The three of us rode along in befuddlement but good spirits to drop Miranda home.

You see, we all three walked into a cloud of powerful mace as we were going to The Asylum on the other side of the tunnel.

The assailants were unidentified and we were instantly stinging with pain. It seems like someone sprayed us from their car and kept driving.

First eyes, then face. My skin burnt like it was as vulnerable as my eyes. My eyes watered and I rubbed the lids with my jacket to rub out the sting. Eventually it gave in.

In retrospect, we continued walking as if we were going to continue on our merry way. What’s a little mace? But that’s ridiculous.

I think I said: “Um, I’m not going to Asylum” and we walked home and got more milk for Miranda’s eyes.

Poor Miranda got the worst of it. In retrospect, she was the only one who hadn’t had anything to drink. They make the drinks strong at Potlatch and Ria and I had both had one (I had two, not sure about her).

“I mean I’ve been to a lot of places and it’s totally bizarre that it would happen to me here.”

“I still can’t believe that guy was coming on to Miranda while she was in agony.”

Ria chose to focus on the good guy who offered his sweatshirt so she could pour half and half on her face without it getting on her clothes.

I wasn’t that impressed with him or with any human except Miranda who was in so much pain but kept trying to be kind to everyone around her.

She is short and has a beautiful smile and looks up at you with a cuteness (that she knows she has, she just must). But this was not a moment for putting on any cuteness, and she was as gentle as a lamb about the whole thing. She was even trying to be nice to the idiot who complimented her on how cute she was while she was in so much pain.

Ria, on the other hand, went into Scientist Mama Bear mode (it’s not a thing, unless you know Ria) and told us that she accidentally attacked herself with mace in a chemistry lab once. These stories were amusing to me given the timing. But there we were.

Apparently, this is what I was texting Claire who was already at Asylum (bottom to top is chronological)

In the back of my mind, I wondered if I should just walk up the nearby steps, knock on the door and crawl into the arms of my unshakeable crush.

“Hi. I’ve been maced. Love me.”

But I fought the urge, I haven’t even told him about it today. Instead, I texted everyone else this morning.

I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, honestly, except for the pain in the moment that eventually passed. I didn’t think I would let people know, I just thought we walked into a cloud of mace and that it passed. But I got home and checked facebook to find that Miranda had posted the following:

It made me think more about the fact that I had been victimized, and that it did hurt.

In the car to Miranda’s, the conversation turned to Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton and if there is anything that could make the evening better, it would be a discussion about American politics in their natural state.

I think we discussed terrorism and I mentioned that I suddenly, for the first time, feel specifically terrible about tear gas.

And then this morning I googled how many deaths have occurred in the Middle East to innocent civilians. How is it that in all this time I haven’t considered that me paying taxes to my own government is a quiet support of the senseless deaths that have occurred in the Middle East?

I’m confident in saying that I don’t think we can do anything to suppress ISIS.
Actually, you know what, I could go knock on everyone’s doors in Ketchikan and push myself into their homes to steal all of their peppers and all of their pepper spray and believe that this might stop street violence on the streets of this island.

What’s the alternative? How do we “Fight ISIS?” Also why is this the violence that we are focusing on when we have more violence under our own roofs to keep us concerned for the rest of all time. No, we want to displace evil on Muslims in the Middle East. Let’s not consider that we can’t pinpoint violence, we are powerless against it, as powerless as I am to the mace that was sprayed by someone I’m certain I don’t know. We certainly can’t target one religion and one culture and say that it is the epicenter of evil. Let’s take them down, let’s kill them and spray them with tear gas and make them cry and hurt.

And that’s the conversation I had with myself this morning, in my head. Maybe that’s the conversation I’m writing about right here.

Not only were we maced, but before that, someone grabbed my friend in the bar. The men around her tried to comfort her by saying that she was beautiful and that she shouldn’t let it ruin her night.

Let me also mention that one guy tried to tell Miranda that she was cute, while she was in agony over the mace in her eyes, and lost interest when we tried to find half-and-half for her. The mace was one thing, the response was perhaps worse in a way.

There are a lot of good people in the world, and in this town, but it takes one to hurt you physically for no reason at all to color your experience of everything else.

I haven’t showered yet to get the mace off my hair. The curls were too good to wash the mace out.