The Grand Tour 2

I cheated. I used my visit as an opportunity to train at another dojo.
This place was small, real small. Imagine your typical half-strip strip mall, three unrelated offices: a comic book store, a tiny furniture outlet, and an a law office.

We'd turned into this building on the advice of the cluttered signage fifteen yards away, a series of squares, rectangles, and other forgotten four sided shapes. Each promised something: a service, a store, an idea, and three more offices than were visible. With its clashing fonts and competing reds, blacks, and greens, the uniform white background fused into one off kilter asymmetrical meme "Jujitsu-Comics-Furniture-Insurnace!-Attorney-Space for Lease" Somewhere in a tiny cubicle cluttered with Go-bots and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a graphic artist, a twenty something named Bob with a tiny pot belly and a odd devotion to Plan 9 from Outer Space, imagined a world where Jenga was the ultimate form of advertisement, but something went wrong. He fused Jenga, played right to the point of inevitable folly, with a Totem pole. At least, he did so half heartedly. Only he knows why he gave up. Only he knows why someone was nuts enough to purchase his work.

"I don't see it--well, now, check this out"
The blacktop curved down and around the back.. The building had another side, an underneath. There were three more offices in the building, jujitsu among them.

It seemed appropriate that a dojo would be wedged into the lower left hand corner of the building, a violent id for an inanimate object-space. It was the suppressed desire of fanboys dipped in toilets, the sinister urge of lawyers beaten by the excrutiating non- precision of legalese, a sweaty dungeon hidden away from those blinded by the anti-razzle and the anti-dazzle of the signs.

"Bow before you enter."
Girlfriend and I went inside.

The mat was a light brown, a thin tan. I reached down to touch the floor. Hard mats, not a lot of give. It was the first time I'd seen mats with a bamboo pattern. Waves shaped into tiny sticks, criss-crossing the floor. I was amused and disappointed. "I was hoping for something a little softer." I'd driven over 300 miles, and god damnit, I walk into another dojo with hard grooved mats. My toes wiggled and grumbled, one of them ached stupidly. "I must have tortured a burn victim in a former life."