I napped after dinner and was not able to go back to sleep. Circumstances prompted me to review my posts for this blog starting with the most recent and going back to 2013.
I've come a long fucking way.
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Wow
Friday, March 5, 2021
Gustavo Perez endures the pandemic and turns eight today.
I started this post at the beginning of the month when I realized that the anniversary was coming up. My last post was a year ago. A few rumors about some sort of virus were starting to make the news. No idea that I'd be looking for a new place to stay eight weeks later, as both of my classical musician roommates saw all their gigs get cancelled for at least five months, and instead of incurring months of back rent they'd never be able to pay back, elected to give notice at the beginning of April.
As inconvenienced as most of us have become, the pandemic had an even greater impact on those who live outside. Many food programs elected to suspend operations. But the harshest thing to deal with was probably the closing of the public libraries; not only did they provide a respite from inclement weather, they were a source of internet bandwidth, restroom access and perhaps most significantly, electricity to recharge any and all electric appliances, without which they would be cut off completely from the rest of the world. And of course, if people were already inclined to avoid you on the street, they become even more motivated to do so now in lockdown mode.
It's been almost a year now. It's become the new normal. That frightens me more than anything else.
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Gustavo turns seven.
The Russians say that if you manage to survive something that should have killed you, you get another birthday. March 5th, 2020, Gustavo Perez turns seven.
For those of you coming in at this part of the story, you can read:
https://samstabbed.blogspot.com/2019/03/gustavo-perez-turns-six-today.html
and then read earlier entries (starting at the beginning) at your discretion.
So I've managed to last seven years beyond my due date so far. And these seven years my life has been very different. It occurs to me that I've not really mentioned one of the main ways in how the attack has impacted my life. I think I've mentioned that when I returned to the park the following week just a few days after being released from the hospital, one of the regulars for dinner appointed himself my personal bodyguard; for the next few months, he was never more than five feet away from me the entire time I was at the park. Even when we talked, he never made eye contact because he was always scanning the area directly behind me.
The fact is that I found myself unable to ignore the kind of statement those actions said to me, that in the (then) relatively short time I'd invested into helping the homeless I'd managed to make a difference, enough so to inspire that kind of loyalty. As a matter of fact, this person who I will refer to as Bob was at the park this last Tuesday. He'd gotten a job driving a truck and had been on the road for a number of years but made a choice to quit driving, and try and find work in LA so he could help out on Tuesdays. So one of my main volunteers now is actually someone who used to come for dinner himself.
To make a long story short, if not for the attack, I probably would have eventually stopped. Instead, the attack turned out to be the catalyst for my choosing to make helping the homeless my vocation. That choice has come at a cost; I've resigned myself to part time work/hours (making less an hour than I did 30 years ago when I first moved to LA to work for Kaiser, actually) to cover my expenses as I work towards getting funding for my non-profit. My circumstances during this time have helped me gain a deeper understanding of what it's like to be homeless. But it's a choice I would make again; I'm much more content with my life now than when I was making six figures a year with a three bedroom home and a rental property. I'm not sure that I can explain it properly.
I was successful at my career in IT mainly because I've always been able to see the big picture; knowing how making a change in one place would cascade into changes up and down stream, etc. I guess the best analogy I can think of now is one put forth by C.S. Lewis. I'll have to paraphrase since I can't recall exactly where he wrote it. Essentially, Lewis proposed that the more of the world one explored, the smaller the individual he became, while the more one invested into his immediate neighborhood, the larger the individual became. But part of what ties into it is also about simplification, which is a difficult thing to achieve when technology places the entire world at one's fingertips, or where one merely has to pose a question out loud, and your cell phone provides an answer.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that the more sophisticated/worldly one strives to be, the more it is about themselves, while the more one invests in the relative tedium of the moment, the more it becomes about everyone else. Does that make sense?
For those of you coming in at this part of the story, you can read:
https://samstabbed.blogspot.com/2019/03/gustavo-perez-turns-six-today.html
and then read earlier entries (starting at the beginning) at your discretion.
So I've managed to last seven years beyond my due date so far. And these seven years my life has been very different. It occurs to me that I've not really mentioned one of the main ways in how the attack has impacted my life. I think I've mentioned that when I returned to the park the following week just a few days after being released from the hospital, one of the regulars for dinner appointed himself my personal bodyguard; for the next few months, he was never more than five feet away from me the entire time I was at the park. Even when we talked, he never made eye contact because he was always scanning the area directly behind me.
The fact is that I found myself unable to ignore the kind of statement those actions said to me, that in the (then) relatively short time I'd invested into helping the homeless I'd managed to make a difference, enough so to inspire that kind of loyalty. As a matter of fact, this person who I will refer to as Bob was at the park this last Tuesday. He'd gotten a job driving a truck and had been on the road for a number of years but made a choice to quit driving, and try and find work in LA so he could help out on Tuesdays. So one of my main volunteers now is actually someone who used to come for dinner himself.
To make a long story short, if not for the attack, I probably would have eventually stopped. Instead, the attack turned out to be the catalyst for my choosing to make helping the homeless my vocation. That choice has come at a cost; I've resigned myself to part time work/hours (making less an hour than I did 30 years ago when I first moved to LA to work for Kaiser, actually) to cover my expenses as I work towards getting funding for my non-profit. My circumstances during this time have helped me gain a deeper understanding of what it's like to be homeless. But it's a choice I would make again; I'm much more content with my life now than when I was making six figures a year with a three bedroom home and a rental property. I'm not sure that I can explain it properly.
I was successful at my career in IT mainly because I've always been able to see the big picture; knowing how making a change in one place would cascade into changes up and down stream, etc. I guess the best analogy I can think of now is one put forth by C.S. Lewis. I'll have to paraphrase since I can't recall exactly where he wrote it. Essentially, Lewis proposed that the more of the world one explored, the smaller the individual he became, while the more one invested into his immediate neighborhood, the larger the individual became. But part of what ties into it is also about simplification, which is a difficult thing to achieve when technology places the entire world at one's fingertips, or where one merely has to pose a question out loud, and your cell phone provides an answer.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that the more sophisticated/worldly one strives to be, the more it is about themselves, while the more one invests in the relative tedium of the moment, the more it becomes about everyone else. Does that make sense?
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Gustavo Perez turns six today
For those of you joining the story in mid-stream, Gustavo Perez was the alias assigned to me by Huntington Memorial Hospital. This is part of their standard protocol when admitting someone who was the victim of a hostile and potentially fatal attack. On the evening of March 5, 2013, while feeding the homeless in Pasadena, CA, I was stabbed in the neck from behind by someone wielding a box cutter resulting in the anterior branch of my carotid artery being severed. I spent five days at Huntington before being discharged. I slept 12-14 hours a day until mid-summer or so.
This blog was created to help me document the process of dealing with the experience. with some sort of vague expectation that it might help others. I'm either in denial, or I seem to have come out of it fairly well, and in many ways better off emotionally than before the incident. I'll try to summarize how.
My understanding is that for most people when something bad happens, a question that gets asked sooner or later is "why?". Moreover, closure seems to come more quickly when the answer is one the poser of the question can accept.
Thanks to the level-headedness of a bystander who pursued my assailant to the edge of the park where she got into a cab, the police were given the license plate number and they apprehended my assailant almost immediately. Before I went into surgery, the apprehending officer told me that the suspect had told him that the voices in her head told her to attack a church group whose teachings were "sodomizing religion." So clearly to me she was at some level mentally unbalanced. That prompted me to pursue the concept of madness. The seeds of my answer were sown in an essay by G.K. Chesteron: "the Maniac". There's no good way to paraphrase Chesterton, but i'll try. Chesterton submits that those we consider insane have not lost their reason,but rather that reason is all they have left. The issue is that the universe of facts for such people is so small that they can't help but reach the same conclusion over and over. This led me to consider how people can ignore basic facts while making an opinion .
Some people just NEED to be right - and that need forces them to rationalize rather than accept any truth that refutes their ideology. For others, what seem to be 'facts' are actually a consequence of painful memories, physical/emotional trauma, etc. My choice was to determine that my assailant fell into this category. As such, I could re-frame the perspective and view her behavior as a result of displaced anger where I just happened to be the target. I'm not sure if I could have gotten there so quickly if someone else hadn't happened to me just a few weeks before. I got cut off while I was driving, and a policeman who'd seen the entire thing pulled ME over for laying on the horn. I started to explain how the other driver had cut me off when the officer interrupted with "people around here drive like &^$#. Honk the horn once and move on." So as I resume my driving, I'm thinking: "but I was GOOD!!!" But with a little thought, it dawned on me that I had personalized it first by judging the person for not observing my own subjective standards of courtesy and acting as if that person had done so deliberately just to irritate me. The reality is that the person who did that would have done the same regardless of who was in the lane he was cutting across. I'm not proud to admit that I realized how much I had personalized things before my attack.
The point is that when one is able to depersonalize a near fatal attack, anything else seems trivial if not downright banal. The flip side of this is that as I've dismantled/de-energized a lot of the coping mechanisms I'd developed over the years, I have found that many are more accepting of me than I'd believed as well. Rather than becoming reclusive/more protective of myself, I recognize that it's up to me to put myself out there; the risk may be real, but the potential rewards more than outweigh the risk.
I was back at the park the next Tuesday. Later that summer, during dinner one of the homeless asked if I was afraid of getting attacked again. Right at that moment, another homeless person came up behind me and gave me a hug. I turned to see who it was, then turned back to the person who asked the question, and I replied: "well, if I was, that would have freaked me out.".
This blog was created to help me document the process of dealing with the experience. with some sort of vague expectation that it might help others. I'm either in denial, or I seem to have come out of it fairly well, and in many ways better off emotionally than before the incident. I'll try to summarize how.
My understanding is that for most people when something bad happens, a question that gets asked sooner or later is "why?". Moreover, closure seems to come more quickly when the answer is one the poser of the question can accept.
Thanks to the level-headedness of a bystander who pursued my assailant to the edge of the park where she got into a cab, the police were given the license plate number and they apprehended my assailant almost immediately. Before I went into surgery, the apprehending officer told me that the suspect had told him that the voices in her head told her to attack a church group whose teachings were "sodomizing religion." So clearly to me she was at some level mentally unbalanced. That prompted me to pursue the concept of madness. The seeds of my answer were sown in an essay by G.K. Chesteron: "the Maniac". There's no good way to paraphrase Chesterton, but i'll try. Chesterton submits that those we consider insane have not lost their reason,but rather that reason is all they have left. The issue is that the universe of facts for such people is so small that they can't help but reach the same conclusion over and over. This led me to consider how people can ignore basic facts while making an opinion .
Some people just NEED to be right - and that need forces them to rationalize rather than accept any truth that refutes their ideology. For others, what seem to be 'facts' are actually a consequence of painful memories, physical/emotional trauma, etc. My choice was to determine that my assailant fell into this category. As such, I could re-frame the perspective and view her behavior as a result of displaced anger where I just happened to be the target. I'm not sure if I could have gotten there so quickly if someone else hadn't happened to me just a few weeks before. I got cut off while I was driving, and a policeman who'd seen the entire thing pulled ME over for laying on the horn. I started to explain how the other driver had cut me off when the officer interrupted with "people around here drive like &^$#. Honk the horn once and move on." So as I resume my driving, I'm thinking: "but I was GOOD!!!" But with a little thought, it dawned on me that I had personalized it first by judging the person for not observing my own subjective standards of courtesy and acting as if that person had done so deliberately just to irritate me. The reality is that the person who did that would have done the same regardless of who was in the lane he was cutting across. I'm not proud to admit that I realized how much I had personalized things before my attack.
The point is that when one is able to depersonalize a near fatal attack, anything else seems trivial if not downright banal. The flip side of this is that as I've dismantled/de-energized a lot of the coping mechanisms I'd developed over the years, I have found that many are more accepting of me than I'd believed as well. Rather than becoming reclusive/more protective of myself, I recognize that it's up to me to put myself out there; the risk may be real, but the potential rewards more than outweigh the risk.
I was back at the park the next Tuesday. Later that summer, during dinner one of the homeless asked if I was afraid of getting attacked again. Right at that moment, another homeless person came up behind me and gave me a hug. I turned to see who it was, then turned back to the person who asked the question, and I replied: "well, if I was, that would have freaked me out.".
Saturday, March 2, 2019
Fleece
I still wear the black fleece that I was wearing when I was attacked. I'm wearing it right now as a matter of fact. For some reason, they saw fit to cut a long slit from the left armpit all the way down, but still pulled it over my head to remove it. I had stitched the slit closed, but all the stitches had come out, so I stitched the slit closed again this morning.
Fleece also describes a concept in the Scriptures about how someone used a fleece to determine if an apparent calling really came from God or not. The Biblical account refers to how someone left a fleece out overnight and asked God to have the fleece be wet with dew but the ground be dry. It turned out so, but that wasn't enough. The person then requested that the conditions be reversed, that the fleece be dry and the ground wet with dew.
I didn't realize this until recently, but I've been maintaining a 'fleece' type of mentality towards things. Essentially, I've been waiting for some sort of guarantee before taking action. This is not a consequence of the attack, though, this is something that comes from my family of origin. The irony is that now things are going well, and I'm waiting for something to go wrong instead of moving forward. I guess this is the season I come to grips with this.
Fleece also describes a concept in the Scriptures about how someone used a fleece to determine if an apparent calling really came from God or not. The Biblical account refers to how someone left a fleece out overnight and asked God to have the fleece be wet with dew but the ground be dry. It turned out so, but that wasn't enough. The person then requested that the conditions be reversed, that the fleece be dry and the ground wet with dew.
I didn't realize this until recently, but I've been maintaining a 'fleece' type of mentality towards things. Essentially, I've been waiting for some sort of guarantee before taking action. This is not a consequence of the attack, though, this is something that comes from my family of origin. The irony is that now things are going well, and I'm waiting for something to go wrong instead of moving forward. I guess this is the season I come to grips with this.
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Clarity
I think I've initiated a process towards clarity, for want of a better word to use. And one of the first steps in that process is developing a whole new set of expectations - and saying goodbye to the expectations that prevented me from seeing a lot of things for what they really are. I think I'm starting to discover joy. I'm not sure I have it all down yet, but for now, I'm experiencing emotionally and spiritually facts I knew intellectually, that gratitude leads to humility which in turn leads to a different set of expectations. And the most memorable pleasures are the ones that are unexpected.
Friday, March 24, 2017
Madness
In this case, March Madness, a term used to describe the annual NCAA basketball tournament. My alma mater suffered a heartbreaking one point loss last night, ending a rather improbable run that started with four straight wins in the B1G tournament resulting in a B1G tournament championship, followed by two more wins in the NCAA tournament including a stunning tournament upset over #2 seeded Louisville.
The beginning of that run coincided with an incident involving my college basketball team in an aborted plane takeoff where the plane ended up leaving the runway, skidding across the airport, through a fence, and almost ending up in a ravine. The head coach gave the team the option of forfeiting the tournament, or trying to fly in the next morning. The team voted to travel and play, and the more they won, the more they began to attract the attention of the national media, who began to cover the story of how this near tragedy had had a galvanizing effect on the team.
This morning I saw a tweet from one of the players:
STILL ALIVE
And that got me thinking. Maybe my mentor was right in that I really hadn't come to grips with the fact that I almost died. It's a scary thing, but on the other side, there really hasn't been any gratitude. Not reminding myself everyday that it's great to still be alive might be the maddest thing of all.
The beginning of that run coincided with an incident involving my college basketball team in an aborted plane takeoff where the plane ended up leaving the runway, skidding across the airport, through a fence, and almost ending up in a ravine. The head coach gave the team the option of forfeiting the tournament, or trying to fly in the next morning. The team voted to travel and play, and the more they won, the more they began to attract the attention of the national media, who began to cover the story of how this near tragedy had had a galvanizing effect on the team.
This morning I saw a tweet from one of the players:
STILL ALIVE
I just remember thinking two things:
How glad I am to be alive.
And how glad I am to go to Michigan.
And that got me thinking. Maybe my mentor was right in that I really hadn't come to grips with the fact that I almost died. It's a scary thing, but on the other side, there really hasn't been any gratitude. Not reminding myself everyday that it's great to still be alive might be the maddest thing of all.
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