always thinking of that one great bar fight I’ve been in, at the FYF Fest (“Fuck Yeah Fest” but after years the LA Weekly turned its editorial office over to third-party fundraisers who tried lowest common denominator, truefax) after party at Mountain Bar in like 2009?

Where he tapped me on the shoulder and sucker punched me

(I almost CERTAINLY had walked by his girlfriend and grabbed her ass earlier, this was that month I was crazy disinhibited on Lexapro after I got diagnosed unipolar depression)

And then that would have been enough except I had been specifically training to resist that hit at the dojo, first time I spun around and fell down, second I just spun around, that was the third

And when I recovered I looked up and he was already bragging to her and I wiped the back of my hand across my nose and there was blood and I remember the one word I thought the entire time was “okay”

And then afterwards this guy came up to me, remember we were all skinny white LA hipsters and he was a 300-pound black guy in black jeans, shirt, cap, clearly the bouncer, and I was like “oh well” and he clapped this meaty hand on me and I was like “oh well”

And in retrospect he was looking at me being a smiling intelligent-looking man with blood running from one nostril who just finished a fight but maybe didn’t start it, compared to the gym bro on the ground attended by his gf, and he was like

“Was that dude fucking with you?”

and I, who until that moment was expecting to get physically ejected at the least was like “that dude WAS fucking with me”

And he reassured me, and then teamed up with his partner to throw that dude down a flight of stairs.