’t seem to get peoples full attention….I found out how the well-endowed woman with a low cut top feels when talking to a guy.  I later learned that people are distracted by what they don’t understand or to that which they can not relate. It was just hair and the person inside is the same person as yesterday (with the exception of the great deal of pain I was going through for my fathers loss) and my job in life hadn’t changed just my hair.  However, in actuality I was changing I was learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable situations that life offered me.

Interesting enough, I had the pleasure of people apologizing to me after talking with me because they felt bad that they had made a pre-judgement about me because of my hair before actually getting to know me.  I thought it was cool that adults had recognized their own preconcieved stereotypes and they realized the error of their judgement.

When I first introduced to BJJ, I was a student of Tae Kwon Do. I found it strange (not unfamiliar) to accept a fight on the ground rather than trying to take the fight back to one’s feet.  Fast forward 15 years I just returned from Pamploma Spain – San Fermin Festival (Running with the Bulls) and was looking for another challenge and found myself on the mat visiting a BJJ school wearing a tshirt and shorts.  And after a couple of months of visiting different BJJ schools,  I was ready to accept the uncomfortable position of ground fighting.  With my participating with BJJ,  I started seeing similar looks from friends and family members as when I had first started growing my hair.  When I would show up at the cookout or work with a bruised eye, a swollen nose, broken fingers or holding my ribs during lunchroom laughs …they looked at me like I had joined a “fight club” and questioned my recreational decision-making skills but I was again becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable and I was okay with it.  But unlike my journey with my dreadlocks this discomfort I was experiencing wasn’t with my fellow man’s looks but purely with myself and my abilities (and inability) to adjust to the uncomfortable situations I knowingly got into 3-4 days a week and I was learning to handle the uncomfortable without issue or hesitation. I was looking forward to fighting and being in the “hard to escape” position and learning to work through it. I was learning the meaning of Oss.

So to prevent a long story from getting longer….When you only go to one BJJ school and all your buddy’s roll with you because… you know them and they know you …and hell, you’re just comfortable rolling with each other until maybe a new guy visits and brings in a new defense, choke or enthusiasm. Im not knocking only going to one school.  Hell, I really miss my first school, it was like a family and when the family fell apart and the school closed, we lost a comfortable environment to practice our craft with people we liked.  (Told you this could be a long story) Anyway, I always liked when visitors came to my old school or when our school’s members would travel to other schools and return with new BJJ stuff that required a different “game plan” than what we were working in class.  These “game changers” made BJJ a pain in the ass and uncomfortable but from that discomfort came growth.  I travel as much as possible and visited BJJ schools all over the world and decided to start writing reviews on some of the criteria I consider to be important to a BJJ school.  Whenever, Im a visitor I try to share the knowledge I’ve acquired from my Professors and coaches over the years but mainly, I’m there to learn what I can from the new school to enhance my wisdom and understanding of BJJ and its gentle method of grappling with the uncomfortable situations life can serve up.

Although my dreadlocks are no longer physically on my head, I still look at people through the same uncomfortable filter I developed over the 15 years I had them.  It would be much easier to go through life avoiding the uncomfortable but that would be to pretend that discomfort doesn’t exist and our strength would never be tested and therefore never increased.  So the sooner we learn how to deal with it, the easier dealing with life’s discomfort becomes. I hope to share with you some of the ways I’ve made the uncomfortable comfortable with this blog.

Respect, Shalom, Namaste

Bald Rasta