The rain was no longer coming down in buckets.
I was feeling confident after convincing the two buck dindus back in the city to leave me alone.
So, as I offloaded, and the driver looked around to make sure I wasn’t attacked, a common procedure on the parts of these drivers who have recently been taking on a security role, especially in the Essex Precinct in Baltimore County, where the BCPD have declined to patrol the County’s largest bus transfer point, leaving this once bustling pedestrian hub as unprotected as an African watering hole, a mere two blocks from their headquarters.
As I walked off and the bus driver pulled off with his empty conveyance, I made a note to walk evenly to cut out the swagger that had crept into my walk. The cocky jaunt is okay if I have a cane. But when my means of defense is nothing but a butchering tool in my pocket it is unwise to walk with a confrontational gait.
As I headed up into the parking lot of the Aldis grocery store, the rain was coming down in less drenching fashion, in a heavy downpour rather than drenching sheets.
The dark lot of the grocer is used as a walk-through point, having only two exits, most of the lot being boxed in with high wrought iron fencing. I am walking from the Stemmers Run exit to the Eastern Avenue exit.
Coming towards me is a massive man, a dark-skinned black man with the build of an NFL offensive lineman, standing 6’ 4” and scaling at least 350 pounds. Jokingly I thought to myself, Thank God he has an umbrella, because he’s a massive endomorph and there is no way I could get to his vitals with this 2 3/4 inch blade!
While making introspective fun of my previous comic situation, I noted that we would bump into each other if we both stayed our course. It is common in these situations between pedestrians for both parties to notice this and make a slight adjustment, as it is both dangerous and rude to pass so close to a stranger. Such is the norm, usually accomplished with a nod of respect, that I have rarely recorded such encounters, being simple courtesies generally engaged in between myself and black men of all ages. In fact, since the Purge began 27 months ago, most black fellows have made wide corrections and walked by me with a greeting of respect as if doing their civic best to assure me that they are not among the people of their race who are now taking every opportunity to wax confrontational with my pale kind. I would say that for every aggressive encounter I have with a black man or men [that is the 36 I have had in the past 27 weeks] that I have ten passing nods of respect in which both of us step slightly aside for the other.
And so I correct my course to the right with him still 20 paces off, meaning that we will pass one another six to 12 feet apart, with him off my left shoulder. I made an unusually large correction due to his size and to dampen down my arrogant, post-confrontational gait.
Three steps later, with my course drifting along the iron fence, with nothing to my rear but an empty, fenced corner of parking lot, I am heading pat him 12 paces off, with four feet already separating our course.
The man then looks across the lot at me, peering under the water-shedding rim of his white and black Yin & Yang patterned umbrella, juts his chin forward, rounding his shoulders forward and scowling with big wrinkling brows. Without stopping he then changes direction about 70 degrees off of his previous course and picks up his pace, coming directly at me, nothing but a wrought-iron fence to my back.
This makes zero sense.
He has the same large model of umbrella, unbent and more interesting.
He is far better dressed than I, his massive, brand new sneakers alone worth more than everything on my person.
There is no one to see him squash me, no recognition to gain.
Most people would say this was not aggression, that he simply wanted to inquire after my health, bless me by God, etc. But his every posture change—eyes, neck, shoulder, chin—is aggressively confrontational and there is no other sensible conclusion for me to draw other than that he is aggressively moving on me to my detriment.
There is no word, no threat, no empty question, no warning.
This simple move of his is far more aggressive than the cruiserweight jerk who had threatened exactly a half hour earlier to beat me up if I did not bring him my umbrella.
I did not correct my course again as that would put him flush on my flank, running me into an iron fence line.
I stayed on our new collision course which he had just set and, as I switched my umbrella to my left hand, reached my forefinger and thumb down into the right pocket, to draw that cheap, undersized folding lock blade one last time that night.
He did not notice. So with no confidence of stopping him with anything short of a neck stab—which would look like murder—I decided to go down under him and stab up into his groin once we made contact.
Three paces apart, his small pig eyes glanced down at my half-pocketed right hand and he squeaked his white sneaker heel as he counter-pivoted 90 degrees with his outside right foot and walked past me as he glared with menacing intensity down over his massive left shoulder.
The sissy, liberal, paleface mind, finding no common logic to link this man’s actions to a reasonable purpose, are inclined to—and have—questioned my assessment of his actions. Four people have stood shaking their head, refusing to believe that what I described was aggression on the part of this unknown man. Even to me, the presence of the incongruent umbrella, that a man worried about getting wet would spontaneously decide to attack an older, poorly dressed man in the same situation, a man wearing a 30-year-old T-shirt, is mind boggling. However, as a survivalist it is not my duty to link his actions with a reasonable, socially comforting purpose, but with their probable outcome, which was a collision with a man over half his age, just over half his mass, and less than half his strength, on a rain-drenched parking lot, six minutes to midnight, in a deserted area never patrolled after dark by the local police force, where I have been threatened by numerous men of his race, at this very same time of night, over the course of the past three years.
What is more, assigning materialistic or moral motivation to a strange person’s aggression is nothing but a civilized artifice implanted in our minds by the media, the church and the government to disable our instinctive wisdom and objective experience to render us forever food.
If you are a survivalist rather than an apologist for criminal aggression—as many of your fellow citizens are—note your temptation to assign meaning and purpose to this man’s aggression, your wonderment, like mine, as to whether he was motivated by hatred, greed, desire, ageism, racism, possibly a need to overcome the sorrow of his childhood by standing dominant in some lonely way over a fallen foe for a moment…and recognize this urge—even if now faint in the face of your waxing cynicism—as a result of your domestication, a tool of your enslavement.
May Civilization fall into ruin, with men once again free to stand uninhibited before evil, rather than embracing it according to the twisted will of our unseen masters.
PS: When I got to work and told this story to the gathered coworkers and the young black lady laughed her ringing laugh at my hunters' befuddlement over my chronic knife arming, Steevo called me aside and took me to his book bag and said, "Here, Dude, bought it at Walmart—this will get through his big ass!" and handed me a four-inch folder with a forefinger switch, probably illegal. But life is pushing me to that point.
Thanks, Steevo.
This concludes Rubbing Out Palefaces.
Under the God of Things
I wouldn't worry about what other peoples' assessment was (I know you're not, you're just reporting it).
They weren't there, they don't have prior experience in that part of the city, and they weren't the one with their asses on the line if, by 1 chance out of 100, this guy was going to do something randomly violent to you if he could do it with no risk to himself.
I'd stay ready, have my weapon ready to hand, and assume that the worst is going to happen. It doesn't cost you a penny, and it'll keep you in the habit of standing on guard regardless of the "likelihood".
People are so stupid about "risk". People chuckle at you for taking 20 seconds of your time to change direction and ready your weapon for a genuinely risky situation.
And yet, literally BILLIONS of people in the last 45 years have spent MILLIONS of hours, and delay of takeoff, so that MILLIONS of flight attendants can give a little speech about using their seat cushion for a flotation device "in case of a water landing". They do it TEN THOUSAND TIMES A DAY every time an airplane takes off ....
... and yet a seat cushion has never saved ONE life when a plane crashes into the ocean. Not one. And yet we do it every single day.
You keep on keepin' on, we're listenin' ....
A very quick look at a random website tells me that in Maryland, as long as it doesn't have a "switch"blade, which seems to mean an automatically opening blade, a folder is a pen knife regardless of size, and thereby legal to carry concealed or open. Of course, Baltimore might have additional restrictions, IANAL, etc.
It's always amazing to me how oblivious to danger most people are. I think it must be that stunted amygdala syndrome. They literally can't see a threat until the first kinetic impact, and after the fact, they say things like "He just came outta nowhere".