His favorite maneuver was the Rolling Pebble, where both feet start pointing south, the southern most foot pushing off to rotate his body counter-clockwise, spinning on his other foot, his elbows out as his hands rotated around on another, palms-width apart, hand over hand, and as his foot came around, hitting the ground he bounced back again the other way, hands now rotating in the opposite direction beneath one another. A punch landed on the first half of the move could break a man's jaw; a punch landed the other way could drive the bones of his nose into his brain and kill him.

But he was mild mannered, and genuinely only practiced Hummingbird Tai-Chin for its spiritual access. He never had occasion to defend himself in a fist-fight, much less attack anyone. Indeed, in a man's life, of occasion arose where fists need be involved, better to let one man land a punch, get it out of his system, suffer the smallish bruise, rather than aggravate him into paroxysms of blind rage by defending oneself well. Such is the hypocrisy of violence.

No, for him, Tai Chi was meditation, a connection with nature, and as his body, like water, flowed through the air and the hummingbird slowly beat its wings as at sipped at sweet nectar from the hyacinth, his spirit, too, like water flowed in and out of the gentle crevices of the existence of the universe.

Of course, as months went by, and turned to years, he slowly sped up the tape of the bird, and while he could never complete his routing in the real-time of birds darting into and out of the fallopian flower petals, he nevertheless did become almost preternaturally fast. But as time went stil further forward, he found he preferred the slower movements to the faster, spending more time in meditation, for what good is meditation if it last all of 15 seconds?

But mother nature never seems to care for over intellectualization, has no respect for consistency, answers no questions and rewards no one for patience or understanding, choosing to flit from flower to flower according to its own design, and the whims of man be damned. And so it was that on a gentle Sunday at an outdoor brunch with a lady he become quite fond of over the course of several months, he had occasion to, unfortunatly, stand up. He stood up from the table, from his plate of sliced ham, scrambled eggs, from his glass of champagne with the strawberry floating in it, stood up from his napkin tossed gently on his chair, and stood up in one fluid motion, going from still to start to stop again with no seeming abruptness but no seeming acceleration, deceleration: first he was sitting, then he was moving, and the he was standing.

And the waiter, to his credit, was having a bad day. Who knows why. A lazy good for nothing lout who wanted nothing more than to score a bag and watch nickelodeon reruns, and only agreed to cover this god-awful shift because was low on money and his stash was getting meager. Or maybe he was a bright and motivated college student, earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering, studying for finals and bit surly for having gotten lttle sleep thanks to an all-night studying binge before taking the brunch shift. Or maybe just a regular guy, career waiter, working on his novel, a bit irritated this Sunday morning because the bartender kept his mimosas too orange-juicy and the customers were complaining. It doesn't matter who he is; he was just having a bad day,

And so when the man who'd been doing tai-chi to the slow motion video of a hummingbird stood up in one fluid motion, startling the passing waiter who dropped his tray of empty mimosa glasses, the waiter yelped "watch it, motherfucker," just as another man walking by was splattered with broken glass about his ankles, and coincidence stacked on top of coincidence, on this idyllic Sunday morning in May, flowers in ripe, rich bloom, a hummingbird darted past, from one side of the seating are to the other, from Iris to Hyacinth, and by the time the bird had gotten nectar, it was all over. The passing man had a broken jaw, the bones of the waiter's nose had been driven into his brain, killing him, and the mild-mannered man was no longer one with the universe, was never going to see this young lady again, and was going to be in jail for the rest of his life.

And if you think this story is ridiculous, then quite telling me pornography makes men hate women.