Wrestling with a Gorilla

It's a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired." – Robert Strauss

    I've been working on digesting the results of the election. Mark Moford of the San Francisco Chronicle gave perhaps the best description of how I am feeling: "It simply boggles the mind: we've already had four years of some of the most appalling and abusive foreign and domestic policy in American history, some of the most well-documented atrocities ever wrought on the American populace and it's all combined with the biggest and most violently botched and grossly mismanaged war since Vietnam, and much of the nation still insists in living in a giant vat of utter blind faith, still insists on believing the man in the White House couldn't possibly be treating them like a dog treats a fire hydrant."

    But I wound up getting some help on perspective from an unexpected quarter. I stood in the wind and the rain outside the Boston Public Library in Copley Square for eight hours on Tuesday night with tens of thousands of Kerry supporters, watching the election returns come in on giant screens, listening to speakers whip up the crowd, listening to girls scream while Jon Bon Jovi worked his way through 'Living on a Prayer.' That last bit was one of the low points. There were others.

    As the night wore on and the wind got colder, the returns took a turn for the Bush. When Tom Brokaw came on the big screen and declared that NBC was putting Ohio in the Bush column, you could hear the air go out of the crowd. When the gospel singers came out and started singing 'God Bless America' for the fourth time that night, I decided enough was enough. I walked down to my favorite bar and fired down a pint of Mojo IPA, feeling the outer edges of a truly epic hate-frenzy beginning to work its way into my bones. I shrugged my coat back on, gave the disconsolate bartender a hug, and headed home. On the way, I stopped at the 7/11 and bought a can of Chef Boy-Are-Dee Beef Ravioli.

    That's when the unexpected help showed up. As I was sliding my key into the back door of my apartment building, a young man emerged silently from the bushes behind me. I turned the key, and suddenly it felt like my head had exploded. The man from the bushes had thrown what was later revealed to be a large, 20 lb. cobblestone at me. It bounced off my shoulder, blasted into my jaw, and dropped heavily at my feet.

    I reeled into the door but didn't fall. The fellow, assuming that anyone struck with a 20 lb. rock was ripe for the picking, started to come at me. I turned, and in a moment of truly dumb Braveheart macho testosterone rage, charged the guy. He stepped back in surprise, and then turned to flee. I pursued him down the street, brandishing the can of ravioli over my head while screaming unkind comments about his inappropriate sexual relationship with his mother, until my jaw reminded me that it might be broken.

    After the cops and the EMTs and the x-rays were finished with me, the diagnosis was that nothing was broken or loose. My face is pretty torn up, but I should be able to chew solid food in a couple of days with the help of the Ibuprofen/Percocet cocktail the folks in the emergency room were kind enough to give me. As for the guy who threw the rock, I have no idea where he came from or what he was about. There are a few junkies wandering my neighborhood, so I assume this was an attempted mugging... possibly the first mugging in American history to be thwarted by a thick skull and a can of Chef Boy-Are-Dee.

    Beyond the pain and the big scare, I am actually grateful for what happened. This may seem strange, but getting belted with a boulder did wonders for my perspective. If his aim had been a little better, just a couple of inches to the left, I'd probably be dead right now. I have the rock sitting on my desk in front of me, with an inscription written on it in indelible ink: 'There Are Worse Things Than Losing An Election.' A narrow perspective, to be sure, but a hard one to avoid while living inside my own bruised head.