Fat Albert Tried To Kill Me

My glasses broke a couple months ago and I've been very lazy about replacing them. I don't like to put in my contacts when I've first woken up because they tend to dry out my eyes. As a result, I often can't see very well when I'm walking around during the day. I can read the stoplights and recognize people I know (when they get close enough) but some of life's little details get blurry.

So when a morbidly obese 14 year-old lobbed a bike lock at me yesterday, I wasn't initially that surprised. Until it came clanging down inches from my feet, I assumed the airborne object was a wadded up paper bag or a banana. It was not, and had it come any closer to me I would not be typing this with such ease.

I'm not sure what I did to anger this corpulent adolescent, but I clearly offended him so much that tossing a heavy piece of metal at me was completely justified. Could it be that I was squinting his way without realizing it? Was it just that he and his (more appropriately sized) friends just felt like rousing some rabble after school? Maybe the boy conjectured that I was on foot because my bike had been stolen and was just making sure that I took precautions in the future?

He tossed the lock underhand, like a softball. Maybe he had just come from practice and wanted to keep his throwing arm fresh. Do you think he belongs to one of D.C.'s softball leagues and was so drunk from the post-game happy hour that he confused a soft, spherical object with the U-shaped theft deterrent? If that's the case, than somewhere out there is a buckling huffy attached to a bike rack with nary more than a leather mitt and some chewing gum.

I live on the divider of Shaw and U Street, right near an elementary school. While I'm not as steeped in the craziness as Ben, my neighborhood often has the martial law feel of an old west border town. Others in my neighborhood have been terrorized by packs of kids. There's an old boarded-up house on the corner of my street that serves as a community center for seemingly all of D.C.'s stray cats. When my sister visited, I spent an hour telling her how safe my street was, only to have someone drive by my house and fire 9 gunshots in the air after she had gone to bed.

I tend to believe that the mere idea of violence is not enough for me to change my daily routine. I won't stop walking down T street to get home, nor will I even consider moving. I like the area too much for that. But it would probably behoove me in the future to at least be able to see my surroundings when I'm walking home. Who knows, maybe next time ol' jiggly tits will throw the whole bike.