Well, what to write about, what to write about…

To get this out of the way- yep, life trying to avoid the Corona virus is kind of upside down for everyone, and I keep swinging from intense anxiety to feeling oh-so-slightly less anxious. So good times, really.

Anyways, that’s not what I really want to write about. Not because I am downplaying anything, more as an exercise to see if I can place my attention on something else for more than 5 minutes.

That’s the start of this post…from about five weeks ago. That’s the reality, I suppose. It has taken weeks to reframe daily life to account for the constraints imposed by C-19 while establishing something that resembles normal life. Or maybe it is just that five-six weeks is how long it takes for the new habits to settle into place.

But as promised, this is not about the ongoing battle with a virus.

A few days ago a neighbor was assaulted. He was approached while parking at his garage at a time which is late enough to technically be called morning but when nobody in their right mind is awake. The man approaching him held a knife. Before the assailant could attack him our neighbor’s dog, a large doberman, charged the knife wielder. The dog fought them man off, but was stabbed. Luckily this awesome dog is recovering just fine so far.

An additional factor is that the attack was the setting- the parking lot for our homes. The parking lot is surrounded by woods, and is a significant distance from the houses. Having lived here all my life the possibility of something like this happening has always floated around in my mind. However now that it has happened (with about as good an ending as you could hope for in the situation) the vulnerability of the location is in stark relief.

This all has led to some rocky sleep and lots of dreams of myself or my family being threatened. It has also led right where you can imagine- looking into self defense classes and researching which kind of pepper spray works best on assholes. It has been a while -over a year- since I enrolled in any serious training (although it will be a while before we can all work out and sweat in the same room) and I am enough of a realist to know that I am not John Wick- confronting an attacker is a supremely great way to get hurt. However the desire to be able to protect my family is a strong emotion, enough to keep me awake late into the night. And while I know that if I were personally confronted I would be looking for any way to just get out of there, if my family was involved then that protective sheepdog mentality comes into play. I dearly hope that I would immediately take the threat seriously rather than fall into that ‘nah, this can’t actually be happening’ trap that can happen. But being able to respond in a helpful way depends on being at least a little bit prepared, right?

Hence comparing pepper sprays on Amazon (this one looks promising), looking for a local Krav Maga studio… and noticing that my wife’s javelin is hanging on the garage wall, driver’s side and fairly close to the door. It is all such a stereotypical reaction to events that it is completely unremarkable. However, there has been so much of this lately- wondering how best to prepare for uncertainty- that this at least feels productive. If laying awake at night picturing the best way to get between a jerk with a knife and one of my boys can be considered productive.

At least I’m not obsessing over whether I washed my hands enough today.