I slept until 2:15pm in the afternoon. I guess my body still needs it.

The insulin drug shoot was supposed to late this week, so I guess I didn't get it. Oh well.

My sleep schedule makes it kind of tough to keep track of what day it is sometimes. I guess I just stayed home both Friday and Saturday night.

Everyone I've talked with naturally assumes that my assailant is crazy in some way. Coincidentally, I've been reading G.K. Chesteron's Orthodoxy, and am slowly reading and re-reading chapter 2 The Maniac. Chesterton's mastery of the language makes him almost impossible to summarize without losing some valuable essence of the content, but i'll try: if I get him properly, those we might consider mad or insane are not incapable of reason, but are instead limited by the facts they allow within their universe or world view. It would follow that the degree of insanity would correspond to the narrowness of world view.

There's a lot here but it's late, so I'll come back to this.

The Mark of Cain.

I think I've already mentioned that I've been contacted by the court to get my feedback on sentencing, etc. As far as I know, my attacker remains unrepentant, and based on my understanding of the statute, would probably fail in an attempt to present an affirmative defense of mental defect. So it's to me relatively clear cut and dried - she's going to go to jail, the question is for how long.

To me, it would become more complicated if she presented an attitude of repentance, and then threw herself on the mercy of the court. In my mind, I've already forgiven her, and if freedom would give her a legitimate chance to find redemption, I would be OK with it - but she would still require time to earn trust over a number of years before I would want her roaming around unsupervised. The problem is that the penal system is designed to be punitive, not rehabilitative; seventeen previous misdemeanors escalating in level of violence demonstrates that  that legal/penal system is not equipped to handle this.

The thing is, even if we were somehow able to find and agree on an alternative that satisfied all the interested parties, including myself, there would still be people dissatisfied with the result, much like when God punished Cain for killing Abel by cursing Cain. God knew that men would still seek to kill Cain, so God put his mark on Cain to protect him from those who would play God themselves and exact their own punishment/revenge. The sad thing is that people still do this when they take up other people's grievances even when the person who's had the offense committed against them has come to terms with the person who committed the offense, or worse, when the "offender" in reality has done nothing wrong. I've been on the short end of that kind of scenario in the past, so I suppose that's part of why this seems to matter so much..

One of the charter members of our Tuesday night group is planning on leaving the group at the end of this month, but he has yet to make any sort of formal announcement. While I'm fairly confident that what happened to me has had very little to no bearing on his decision, I'm curious to see how everyone else takes this.

Getting caught up with a ton of stuff with the car that I've just let go; I got my car registration renewed - five months late & a few parking tickets for expired tags later. While getting the oil changed, was told that I needed new tires - there were cracks in each of the sidewalls, even though there was reasonable tread on them. The person I bought the car from said the car had been in storage for a couple of years, so I guess the tires were pretty old. I didn't even notice. All that medical fuss only to have a tire blow out ending up with me wrapped around a phone pole or something. New tires, balanced, aligment, brakes redone... it had to be done, but still, a bigger ouch when you get it all done at the same time. Now to get the trunk fixed after backing into a pole.

I had lunch today with someone I used to go to church with 20 years ago. Unfortunately, his life took a different turn and he spent the last two years at the CRC California Rehab Center) in Norco. The part of our conversation I'm going to share is about his fellow inmates; some of them released only to return, some within a few months, others only in a matter of days. It's clear that the prison/legal system is not rehabilitating convicts, nor is incarceration considered a punitive disincentive. It's just as obvious looking at the history of my attacker; SEVENTEEN misdemeanor convictions escalating in level of violence. Something is clearly not right here, and the average member of society can't be bothered to be concerned about it.

Happy tax day.

I put my extension in the mail on Saturday; there is no way i could have dealt with it. I'm going to take it to a CPA who specializes in house sales.

Slept most of the day after lunch.

Met a friend for breakfast yesterday (or earlier today). This should almost go into the food blog; we went for the egg banh mi at Saigon Bakery. We ordered, and started a conversation, during which an old asian man came in and began asking other customers for money. We didn't pay him any attention until he began shouting at the workers behind the counter, something to the effect that they had stolen the store from him. He then became violent, picking things up from the counter and throwing them at the workers. At no time was anyone in any real danger of serious injury; the guy was substantially older and probably no more than 5'5" and 140 lbs, but I could feel my adrenalin start to kick in as I began to assess what I might need to do if he escalated and the odds that he might have a weapon. As it was, the workers responded by threatening to call the police, and the old man left.

I think I experienced to some degree what I've intellectually hypothesized as going on in the minds of the other people in the group, both during and after my attack. For me, there's a sense of closure; I suffered bodily harm, now I recuperate from that. But there's a sense of open-endedness to what I'm experiencing now, the alternative universe what-if scenarios. If he had been bigger and escalated, would I have interceded if someone was clearly in danger of being seriously hurt? And the reality is that I really just don't know, though the masculine ego wants to fantasize how I'd have closed with him executing a right elbow to the throat followed by a putar kepala, taking him down and going into a submission hold from behind....

Uh-huh. Or maybe I'd be wetting my pants!

Went out to a casting interview today for an insulin drug commercial. I had a choice to make and I decided to wear a t-shirt and when they went to right profile shots during video I said to make sure they got my scar. Sometimes we have to be known by our scars.

Cynical Barry raises his head. The bottom line is that someone tried to kill me while i was doing something expressing my faith. Would it be too cynical to wonder how much media exposure I would have gotten if i'd been doing this in the name of Islam?

Police report copy - acquired, scanned and copy sent to insurance.

Not much to glean from it - it was redacted per some regulation. I did find out that my attacker was in fact a fairly large vs. described by witnesses as a a relatively small person, at 5'9" & 165 lbs.

Also went for a followup to get stiches removed. I am by all accounts ready to get back to it and was cleared to begin working out again. Any fatigue at this point should be attributed to loss of strength due to inactivity. I guess that's a good thing.

I was DJ-ing last night and struck up a conversation with a couple of patrons and one turned out to be a former psych nurse. She suggested that my increased need for sleep was actually a sign of depression.  My appetite is pretty good, so I don't think that's it, but I suppose I should mention it.

It's now been over a month since the incident.

I requested a copy of the police report as my insurance will not process certain claims until they get a copy of the report. I'm kinda curious to see what it looks like.

I haven't been out much. Besides Tuesday at the park, I drove someone to the airport Thursday night and went out to lunch on Friday. The weekly lunches on Fridays have helped keep me sane, I think.

My attacker goes to court today. I never did get the time so maybe it's already occurred. Either way, I need to go and request a copy of the police report and authorize that a copy be sent to the insurance.

Other than that, business as usual: sleep, wake up, do my daily errand to get out of the house, come home and call it a day, eat. The worst part about it is feeling too tired to exercise - but maybe I should anyway even if it means going back to sleeping 14 hours a day.

The lead investigator returned my calls today after being out for a couple of weeks. My attacker had stated that she had come to the park to kill someone from a church group that was by their teaching in the park "sodomizing religion". Apparently she'd had previous contact with some group at the park. But there are at least four churches that do stuff at their park, not to mention another group that also meets in the park on Tuesdays that apparently discusses the philosophy of life based on Harry Potter!

But it was nice to hear the officer support what we are doing in the park, encouraging us to contact the police if we encounter people who exhibit violent behavior. The officer was surprised to hear that it was my understanding that legislation had been passed which made it unlawful to serve groups of larger than 50 in the park. Our numbers tend to exceed that at the end of the month.

The police are aware that church groups are helping homeless people and think that that is a good thing, but none of the news reports make any mention of the fact that the group I was part of is made up of various churchgoers helping homeless people. I can't help but wonder if I'd been part of a Muslim group helping homeless people if I'd be a poster boy in the media right now: "MUSLIM ATTACKED WHILE FEEDING HOMELESS!"

DJ'd at Joes earlier this evening. Was pleasantly surprised when two friends told me "90% of the reason we showed up was to give you a hug" and we had a pretty good talk about things. One's a pharmacist and the other is a social worker so they followed up on my medical and emotional situation.  It was very sweet. I think I passed muster.

I finished re-watching season 3 of Breaking Bad. I suppose I should have taken pause when I saw the title of episode 1 of season 4: "Box Cutter". The thing is, I'd forgotten that the box cutter was used in the episode for pretty much the same purpose in a very graphic & truth be told, very brutal scene because it was completely unexpected. Oddly enough, it was like, oh yeah. I suppose I should be imagining that to be me, etc. which really had no appeal for me.