Ornoth

Time for a brief update on my kyūdō practice.

You may recall that after 2½ years of painful struggle and utter failure in this martial art of Japanese archery, I attended a seminar in South Carolina in hopes that our sensei would be able to correct my constant misfiring, which I wrote about at length here.

That was four months ago. So how has it gone?

Holding the tally board following Austin Kyūdō's 108 Arrows Shoot 2026.

Pretty well. Putting sensei’s feedback into practice has helped immensely. While I’m still far from perfect, I’d say I’m able to shoot nearly as reliably as anyone around me, which is an amazing degree of improvement.

Which brings me around to yesterday’s practice session: our annual ceremony of shooting 108 arrows to begin a new year.

Ironically, the meaning behind the ceremony is Buddhist in nature, as a way to recommit to overcoming the 108 Defilements. In her email to the group, our club leader phrased it as “letting go of tension, frustration, mistakes, grudges, and anything else we carry from the past year.” I think those words perfectly encapsulate my attitude toward my shooting in 2025.

So this was a very intentional opportunity to make a break with the struggles of the past, and begin a new year with a clean slate.

In previous years, my terrible form and lack of confidence made this ceremony uncomfortable for me, and I contributed very little to the group effort. But with newfound confidence in my shooting, this year I was eager to push myself and publicly demonstrate my progress. Plus this would be exactly the kind of shooting-focused practice I need.

One way I prepared was working out with my bow while the group was on hiatus over the holidays. I specifically wanted to develop the strength to hold a full draw for longer, and the endurance to do so repeatedly. To that effect, I did daily workouts, building up to three sets of three draws with my 12 kg bow, holding each one for 24 seconds before release.

On the day of the ceremony a dozen of us showed up, so math suggested each person should aim for about 9 or 10 shots. Whatever! I was the first archer to the firing line, shot the club’s first arrow of the year, and spent the most time at the line.

And at the end of the session, I tallied 36 shots, well more than anyone else, and tying (intentionally not surpassing) the current record for most shots during the annual ceremony.

Not all of them were perfect, of course. About a third of the way in, three of my shots ricocheted off the target, but I realized what I was doing wrong and corrected my form from that point forward. And even if I count those as misfires, that’s still a 92% success rate, which I haven’t enjoyed since early 2023.

So yeah, my shooting has definitely improved, and I’m pretty happy with where I’m at, with an eye toward improving even further in 2026. Or, as the Japanese would say, “Daiseikō!”

Aside from general improvement, one of my next steps is joining the local archery range and getting proficient at distance shooting. The range is open all day, every day, and is a very convenient 10 minute drive from home.

I also have the option of formal testing and advancing in rank, but – having begun in a different school of kyūdō that doesn’t have tests or ranks – those things aren’t of any interest to me. Nor am I particularly interested in flying out to South Carolina (or further) every few months for seminars.

For now, I’m perfectly happy taking my time and refining my form, free of the significant downsides that come with formal testing and ranking systems.

Though I will say that after 2½ years of stress, insecurity, and failure, being the top dog at the dojo – even if it was just for this one day – felt really, really good. If this were a TV drama or sports anime, this would have been the climactic episode of my redemption arc! And it was a deeply satisfying way to begin a new year.

My Austin kyūdō group doesn’t have a teacher; it never has. But we fall under the distant tutelage of a Japanese archery group based in Greenville, South Carolina. The South Carolina Kyūdō Renmei (or SCKR) is run by Blackwell-sensei, one of the most senior kyūdō teachers outside Japan, and his wife Reiko-sensei.

SCKR hold kyūdō seminars a couple times a year, which are attended by local South Carolina practitioners, Austin kyudoka, as well as people from all over North America.

Given my well-documented and very fundamental beginner struggles, I never attended a seminar. I didn’t want to take sensei’s time away from his many advanced students to deal with my remedial problems, and I didn’t want to waste an expensive trip if I wasn’t going to get the attention I need.

However, sensei offered to run a seminar just for us, only open to the comparatively junior members of Austin Kyūdō. It was an irresistible opportunity to get sensei’s help in a way that didn’t feel like I was imposing on other archers. So in September I joined ten other Austinites for a three-day kyūdō intensive.

And “intense” is the right word to describe my experience, from beginning to end. There’s way too much to be able to share it all, but I’ll do my best to briefly share the important parts of where I started, what I went through, some of the things I learned, and where I go from here.

The Honda Prelude

Just two weeks before the seminar, I was ready to call off the trip and quit kyūdō entirely. After two and a half futile years enduring consistent failure in stoic silence, I had finally reached my breaking point.

While everyone around me – even complete first-timers! – demonstrated basic competence and increasing proficiency, I simply couldn’t successfully fire a bow without injuring myself or damaging equipment. My arrows would fly through the air sideways and clang off the practice target, or flop feebly to the ground only a few meters downrange. I broke strings, stripped the feathers from arrows, and bruised my forearm. And the months I’d spent trying dozens of different ways to correct it had all been for naught.

In the interest of moving on, I’ll leave it at that for now. But to get a better idea how frustrated I was, I’d encourage you to read the blogpost I wrote eight months ago, entitled “All the Gear and…”. Just take all the anguish in that post and amp it up to eleven.

Ironically, that week I had a promising insight: that I clenched the fingers of my right hand so tightly that they were interfering with my release. That didn’t solve all my problems, but it seemed like a clue: one piece of the puzzle. But I didn’t even have time to put it into practice before the seminar was upon us.

So that was my mental and emotional state going into the trip: off-the-scale frustration, extreme pessimism, and the only thing I wanted out of the seminar was for sensei to fix me… Although I was skeptical whether he would, or could.

It was – if you’ll excuse the pun – “my last shot” at being a kyūdō practitioner.

The Tyranny of Logistics

Bearing so much emotional distress, I wasn’t very tolerant of the usual discomforts of travel. Other than two trips between Pittsburgh and Austin when we were deciding where to move, I hadn’t flown in six years: since before the COVID-19 pandemic. And it was my first time flying Southwest Airlines, whose asinine unassigned seating policy makes boarding a complete free-for-all.

Things didn’t get a lot better once we arrived, either. I had to share a room with another person, which added some more stress. Not only were we going to prepare communal meals, but because no one had bothered to communicate with one another, sensei and his friends had also prepared meals for us too, which was yet another stressor for everyone.

Even the seminar provided some unexpected wrinkles. Sensei vetoed my use of the familiar bow I’d brought. I’d purchased some used zori sandals for outdoor use getting to the dojo and fetching arrows, but those promptly broke, necessitating a special trip to the store to buy replacements. And although the seminar was supposed to be for his Austin students only, we were sporadically joined by 5-10 local practitioners. Despite being able to use the dojo 365 days a year, they took shooting spaces and sensei’s time away from those of us who had traveled from far away for a precious 2½ days with him. And I have to admit I got frustrated by seeing other kyudoka improving much more rapidly than I did.

But the underlying message here is that the seminar was extremely mentally, physically, and emotionally draining. In addition to my already-charged emotional state, I was dealing with lack of sleep, poor and insufficient eating, muscle fatigue, dehydration, headaches and nausea, social stress, and of course the emotional rollercoaster of judging every shot I took.

It was, in short, an incredibly draining experience.

Nana Dan the Sensei

I’m gonna be honest: I felt a lot of trepidation going into my first experience with Blackwell-sensei. In speaking with my friends who had worked with him in the past, my preconception was of a teacher who was willfully terse, irritable, intolerant, and easily offended. But after telling their daunting stories, my friends would always add the postscript: “… but as long as you’re serious about kyūdō, he’s really great!”

During the seminar, Blackwell-sensei was actually very willing to give me the benefit of his time and instruction, and he patiently listened to my observations and needs. Despite my skepticism and obvious frustration, he was able to see the mistakes underlying my problems, and gave me clear strategies for correcting them. And he did so with patience and graciousness.

While fixing my issues will take lots more practice and reinforcement, my shooting did begin to improve by the end of the seminar, thanks to his valuable and generously-offered instruction.

Not that he isn’t surly and cantankerous and all that. But I think it shows up in his interactions with more experienced students, with whom he has higher expectations and more established relationships.

My Threefold Incompetence

So what exactly did I get out of the seminar? Well, there were lots of little, specific learnings, but those will be documented in my kyūdō notebook, rather than here. And as far as I was concerned, the only thing that really mattered was figuring out the cause of my constant misfires.

Over the course of the weekend, we identified three specific issues with my release. I’ll distill them down as briefly as possible.

First, my grip on the bow was incorrect, which was causing the string to slap my wrist and the bow to invert itself. Fixing it requires both holding the bow more loosely, plus making small changes in how my fingers configure themselves on the grip.

My second issue was what I’d identified just before the seminar: by locking my fingers around the string, they interfered with the string when I released it, causing the arrow to fire off-kilter, with very little power, and stripping some of the fletching. Ideally, I wouldn’t lock those fingers at all during my draw, but for the time being I’m simply trying to consciously loosen those fingers before I release the string.

I developed the habit of locking those fingers because the string was prematurely coming out of the groove it’s supposed to sit in within the glove. Sensei gave me several techniques to counteract this tendency during my draw, including: keeping my right hand flat; being careful to keep my thumb level or pointed up, rather than downward; making sure my right elbow comes down and back as I draw; not drawing the arrow all the way down to the chin; and not holding my full draw for very long.

Of course, there’s an immense difference between a conceptual understanding of what one has to fix versus actually physically performing it reliably each time one steps up to shoot. And because I’ve spent two years developing muscle memory of improper techniques, my attempts to correct my form feel completely unnatural and wrong. So even though I know what I should be doing, it’s going to take time and lots of practice to learn new habits.

The Fourth Problem

As chance would have it, our kyūdō trip coincided with two Zoom calls that I wanted to attend, both organized by Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, where I practiced meditation for 12 years, and which has been an important part of my growth for more than two decades. Saturday’s call was in honor of CIMC’s founding teacher, Larry Rosenberg, who is in his nineties and in poor health; and on Sunday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of CIMC’s founding. These were intensely moving for me, and featured several of my dear old friends. A shaved-headed version of Ornoth even showed up in the background in part of the “community reflections” video they shared!

The main reason why I mention these here is because those celebrations included poignant messages about looking at how one relates to the challenges and suffering that arise in one’s life, and to pay close attention to what one is attached to, especially ego-based ideas about who one is and how one wants other people see them.

The applicability of these ideas to my kyūdō practice couldn’t have been clearer, and really put the past couple years into perspective.

To clarify further, here’s a citation from a recent article in Lion’s Roar magazine that stated things rather well:

Often a problem at home or at work isn’t just troubling because of the surface issue that the problem is about. It’s what the problem makes us feel and think about ourselves that is disturbing. Taking the time to examine those feelings and thoughts using our meditative practices often shows us that we have some internal hook by which the external challenge has grabbed us.

[…]

Try answering this self-exploratory journal question: “What is the difference between the actual problem posed by my situation and my perception of and feelings about my situation?”

A neutral observer would see that there’s really nothing objectively painful about my kyūdō practice, other than maybe an occasional abrasion. The towering mountain of anguish I’ve endured is entirely due to the meaning I’ve attached to my practice, specifically my need to be seen as a competent – if not a skilled – archer, both in my own mind as well as in the estimation of others.

My need to be a skilled kyudoka was the source of a great deal of pain: that is the fourth problem with my archery practice.

I would free myself from an immense quantity of suffering if I were able to let go of that need, or at least hold it more lightly. Like changing my shooting technique, that’s easier said than done, but just having that mind-shift cleared some space for me to relate to myself and my struggles with more ease, more compassion, and hopefully a little more freedom.

Since my early days as a tech consultant, I’ve known that I don’t thrive in my “stretch zone”; I thrive in the “comfort zone”. I want to enjoy life as it comes, in accordance with my own values, without unnecessary effort or discomfort. I don’t understand people who fixate on personal growth, always striving for something more, wanting to leave their mark on the world. To me, that sounds like living in a perpetual hamster wheel: lots and lots of effort, achieving nothing of value. Or as Devo sings: “Toil is Stupid”.

I had an exchange with one of the senior kyudoka from South Carolina which was especially discouraging. He told me that he enjoyed having the younger Austin people visit, because they reminded him that practicing kyūdō could actually be fun. If enjoying kyūdō is an alien concept to such a longtime practitioner, that raises a big question about whether I even want to continue. What’s the point, if there is no enjoyment?

Kyūdō challenges my self-image, my attachment to how I am perceived by others, and the basic values I hold toward life. Hopefully I can work through those challenges and find a better way to relate to them, so that I don’t have to suffer as much as I have for the past two years.

Seeking the Target

So where do I stand?

Sensei actually gave me both hope and a number of specific changes that I can incorporate into my shooting technique. It would be logical to make a sincere effort to adopt his suggestions, to see whether they actually improve my shooting or not. That will take time and practice to prove out, but that’s an investment I’m willing to make.

I’m also willing to work on my relationship with kyūdō. It’s important that I learn how to let go of the frustration that comes with identifying as a competent archer, while at the same time asking myself whether kyūdō’s endless self-improvement treadmill is something I am able and willing to tolerate over the long term.

As such, I am not going to quit kyūdō… yet.

But at the same time, I am only suspending judgement long enough to work with sensei’s suggestions. Those changes might not help, and I might still decide that I can’t cope with kyūdō’s perpetual challenges and frustrations.

So we’ll see. The arrow’s journey continues, for the time being.

I must have been terribly bored, because sometime around 2012 I started watching MLS, the top-tier American soccer league, with specific interest in the local team: the New England Revolution.

Sporting my Revs kit, here in the farthest seat from the pitch...

The matchday poster I snagged at the end of the game.

I’ve never been into sportshead culture, but in 2019 I paid for membership in the Midnight Riders, one of the Revolution’s supporters’ groups, specifically to back them for calling for the dismissal of the team’s coach following years of underperformance. I’ve followed the Revs and been a member of the Riders ever since; but I’ve never been to a game, because their stadium is an hour’s drive out of town, and at that point I was living car-free.

In 2022 Inna & I moved to Austin, where the local team — Austin FC – had just joined MLS. Which brought up the obvious dilemma: do I root for Austin or New England?

Although I’ll always support the Revs, I really want to like the local team, but that hasn’t been easy. Austin FC has been a perpetual underperformer, saddled with poor coaching and mystifying personnel choices both on and off the field. Plus, their supporters’ groups are best known for drawing attention to themselves and ignoring what’s happening on the pitch.

Fortunately, Austin plays in the Western Conference and New England in the Eastern, so the two teams rarely face each other. In fact, although Austin joined the league in 2021, they have only played New England once in four and a half years!

As of July 2025, New England was the only MLS team that had never visited Austin’s Q2 Stadium. But on July 12th they would finally face off here in my new hometown. For me, it was a must-see game. It would be the first MLS game I’d ever attended, so equally my first Revs game, and my first Austin FC game.

The next question was whether to go as a general local fan, or if I should wear my New England kit and sit in the away supporters’ section.

On the plus side, getting tickets through the Midnight Riders would be cheaper than general seats, and I’d be sitting amongst other vociferous New England fans for the first time. The downside was that away team seating is as far as you can physically get from the field, and on the side of the stadium that receives direct afternoon sunlight.

In the end, what swayed my decision was it being my only chance to sit in the away supporters’ section, whereas for any other game I could sit wherever I wanted and cheer for Austin with the rest of the crowd.

That’s a lot of build-up, just to get to the point of saying that I went. I’d like to say it was amazing, but the reality was considerably less.

It was indeed cool sitting in the away section with other Revs supporters, joining in on their chants and general merrymaking. My seat was indeed in the very last row at the very top of the nosebleed section in the extreme northeast corner of the stadium.

I made particular note during warmups to focus my binoculars on Andrew Farrell, a New England fan favorite who – after 13 years and a club-record 341 appearances with the Revs — is nearing the end of his career as a player.

As befits two perennially mediocre teams, 90 minutes of soccer resulted in a pretty predictable 0-0 scoreless draw.

Having some local foreknowledge – and knowing neither team was likely to score – I left just before the game ended, so that I could score the free 11x17” game matchday poster before they ran out. It’s nothing special, but in the absence of paper tickets, it’s the best cheap memento of what was, for me, a memorable event.

I’m sure I’ll go to other games at Q2 – rather soon, in fact! – but you always remember your first, right? And it was a good way to honor my dual loyalties to both Austin and New England.

Oh yeah, PS: here's the match highlights video...

Since ancient times, mankind has been preoccupied by a quest for “freedom”. Even in today’s somewhat enlightened society, safeguarding our “freedom” is an almost daily topic of conversation.

But I wonder how many of us have ever made the effort to formulate in words exactly what that term means to us. And if you don’t know what freedom means, how can you possibly successfully attain it?

Freedom!

For me, freedom has three main components: choice, independence, and ethics.

First is the freedom to choose between alternatives. Where a man has no choice to make, there is no freedom.

And to be truly free, that choice must be largely independent of external influence or coercion. A man who is coerced or misinformed is not able to freely choose.

And finally, “freedom” has no meaning unless a person can make decisions based upon the values and beliefs that he holds as the product of his upbringing, education, life experiences, emotional makeup, and philosophy.

As a bonus aside, I’ll assert here that a person’s values are most often a uniquely individual balance between benefit to oneself and benefit to others, where the latter category might be further subdivided into one’s “in-group/family” and “outsiders/others”, however broadly or narrowly one chooses to make that distinction.

So that’s my operative definition of personal freedom; now let’s consider whether we do a good job attaining it…

We humans like to think of ourselves as complex, multifaceted, and diverse, as the pinnacle of evolution, and imbued unique capacities of intellect, free will, discretion, morality, and freedom of choice.

How ironic then that, across all cultures and times, the overwhelming majority of human behavior can be reduced to two very simple principles:

• Get more of the sensations that we perceive as pleasurable, and
• Get rid of the sensations that we perceive as unpleasant.

This two-line algorithm is not only sufficient to describe almost all human behavior, but that of nearly all animal life, down the simplest amoebae and paramecia. If it’s pleasant, move toward it; if it’s unpleasant, run away from it. It’s poignantly emblematic that the Declaration of Independence, one of mankind’s most cherished documents, proclaims “the pursuit of happiness” as a vital and basic “unalienable right” of all men.

What does it say about our vaunted sense of freedom and individuality if 99% of all human thought, feelings, and behavior can be boiled down to a ludicrously simple two-line program, the exact same one used by the most tiny, primitive unicellular organisms? Where is freedom to be found in slavishly obeying that biological imperative?

Here is where the Buddhist in the audience has something to contribute.

Without judging anyone’s individual spiritual practices, I would assert that Buddhism is not fundamentally about stress relief, quiescing our thinking, blissing out, self-improvement, earning merit for future lives, extraordinary experiences, psychic abilities, or deconstructing the self. Those things may or may not happen along the way, but I think that the core goal of the Buddhist path is breaking free of our instinctual programming by first understanding that we habitually live under a false illusion of freedom, then gradually learning how to find genuine freedom by ensuring that our thoughts, speech, and actions are driven by conscious, values-driven choices, rather than never-questioned blind reactivity and maladaptive habit patterns.

Realizing that pleasure and discomfort are the central drivers of our biological programming, the principal line of inquiry for Buddhists has been cultivating a more skillful and beneficial relationship to these influences. A key tenet is the principle of dependent arising, which describes the chain of cause and effect that explains how our relationship to desire creates our experience of dissatisfaction. My distillation of it goes:

• Because we are alive, we have senses.
• Because we have senses, we experience contact with sensory objects.
• Because we experience contact with sensory objects, we experience sensations. These sensations are immediately perceived as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral at a pre-verbal, instinctual level. Let’s call that the sensations’ “feeling tone”.
• Because our perceptions produce these low-level feeling tones, we instinctually relate to the pleasant ones with desire, the unpleasant ones with aversion, and are mostly disinterested in the neutral ones.
• When our desires and aversions arise, we react with craving and need, becoming entangled and increasingly attached to having things be a certain way in order for us to be happy.
• Because of our attachment to things being a particular way, in a world where we control very little and where change is inevitable, we suffer when our needs and desires are not met, and even when our desires are fulfilled, we become anxious knowing that it’s only temporarily.

This is the sequence of events that leads to our experience of dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, suffering, and unhappiness.

Of course, if dependent arising were an immutable progression, it wouldn’t be of any practical value in our quest for freedom. But there’s one key step where — with sufficient mindfulness, wise intentions, and skill built up through patient practice – we can pry open a tiny window in this sequence of events and grasp our one opportunity to consciously choose a different response.

And that window of opportunity presents itself in how we relate to our sensations. It’s telling that, looking back on what I’ve written above, aside from “pleasure”, the other word that appears in both my two-statement definition of human behavior and the Buddhist principle of dependent arising is “sensations”.

A Buddhist would say that the only place where we have the opportunity to influence our unrealistic expectations is found in how we relate to our sensations. If we can see our perceptions clearly and in real-time, as well as the pleasant/unpleasant/neutral feeling tones that they evoke, we can wake up from our unexamined habit of letting those feeling tones blossom into the reactive craving and aversion that drives most of our subsequent thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In each moment, if we can bring mindfulness to our sensations and our reactions to them, we can consciously choose to respond in a way that is less compulsive, less harmful to ourselves and others, and better informed by our values.

When it doesn’t harm ourselves or others, pleasure is a vital part of living a fulfilling life. However, our dysfunctional habit of blindly following pleasure and running away from discomfort needs to be balanced by wise intentions like purpose, mission, and ethical values that are more complex but also more advanced in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In this sense, the traditional Buddhist monastic way of life may go a bit too far in its inclination toward banishing or vilifying pleasure, rather than seeking a middle way that allows one to wisely examine, engage, practice with, and potentially master one’s relationship to pleasure and aversion.

Note that this isn’t the same as saying that “life is just suffering” or that one has to avoid pleasure and resign oneself to pain. What I’m saying is that we can learn how to relate to our desires and aversions more skillfully, rather than being mindlessly led around by them. And that is the only path to true freedom and living a fulfilling life of integrity, wisdom, and joy, and a life that is in alignment with our innermost and highest values.

Rhonda, one of my meditation teachers back in Pittsburgh, used to liken it to commuting on a familiar route. Taking the main highway might require the least mental effort, but it might not be the best, fastest, safest, or most pleasant route. The only way to know is to cultivate the ability to choose something different: something other than what comes to mind automatically.

Then she would describe her commute home on Ohio River Boulevard. She could stay on the highway, but the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation had thoughtfully placed a big traffic sign indicating (the town of) “Freedom” with an arrow indicating the off-ramp (that’s it, above). True freedom is exactly that kind of off-ramp, giving us an opportunity to get off the limited access highway of compulsive reactivity and mindless habit.

If you want to be truly free – not satisfied with the mere illusion of freedom and the suffering that it entails — you need to be able to see beyond desire and aversion, beyond reactivity and habit. Freedom means being fully awake in every single moment, willing and able to make real, meaningful choices that are informed by one’s ethical values.

The key to success is developing the skill to be awake enough in each moment to avail ourselves of that little window in the chain of dependent arising, where our perceptions of pleasure and discomfort, if unexamined, can blossom into untempered desire and aversion. If you will excuse me hyper-extending an apocryphal truth: in terms of manifesting wisdom and living an ethical life, the price of freedom is eternal mindfulness.

Or so it seems to me.

Although it didn’t start out that way, I guess this qualifies as a “memorabilia” post, given that it deals with stuff I’ve kept for the past 33 years…

Everyone has their own way of relating to significant purchases like a car, computer, television, camera, or stereo. Some people love buying new stuff when it’s on sale. Others pride themselves on getting a bargain by buying used. My M.O. has always been to buy the absolute best I can find, mostly irrespective of cost, then making it last as long as humanly possible… often long after newer, better things have made it obsolete. I take pride in having top-quality stuff and keeping it forever, and because of that I often form an emotional attachment to the objects I’ve acquired.

I can’t say that my first stereo was one of those things. It wasn’t very noteworthy, but it provided a lot of pleasure during my high school and college days.

But as I graduated college, got married, and moved into the workforce, digital audio arrived in the form of compact discs, and in 1992 my cheap high-school era stereo was decidedly worn out and in need of replacement. And my first job after college provided the necessary cash to splurge on something nice.

As fortune would have it, my then-spouse was working at a local electronics specialty store called Leiser and could get top-quality stereo components at cost. We wound up buying a hand-picked ensemble, spending around $1,500 on equipment that would have retailed for around $3,200 (which translates to about $7,000 in 2024 dollars).

I really loved that system, and was always proud to show it off. I’ll say more about that in a bit, but first let’s follow its history.

The majority of that system stayed with me following our divorce and my half-dozen subsequent moves, although I used it less and less over time, and the remaining components spent the last decade-plus stored away in their boxes…

Until recently. While noodling around YouTube I stumbled onto a tiny product that is essentially nothing more than a Bluetooth audio receiver with stereo outputs that could be hooked up directly to the auxiliary input of a traditional preamp. Such a device would allow Inna & I to stream any audio from our computers or smartphones directly through my audiophile rig. That was enough to spur me to finally dig up my beloved 33 year-old components and set them up for our enjoyment in 2025.

Of course, a couple of the old pieces are gone. The CD player that we received as a group wedding present from several university friends eventually self-destructed, and there wasn’t any point in keeping the old cassette tape player from my high school stereo. And I’d tossed my huge trunk-sized Infinity 7 Kappa speakers when the cones had dry rotted. I’d also discarded my old speaker cable and patch cords, but those were easy to replace.

But the most important three core pieces of my system were still there – my preamp, equalizer, and power amp – which needed little more than a thorough dusting. Lemme do a little show-and-tell about those, because I still hold a lot of affection for these three components.

Let’s start with my graphic equalizer. An EQ is useful to boost or cut specific frequency ranges in an audio signal. Got speakers that sound tinny? Use the sliders to boost bass and midtones. Don’t want to wake the baby on the other side of the house? You might quiet the bass a little while leaving everything else normal. Got a room where one speaker has to be placed in a back corner? Boost the left channel or reduce the right.

My 12-channel Denon DE70 graphic equalizer is a quality and useful piece of equipment. It’s always provided great service, and I find its lit bank of 24 faders visually appealing. It’s a bit unique in that the faders for the left and right channels are interleaved as paired green and yellow LEDS, rather than the more common setup that uses two physically separate banks of sliders. And there’s my little Bluetooth receiver perched at top left:

Next, the crown jewel: my power amplifier. A power amp has just one job: take a microwatt “line level” audio signal and boost it to the tens or hundreds of Watts necessary to drive one’s chosen loudspeakers. It’s the final device in the audio processing sequence, connecting to and controlling the output from your speakers.

My power amp was manufactured by Carver, which comes with a bit of backstory.

Bob Carver was a legendary audiophile engineer, especially known for his innovative and impressively powerful amplifiers. I was first introduced to his work in high school, when my friend Paul showed me his brother’s stereo, which included Carver’s M400 old-school vacuum tube power amp, a radical-looking 7-inch square black cube that could pump out 200 Watts per channel: a ridiculous amount of power for a home system at that time. It made quite an impression on me!

The Carver TFM-4.0 power amp that I bought in 1992 is one of Carver’s followup models, offering a ludicrous 375 Watts per channel. It’s a great amp by a great engineer, but because Carver only produced this model for one year, it’s a rare and collectable component even within Carver’s exclusive lineup. Like the M400 that Paul showed me back in 1981, its only display is six sets of LEDs to show the power level of the signal it’s sending to the speakers; and in all the years I’ve owned it, no matter how high I pumped up the volume, I’ve never been able to light any but the first, lowest power level LEDs. The thing is a 23-pound workhorse!

That just leaves my preamplifier, which is like the central conductor of a stereo system, orchestrating inputs from various sources (e.g. CD player, radio tuner, turntable, tape deck, microphone, and now even Bluetooth devices), sending a normalized signal out to the EQ and back, and then downstream to the power amp and speakers.

Like my EQ, my preamp is a decent piece of equipment. Being a CT-17 preamp/tuner made by Carver, it matches my power amp, but doesn’t have anywhere near the same cachet as his power amps. But the built-in radio receiver is a convenient combination.

Which brings me to the final, missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that kept me from setting up my stereo over the past decade-plus: the lack of speakers.

A good stereo is worthless without good speakers, and for a long time I wasn’t able to justify spending a lot of money on a set that would do justice to my other components. But I finally found a set of bookshelf speakers with positive reviews, that wasn’t too exorbitant, and which – if I bought them refurbished – would fit neatly within the credit card rewards bucks I was about to liquidate.

So let me introduce you to my one brand-new component: a set of Polk Audio R200 bookshelf loudspeakers. While I haven’t had them long enough to form a strong opinion of them (or bond with them), they seem to be doing a good job so far. They’re noteworthy in having a very flat response, which means considerably less tweaking of the frequency curve on the equalizer than I’m used to. I only wish I could move them a little farther from the wall, to better distribute the bass.

Although this didn’t start out as one of my official “memorabilia” posts, overall I’m delighted to have my old components back in service again. Despite being 33 years old, they still deliver great sound quality, and it’s really nice having a Bluetooth connection to stream music at will from any of Inna’s and my laptops and phones. I’m really glad I lugged this equipment around with me for all these years!

Like golf, kyūdō is supposed to be a little humbling. Part of this Japanese martial art is to provide the archer with opportunities to observe and reflect on his emotional reaction to stress, adversity, frustration, and failure.

I really don’t think it’s supposed to be this hard, tho.

But before I talk about what’s going wrong, let’s talk about what’s gone well: buying things!

Soon after restarting my lapsed kyūdō practice in a new lineage, I purchased a basic kyūdō uniform: a dogi, kaku obi, hakama, and tabi (i.e. shirt, belt, pleated skirt-pants, and footwear). Plus my first yugake (shooting glove), custom-sized for my hand and specially crafted in Japan.

Last year I added the essential equipment. I ordered four semi-fletched arrows from respected kyūdō teacher Dan DeProspero in North Carolina for close-range indoor use with a makiwara target. Then I gained a beautiful set of six fletched arrows for long-distance shooting, which my buddies picked up for me while they were attending a workshop at Blackwell-sensei’s dojo in South Carolina. And I topped it off with a new, extra-long (yon-sun), 12kg draw weight Jikishin II composite bow in a group order from Japan’s Sambu Kyuguten.

I definitely look the part. So what’s the problem? Literally everything else!

But taking aim at the main problem: I can’t release an arrow properly. Sometimes the arrow launches feebly and bounces off the practice target. Other times it flies thru the air sideways and clangs off the target. Sometimes the string tries to rotate around the bow so violently that the bow “flips” and inverts itself, requiring a manual reset. I’ve even broken the string on one bow. And every misfire produces eye-wateringly painful abrasions and bruising on my left thumb or wrist.

This kinda thing happens to archers from time to time. With a normal problem, you would diagnose what you’re doing wrong, correct it, and move on with your practice; but it’s been more than 18 months, and I’ve tried so many things, with no success in fixing my release. In the past six months, I’ve made just 23 successful shots, against 31 misfires of various kinds. And I sat out three entire practice sessions purely out of fear of shooting. I’ve even had actual nightmares about kyūdō.

These days, I panic before every shot, anticipating the painful abrasions and bruising that accompanies yet another humiliating misfire. Obviously, my “release anxiety” isn’t helping matters at all.

Another frustration is the number of plausible fixes I’ve tried. At first I thought that the glove on my right hand wasn’t holding the string securely, causing it to slip free unexpectedly, with my other fingers impeding its release. When fixing that didn’t solve my problems, I started looking at my left wrist, which is weak and thus has a tendency to buckle inward or outward at full draw. Then we tweaked my grip on the bow, even swapping in a larger grip, because my fingers are considerably longer than those of the average Japanese archer. I tried rotating my right arm vertically on release rather than horizontally, in case that motion was interfering with my release. I tried changed where the arrow was positioned against my glove and putting less torque on my right hand, thinking my glove might be nudging the arrow out of nock. I’ve perpetually been advised to loosen my grip on the bow, but that’s something I’m pretty cognizant of, and doesn’t seem to be the main problem. Because I’ve been afraid of doing a full draw for so long, I tried altering my stance to force myself to fully extended my left arm, in case that was influencing the flight of the arrow. And most recently, I’ve tried focusing my grip on the bow with my middle finger. Out of all these things I’ve tried, nothing has worked.

A complicating factor is that our club doesn’t have an actual experienced teacher among us. Our most senior member is still pretty junior, only recently graduating from Second Dan. So although I get a ton of well-intentioned advice from other members, it’s mostly amateur guesswork and is sometimes contradictory. So many different suggestions have been piled on simultaneously that I can’t adequately test whether any of them are working. Especially when we are only able to shoot three or four arrows per weekly session!

As I said above, part of being a kyūdōka is learning how to manifest stoic strength, showing neither elation nor disappointment in one’s performance. So I’ve been exceptionally patient, never showing any overt emotional response. Meanwhile, I’ve helped new practitioners, who began with considerably less skill and self-awareness, advance far beyond me in skill. Although I really don’t care about rank at all, after nearly two years of incompetent struggle, I’m not improving, and I’ve finally exhausted my willingness to suffer in silent solitude.

A normal kyudoka would long ago have called on the experience of their teacher. For better or worse, our Austin group falls under the auspices of a Seventh Dan teacher who lives in South Carolina and runs his own group there. He never comes to Austin, and we can only travel to see him once or twice a year, when he holds kyūdō seminars that are well-attended and open to the public. At those seminars, he prefers to work with his advanced students, and I don’t want to show up on his doorstep asking for him to solve some aging stranger’s beginner struggles. Ideally, I’d get my problems cleared up and develop some basic competence before working with him. But until that happens, I’d be too ashamed to show up with such fundamental problems, and it would be a pointless waste of a trip if I was unable to participate in shooting.

While I expect my struggles to continue, there are two potential options for possibly getting help.

Our sensei has mentioned the possibility of hosting a weekend seminar specifically for our Austin group. This could be a way for me to meet him and get some personal instruction without taking his precious time away from his favored students. The challenge would be getting a critical number of students to schedule travel together to South Carolina to make it worth sensei’s time. And meanwhile, I’ve got an upcoming surgery that’ll prevent me from flying for six months.

Another possibility might be sending video clips to him for his critique. This has the advantage of being easier to make happen, but it would limit how much sensei can see, as well as how quickly I could test out his suggestions and get rounds of feedback. Plus it would still be an imposition, and he’s known for being terse and a poor correspondent.

At any rate, I’ll be taking the month of March off from kyūdō following my upcoming surgery. I have no idea whether that downtime will be a useful reset for my technique or an opportunity for me to atrophy and fall even further out of practice.

This is all an immense challenge to the air of competence and Buddhist stoicism I usually try to exemplify. Despite my obvious struggles over the past year and a half, I successfully remained nonchalant and kept my frustration on a low simmer. But at this point the pressure has built up and reached an explosive level where it has to come out. It’s been a very long time since anything has frustrated and humiliated me so thoroughly as kyūdō.

After two years of continuous struggle, it would be illogical to think anything is likely to change. So there’s no way to end this post optimistically. Just venting, while documenting my lengthy, painful, and ongoing struggle.

I had this entry all ready to go last week, but I couldn’t help but defer it when I saw that Friday the Thirteenth was coming. So now that it’s here…

Imagine this scenario: you’re the parent of a child in seventh grade. In the evening, you casually ask them how school went, and are told that English class had featured some students doing book reports. Did any of them stand out as particularly interesting? Well, one kid gave a ten-minute presentation on a book called “The Satanic Bible” by this guy Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of The Church of Satan…

Yeah, that was me at thirteen years of age. The same year that Mrs. Bernier read “The Hobbit” and “A Wrinkle in Time” to our English class, I was getting my kicks by introducing my impressionable prepubescent peer group to LaVeyan Satanism.

This was suburban Maine in 1976, so to this day, I’m still surprised that there were no repercussions… at least none known to me.

I clearly remember hanging out in Mr. Paperback on my way home from school one day, looking for anything that piqued my curiosity. And there’s not much that’d capture a twelve year old boy’s attention faster than a black book titled “The Satanic Bible”, with the inverted pentagram of Baphomet on the front and back cover, with the latter serving as background for a crimson portrait of its grim-looking, goateed, bald author with a piercing gaze. I hope my grammar school classmates enjoyed my book report!

The book – along with LaVey’s followup piece, “The Satanic Rituals” – continued to provide a unique conversation piece that followed me through high school, college, career, all the way to the present day. And it paved the way for several other infamous occult acquisitions, including Robert W. Chambers’ “The King in Yellow”, Aleister Crowley’s “The Book of Lies”, Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Monster of the Prophesy”, and the Simon “Necronomicon”.

As for our dear Anton, he provided a lasting final connection with me by passing away on my birthday.

Cue the “Twilight Zone” theme…

Recently, in my post about my new computer keyboard, I mentioned that punch cards were still in use when I was in college. Did you question that story? Well, lookee here!

Now, I didn’t say they were common. There was only one card punch and one card reader in the university computer center, and by the time I graduated, even these peripherals had been removed. You didn’t see them very often, but every so often you’d see an old card deck lying around, possibly abandoned.

That’s how I came across a box of cards labeled “Egypt Dictionary” and adopted it.

Why bother? For one thing, they were a disappearing rarity. But I’d also grown accustomed to using them for jotting down lists and notes, kind of like then-recently-invented Post-It notes, only free, a more usable size, and more robust thanks to being made from card stock. Although I gotta admit that blank cards would have been a lot more convenient than cards that already had holes punched in them!

And lest you think the University of Maine was some rustic relic still using peripherals that were backward-compatible with rocks, here’s a very stylish customized punch card that I procured while visiting the City University of New York’s Queens College computer center in 1985:

But while we’re discussing the computer equivalent of the Stone Age, here’s Page 218 from Pugh, Johnson, and Palmer’s 1991 book, “IBM’s 360 and Early 370 Systems” showing one of IBM’s early innovations for permanent storage: Mylar punch cards!!!

How, you might ask, did I know that image was on Page 218? Well, I found it quickly because I’d left a bookmark on that page in my copy. That bookmark was, in fact, an exceptionally appropriate use for one of my old punch cards!

Here I was, all set to post my first of these new “Memorabilia” blogpos, when this happened:

See that big black gaping hole in the toecap of my pine green Chuck Taylor sneakers? Yep, they bit it. Now let’s talk about why I care about a dirty old pair of Chucks…

Out of all the pairs of Chucks I’ve had, this was my only real custom order. Back in 2011, I used Converse’s custom sneaker configurator to build this pair up from scratch, with gunmetal grey stitching and eyelets, green highlight stripes, and a gingham patterned inner lining. But the topper was the silver embroidered “T2SP” on both outer heel panels.

The significance? It’s a reference to an old fable about a monarch who commissions a ring to make him happy in times of sadness. The ring is inscribed with the phrase “This too shall pass”… hence “T2SP”.

Although the story is Persian in origin, it echoes the central Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, anicca, one of Three Characteristics of Existence. Something well worth keeping in mind at all times!

While they were my favorite pair of sneakers for most of the past fourteen years, impermanence finally caught up with my Chucks this past week. Into the bin you go!

I was probably 15 or 16 years old when computers first started appearing at the consumer level.

In the late 1970s, these were mostly for playing games. I played Pong (1972) and Asteroids (1979) on the first arcade consoles; Air-Sea Battle (1977) at Sears on the Atari VCS; Carriers at War (1984) on the Apple ][, and Crush, Crumble and Chomp! (1981) on the TRS-80.

My first experience using a computer for anything other than games was the University of Maine mainframe in 1982, long before the invention of the Web (1989) or even the TCP/IP protocol (1983) that heralded the creation of the Internet.

This was a time when card punches and readers were still being actively used. Students preferred to do homework on paper-fed teletype terminals like the DECwriter II rather than video display monitors, because they would still have a printed record of their assignment if the mainframe crashed and lost their work. It would be years before the first IBM PC model would appear on campus.

It’s a fair question to ask: with no games and no Internet, what did we actually do on the university computer?

Herein lies an interesting tale. You see, before TCP/IP, IBM had created its own networking protocol called RSCS, and in 1981 – a year before I arrived at UMaine – RSCS was used to connect computers at UMaine, Yale, CUNY, and a handful of other colleges in an academic network known as BITNET. BITNET allowed users at different sites to send programs and data files to one another, exchange email, and send interactive messages, and it would eventually grow to over 3,000 universities across much of the developed world.

In 1982, the idea of being able to send an instant message to someone across campus – or even across the country! – was incredibly compelling.

But RSCS messages weren’t all that. An incoming message would interrupt whatever you were doing, whether that was running a program, archiving files to magnetic tape, or composing a term paper. Each message was separate; there was no concept of an ongoing conversation, and there was no way to include anyone other than the sender and one recipient.

TeleVideo 925 terminal

That all changed in 1983, when one of our university’s computer center staffmembers took an example program from a magazine and ran it on his mainframe account: WGH@MAINE. The program was what we called “a chat machine”; users across BITNET could sign in and send messages to it, and the program would echo those messages to all the other signed-in users. It was the ultimate ancestor of later services like Chat@PSUVM1, Relay@Bitnic, IRC, and Discord.

And its use spread like wildfire among the undergrads. If you were a smart kid who wasn’t into partying, then hanging out on a chat machine was how you spent your time. I devoted endless hours with a cadre of other geeks in the mainframe’s “user area”, idly hanging out on these early chat machines, conversing by text message with an increasingly familiar set of students from random sites across the world. I joined several other Mainers in making the trip down to New York City to attend the world’s first ChatCon meetup in 1984.

These days, I still retain a deep sense of nostalgia for those early days, and keep a few of the memories alive in odd, eccentric ways. Not only does my laptop’s “Terminal” window open in the classic green-on-black of a monochrome mainframe terminal, with the standard CMS “Ready;” prompt, but it also paints the default character-graphic VM/370 login panel. I wish one of my friends still had a copy of the old CAPS/UMaine login panel: an outline of the state of Maine, done in asterisk characters!

My Terminal window also uses the same idiosyncratic font-face as the huge old IBM 3278 terminals of the day. That’s kind of an indulgence, because I never used one… The only 3278s were kept inside the mainframe machine room; lowly student users like me only had access to TeleVideo 925 or 955 terminals… And no one has bothered to port those terminals’ fonts to modern Truetype or Postscript files!

One of the attributes of those mainframe terminals that I recall most fondly were their industrial-strength keyboards. They were of the same vintage as IBM’s “Big Iron” mainframes, long before “planned obsolescence” was a thing. Those keyboards were built to easily withstand a decade of student use, or a direct thermonuclear explosion, whichever came first.

Those old 4½ pound mainframe keyboards were so different from the flimsy, commodity rubber membrane actuated keyboards you get today, or the 1.4 pound Apple Magic Keyboard with its little scissor switches and a mere 1.15mm of key travel. And frankly I really missed the typing experience of a solid, durable keyboard with mechanical switches.

So now I have to admit… This whole nostalgia dump was really just a lead-up to this: I recently bought my first mechanical keyboard.

Now the first thing I’m gonna do is warn you: if you get intimidated by too many choices, selecting a mechanical keyboard is a complete morass! You’re absolutely inundated with choice, beginning with what size keyboard you want, and what keyboard layout. Then there’s tons of different keycaps to choose from, coming not just in different colors, but with different heights and profiles. Next there’s hundreds of different types of switches, with different travel, activation, and sound profiles. Mechanical keyboards are – unexpectedly – one of those incredibly detailed, technical areas that enthusiasts love to submerse themselves into, for reasons known only to the cognoscenti.

Saving you all the drama, I chose a Keychron V6 Max. I wanted something really traditional: a full-sized keyboard with dedicated function keys, arrow keys, and a number keypad, similar to the original IBM Enhanced PC keyboard, which is probably the most famous keyboard in history. The V6 Max is also wireless, which I prefer, given that I often type with the keyboard on my lap. And it’s sturdy, weighing in at 4.47 pounds, only half an ounce lighter than my beloved TeleVideo 925!

I kept the stock keycaps, which are a nice two-toned blue, with reddish ESC and ENTER keys. The keyboard has modes for both Mac and Windows, as well as dedicated keycaps for both OS’ idiosyncratic command keys.

Not knowing much about switches, I ordered two sets: the Gateron Jupiter Brown and Gateron Jupiter Banana, but I quickly opted to run the latter, which have a more satisfying sound, which will hopefully not perturb my housemate.

Other features… The keyboard is customizable with industry-standard QMK or VIA software. It also has a handy dedicated volume/mute knob on the top row just to the right of the F12 key. Like many modern keyboards, it comes with (often maligned) programmable LED backlighting, which I’ve set to simply flash blue underneath each key as it is activated. I also bought a nice clear plastic keyboard cover to put over it when not in use.

Having had it for six weeks, I have to say that it’s been a pure delight, and I find myself looking for reasons to sit down at the keyboard and bang away on it. In fact, I enjoy typing on it so much that I’ve been thinking about setting up a Discord text chat for a gathering of BITNET friends to revisit those old days when we used to spend hours upon hours typing to one another across the ether (hence the reminiscing about chat machines, above). And fair warning: another way I’ll satisfy my rejuvenated enthusiasm for typing is to produce more longwinded blogposts like this one!

I’ve only had two minor niggles. I had one bad switch – which happened to be on my ‘s’ key – that would register a double-strike about half the time. However, that was easily remedied by swapping the switch out. The other niggle is one I’ve had in the past with several other keyboards: the little rubber feet on the ends of the keyboard’s prop-up legs always seem to come loose for me, requiring an end-user application of superglue to stay put.

So after all that, the bottom line of this post was just to spend time gushing about having finally bought myself a quality keyboard. I’ve been dealing with garbage chiclet keyboards ever since I left college back in the late 1980s, and – given the amount of time I still spend sitting at the computer! – I was way overdue in treating myself to a higher quality input device.

And I’ll type, type, type till my baby takes my key-board away…
(no apologies to Brian Wilson)