Gustavo Turns Ten Today

This marks the tenth anniversary of when I was attacked by someone wielding a box cutter who managed to sever the anterior branch of my carotid artery, My attacker was caught and convicted of attempted murder but was also declared insane so she was incarcerated at Patton State Hospital in San Bernadino. It turned out that she'd already been convicted of seventeen misdemeanors prior to her attacking me, including her attacking two men with a knife just a few months before, and she'd been released on unsupervised probation when she attacked me. 

I've gone into how I achieved what I consider closure by trying to understand what it means to be insane. I'll summarize it again, using an essay taken from Gilbert Keith Chesterton's Orthodoxy called The Maniac. People paraphrase Chesterton at their own peril, but simply put, it's not about a person's ability to reason. It's about the size and shape of their universe of facts. And nowadays, facts are no longer about truth. They are as much about the things we experience individually that prompt us to believe that certain things are true, or worse, are indoctrinated to believe are true.

While this understanding helped me reach what I consider a healthy perspective in terms of how I view the person who tried to kill me, I find that this understanding seems to apply to most of what's going on in the world nowadays. And the reality is that most people have no idea of how insane they've become. And they'd rather to continue to believe untruth rather than acknowledge that they've been manipulated by events or by those who want them to believe as they do. 

Huh

Early next month will mark the tenth anniversary of an event that's shaped how my life has changed ever since. We still serve dinner every Tuesday night though since the pandemic we don't technically serve dinner at the park as we now set up a portable table on the sidewalk bordering the park. This creates an obstacle of sorts for pedestrians/bicyclists but it's not what I'd consider a major inconvenience. The people typically walk around us by walking on the grass in the park. Usually there's open spots on the street so I can park my car and then just unload the car and set up. However, last night, all the parking spots on the street were taken, prompting me to double park and turn on my emergency lights while I unloaded the car. Just after I'd finished unloading the car. A car which had kinda taken up enough space for two cars to park pulled out. I then backed my car into the back half of that space, expecting another volunteer to take the parking space ahead of me. However he elected to park a little further down the street. Then the car parked adjacent to where I'd set up the table also pulled out and left, leaving two parking spots closest to the table empty. I didn't much about this until we'd begun serving and I suddenly became aware of a figure moving towards me and less than ten feet away. It turned out to be a pedestrian who apparently elected to take the shortest/clearest route around us by going behind me within arm's length. This happened more than once. But the first pedestrian seems to unnerved me more than I would have expected.