The Safety of Devotion

I almost punched a dude in the face today.  So, I'm walking home from work at 10:30 PM.  I live in Koreatown, which isn't an awful part of Los Angeles, but it gets sketchy after about 9:00 if you're by yourself.  So, I turn onto my street, and I see this girl running down the sidewalk straight towards me.  About three steps behind her is an African-American dude about 5'11" chasing her.

She runs up to me, grabs me, and the dude is standing in front of me, looking at me through eyes that are clearly crossed.  I pull back to punch him.  Then, the girl lets go of me and I realize that it's my coworker BG who lives in my building.  She says not to worry, that it was one of her friends and she was just fooling around.  She asked me about what was going on in life, and then she left on her merry way.  I walked home, my heart frozen in my chest.

Last week, a crazy Asian woman followed me four blocks home.  She was screaming at me while I was on the phone with my mother.

Here's the deal:  I always walk with some sort of weapon in my hand.  My mom bought me a taser for Christmas.  I haven't carried it because I thought it was excessive.  And it is, if I'm coming home at 6 or 7 and staying in my part of K-Town.  But, if I'm going to be getting home after the trains turn into hobo jungles, then I'm going to start carrying it because I don't feel comfortable otherwise. I always make sure that if a female coworker is going home by herself late at night that I go with her as far as I can because, really, LA does a shit job of keeping its public transit system safe and there's almost no police presence downtown after sundown.

Regardless, I always walk with my keys wrapped in my fingers so that if I have to punch somebody, I can hopefully puncture their skin and make them bleed.

It's not about being paranoid; it's about being safe.  And because someone acted like an idiot tonight, a completely innocent person almost got their face slashed. I'm working 13-15 hour days and being harassed does not fit into my daily schedule.

But besides that, my day was amazing.