Just got shot at

Funny about the dissonance of close calls. Like when you’re riding a bike and a car rushes by very close, missing you by no more than an inch. Your body is still intact — ain’t nuthin — and you go on about your business.

But tonight, the second shot and the piercing ricochet of the bullet off the pole and then off a metal warehouse sent me ducking down the side of the levee to the water’s edge. Never saw the shooter. I was northeast of town — could’ve been somebody pulled off the freeway. I accidentally scared a big fat beaver who went flying/tumbling into the river likely screaming Bloody Mary Mother of Jesus in beaver language as he hit the water, slapping it hard with his tail sending a geyser up and his own loud crack out into the night before he disappeared below the surface.

The random attacks… like when walking to the store in a non-minority neighborhood and people speeding by in their cars throwing bottles out the window at me. At 50 mph they are powerful lords over me. Or in Lubbock they throw rocks from inside their apartment gates at night (sometimes even hiding in the bushes to do so.)

When you’re under fire, your flesh feels very vulnerable. I can imagine what a dove feels like on September 1st.

Glad no bullet capped me though. Even as I had to walk horizontally along the steep bank pronating my right foot unnaturally against my ankle in order to keep moving and putting distance between me and the shooter, I thought: damn what a stupid waste it would’ve been if my ass was suddenly shot cold after all these years of work, getting this movement really set and going, and I hadn’t completed any of the really big work yet. Wonder if the stray dogs woulda ate on me before anybody found me– likely a couple days.

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My prayers to all the people who died recently from all the violent storms (cyclone in Myanmar — 100,000 people dead with many more threatened by lack of aid and medicine) and Sichuan province earthquake in China 10,000 dead, as well as almost 100 people from over 800 tornadoes in the US already this spring.

(The larger death numbers numb. Can you imagine how reeling the US would be if 10,000 people died in a single event. Americans have to realize it is just as catastrophic to Burmese folks or to the ethnic Han Chinese, Chinese Tibetans, and Hui Muslim Chinese.

I saw one Internet news post that one of the concerns against building the gargantuan (and ecologically and socially disastrous) Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River was that the massive weight of the reservoir might exacerbate an earthquake’s trigger point. Don’t know about any of this, but the headline on Huffington Post tonight is THE ANGRY EARTH, and lots of posters are commenting about we humans ultimately being little more than fleas on a dog’s back.

What matters is that people get the help they need now, in their time of massive suffering. Burma appears to have its own “Brownie” purposely doing “a heckuva job.”