Zen Center, San Francisco

My friend's a bouncer at a club in North Beach. He's Irish, in his mid-30's, raised in the Sunset, a big guy who knows how to fight. He bounces on weekends for extra money.

The key to fighting he says is not so much fighting but knowing how to take a punch. Taking a punch is as important to fighting as fighting. Lots of guys can fight he says but not many guys know how to take a punch.

When a guy is making trouble in the bar my friend asks him to take a walk with him outside where he tries to talk with him. Talking's usually enough, the guy either decides to leave the bar or returns to the bar a new man.

Once, when my friend, his name is Mike, invited a guy outside, the guy crouched in a martial arts pose and threatened to kill Mike. Mike looked him in the eye and said, "you may be good but do you know how to take a punch?", and the guy backed down.

Now that Brig. Gen Herzl Halevi is stepping down from leading the Israel Defense Forces in the northern Galilee region, he's sure that Israel's next war with Lebanon (Hezbollah) is soon to come.

"The interesting issue is how you create a longer gap between the wars," he said in an interview with the New York Times (Sat. Nov. 16, 2013), the idea being that peace is the time to prepare for war.

It was interesting in the interview on C-SPAN Monday with General Martin Dempsey, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, how many times Dempsey used the word, "uncertainty", how many times he alluded to or invoked the "unknown", as if uncertainty and the unknown are now part of military policy, a strategy so to speak. Dempsey seemed so enamored of the notion that I couldn't help but wonder if he is a Buddhist or if his embrace of uncertainty was a sales technique, a piece of propaganda, another way of not disclosing what the state has a responsibility to disclose...

All the people at the SF ZEN CENTER Friday night for the poetry reading seemed like really nice people. One of the poet's passed around little stones she'd gathered in a garden in the east coast as well as a bottle of oregano oil which she claimed could ward off  a cold. You could take one of the stones home or put a drop of oregano oil in your water, if you had any water, or do both. I did neither, staying only to hear two of the four poets read and leaving the reading early, feeling a cold of my own coming on.

By morning I was at war with myself. Had I taken the notion of uncertainty too far in my own life? Had I been too in love with the unknown, sometimes making life decisions based on its calculus?