I almost broke some old black dude's arm today.

I was leaving A Building near Clark and Lake in Chicago at a little after six-thirty PM, en route to a rendezvous with Big Joe near the Chicago Sun-Times building. I had punk rock in my ears and a Slurpee in my hand. It was a big Slurpee, and melting. That might have been fucking with me. Or it might have been something else.

So anyway, me with the Hell Ears and all, I heard, over my punk rock, this Old Black Beggar Dude on the corner says to me, "Hey, man." He wanted change. I ignored him, made like my ears were too filled with music, because for any normal person, they would have been.

Then the dude does something wrong. He starts to follow me. Now, those of you in Los Angeles will know beggars as pretty docile. They try to get your attention, and if you don't give it to them, they don't try to take it anymore.

Well, the bitches in Chicago is persistent. Persistent enough to follow you, and then do something you never do in the United States of America -- and not in other countries, either, though for different reasons -- he touched me. Not only did he touch me, he touched me with all five digits, on the widest part of my shoulder. Gripped it, almost.

His left hand, my left shoulder.

I swung my left arm up and around, catching his at the elbow. It was a split-split second later that I had the old bastard's arm in an aikido lock. It hurt him so bad, it was even hurting me a little bit. He made a squealing sound like a pimp being slowly deflated.

With my right hand, I pulled my headphones down to my neck. The old guy's mouth was wide open.

"What the fuck -- what the fuck, man?" He had a whole bunch of metal teeth. They weren't gold. They were some far less precious metal.

I narrowed my eyes at him. I might have looked angry. I wasn't. I was simply caught off-guard. His mouth opened in the shaped of an "ai."

"Ai," the Japanese word for "love." Were he Japanese, he might be about to admit something deep and/or soul-rending.

"What?" I said to him.

"Sh-shit!" he yelled.

I let go of the guy. He took off running away from me like a kid chasing a school bus. He sure could run.

It happens, sometimes, that I get caught off-guard. I'm usually brought back on-guard very quickly. I learned some six months ago, one night, that I was not at all selfish. I think the only person I told that story to is aderack. It's not a bad story.

Well, I learned today that I might, really, be the kind of person nobody should fuck with physically.

When I get back to Japan, I'm going to continue with aikido. There's an intelligence to it, you know. There's a sense, when you look at a guy -- any guy -- you can think, deep down inside: I could beat him.

Kids in high schools will talk about their abilities to beat up anyone. Yet, there's a level somewhere behind all that shit -- there's a level of intellectual belief in your ability that, combined with stances and poses, can make anyone invincible. That shit you see on certain anime shows, where martial artists compete with their psychic powers -- there's a certain truth behind that. When two people with that belief clash, that's where adrenaline comes from.

The so-minded person is capable of anything.

And that's hardly the point of this entry. The point is that you don't touch someone in American public. You just don't do it. People in this country are born paranoid of muggers and murderers and rapists, even people from shit-towns like the one I'm from.

You don't touch someone, especially when you want them to give you money.

Unless, of course, they've agreed to pay you afterwards.

Or, better yet, if they've paid you in advance.

Some little black kids came up to me when I was standing on the Michigan bridge, looking down at the canal, listening to music and sweating. They were raising money for school. Some christian group at their christian school. I gave them two quarters. I didn't even take off my headphones to see what they had to say. I just gave them the quarters. They didn't even thank me.

They knew better.

I'm going to have boba tomorrow. And then maybe die. How I'll do either thing, I don't know. Death is a good thing, though -- in the metaphorical sense, of course.

I'm going to take a shower.

I've got something else I'm working on. It might go up tonight, on this very page. Or maybe it never will.

Oh, and something big might be on insert credit tonight. Be sure to check it out. If it goes up.