it doesn't.
two days ago, i was mugged in broad daylight. for this account, the details aren't important and they frankly are not all that special from a million other purse grabs, i guess.
did anybody see? i don't know. i do know nobody stopped to help. i was blacked out for a few minutes, and have several spotty hours afterwards, so don't really have a knife's edge on this thing. it was a mess of a night and morning til i finally wound up at the police station exhausted and in tears. men with buzzcuts and guns in and out that little 1/2-door--how many women do they see crying every week? every single one still asked if i was being helped.
a confusion of jurisdiction brought me a statey. a guy named hugaboom (absolutely one of the best names i've ever seen. wonder if his daughter is a stripper?) his pencil map showed i wasn't his catch after all, so he drove me where i needed to go. turned out he'd done time on our local equivalent of s.v.u. his voice was a gruff smoker's, but he kept reassuring me that he only wanted to help, and was only asking and re-asking questions to jog my memory. the randomness of the attack? the absence of a good samaratin? my confusion and fear? none of it surprised him. he faces chaos everyday. it's interesting how cops file things in their heads: he told me about his ancient aunt getting robbed twice, and mother getting her car stolen. (uh, yeah, he's a townie from the bricks, lol.) it wasn't to make me more afraid, but to make me know i wasn't alone in the cruel swipe of the universe sometimes bloodying your cheek.
i don't run with bikers. my friends don't sell meth or kill puppies.
a majority of my female friends (and i) have been raped, and not most by strangers. ( "date rape" wasn't a concept when we were in college. how does it make it less worse if you know the guy? i swear a man must have coined that term.) a good portion of my gay acquaintances have been bashed, and 3 of my favoritest homos have been brutally hurt -- plastic surgery beat. i know women and men stabbed and shot. i know two women who were abducted and held.
for some, there is a need to find order in the universe. that presumes everybody's punching your same clock, ya know?
rural idylls, the cosseting of car travel vs. public transport (i know 2 girls raped by cabbies and have had my share of nastiness on the "t") and the reality of life as a tall white man put a spin on life i'll never know.
last night as i struggled to sleep under my bruises and sore head, i was reminded of the damn christian pablum about predestination. my anger welled and i couldn't sleep. the idea of some grand-master flash on high deciding your ticket before it's punched and then a life behavior based only a fear of us lowly worms not knowing the outcome made my teeth itch even as a kid. (strict calvinists even have double-predestination, which i think involves a tree-house and a bunch of backwards-facing r's on the sign, but i could be wrong.) the catholics added lots more wiggle-room with our infallible pope and all sorts of ante-rooms of hell like limbo and purgatory. the idea, and worse(!) the acceptance of a micro-manager nostradamus behind the pearly gates gets up my dander, k?
thomas paine rebuked the bible's paul, if god made us in *his* image, would he have made lumps of clay? insensible vessels, incapable of joy, misery and justice?
as part of our social contract, we owe it to ourselves and those we touch to do the *right thing*. yes, yes, ok. it keeps the fabric knit and gives morality a marker. i'm ok with that. i'm nice to babies, surrender my seat to old crones on the train and give directions to tourists, ya know?
when hugaboom was taking my initial statement, he said off-handedly that my apartment was "last night's numbah". did somebody get lucky?
some may think the reason this happened was to remind me life could always be worse. trust me, i have a mile-long list of possibilities there. if i'm dragged to this argument, best i can make out, it was to remind anything can happen.
i also still think that can mean for the better.
No comments:
Post a Comment