Hey everyone. It's been a busy month here at Dan Central. My horoscope and 
personal motto for May is, "Sometimes it rains shit out of a cloudless sky." 
For those of you out of the loop, I'll recap:
May started on an encouraging note. I got a job at Janco, a big warehouse 
where I move around boxes and buckets and paintbrushes. Grueling, steady, 
low-stress, and I never take the job home with me.
The problem was that they started me off delivering, sending me to exotic 
locations like Fresno and Stockton, without a map. But at least I was making 
good overtime while lost on the back roads of our great state.
After work one day in my first week there, I biked to El Sobrante for my 
karate class. As I was coming down the home stretch (of a 15-mile ride), I 
got a flat tire. Luckily my karate dojo is right next door to a bike shop. I 
went inside to ask if I could use their pump, leaving my backpack outside 
next to my bike. When I came out 2 minutes later, the backpack was gone, no 
doubt snatched by one of the countless methamphetamine-addled zombies that 
are native to El Sob.
My backpack had my cellphone, my notebook (with all the notes and phone 
numbers need for my upcoming zombie movie), my dice, and pretty much 
everything else I needed often enough to carry around with me.
Grrr.
OK, I figured. Flat tire and theft in one day. We all have bad days, right?
That Friday(two days later), I rode to my girlfriend's house, after stopping 
at a local bar for a beer and a salad. 6 blocks from her house, I was pulled 
off my bike at the intersection of Shattuck  and Alcatraz by a crowd of 
youths. They kicked me in the face a few times in the middle of the 
intersection, while cars on all sides honked because we were in their way.  
When I got up I was almost cartoonishly furious. I hit two of them pretty 
solidly and they all backed off, melting back into the crowd hanging out by 
the laundromat. I screamed  for them to fight like men,challenging any two 
of them to face me in the intersection. I looked around. None of them came 
forward. Just then I noticed one of the kids (and they were kids; none of 
them looked over 17, not that that excuses them) I had hit. He was sitting 
against the wall holding his head.
"Youuuuuu!" I screamed, and pointed at him. "You're coming to the hospital 
with me!" He looked up, looking either tired or confused. I started toward 
him.
Luckily a passing bicyclist talked some sense into me, and I rode away with 
only minor bruises and still in possession of my bike.
OK, I thought. One crappy week is admissable, yes? I can deal with that, 
gain experience and move on...

This Saturday I went to a party in West Oakland, at 26th and Magnolia. It 
was in a big warehouse complex, and was a country fair/hoedown theme. It was 
the first time I'd gotten drunk in quite a while, and I had a grand old 
time.
At about 12:30 or 1am, I was pretty tired, and decided to bike back to North 
Oakland. On the way out of the warehouse, I inadvertently ran over a bit of 
broken glass, immediately popping my tire. Shit. I certainly did not want to 
walk 60 or 70 blocks home, so I hustled to catch up to my friend Megan, who 
was about to drive away. I walked my bike up to the end of the block, tipsy 
and sleepy, and in fairly high spirits.
As I was asking Megan how I could cram my bike into her tiny car, a group of 
street toughs came around the corner. I didn't pay much attention, as we 
were about to leave anyway, and they appeared to be just passing through. 
They passed us up on both sides of the car, and the closest guy on the 
sidewalk called out to us.
"Hey, uh, y'all know what time it is?"
Megan and I both muttered that we didn't and went back to our business.
Just then I got hit with a 2x4.
"Knockout time," someone said.
One of the groupreached for my bike. I staggered toward him and he punched 
me in the face. Good one, I thought, and fell on my left side, in effect 
turning the other cheek. Guess what happened? I got hit again with the 2x4, 
on my right cheek.
I surveyed the situation, feeling surprisingly lucid. There were at least 
ten in the group, with at least two females. One of the girls had hit Megan, 
in a bizarre demonstrations of sexual politics that in any case left Megan 
largely unhurt. There was no chance of victory for us, except in flight.
"Let's go Megan," I said, and spat up a healthy puddle of blood. "Run. Now!"
We ran back to the party, but the festive mood had somehow left us.
"There's a dent in my skull," I mumbled.

I spent the rest of that night in various waiting rooms at the Emergency 
room at Highland Hospital, in various degrees of lucidity and pain. On 
Tuesday night, I underwent surgery to repair 3 breaks in my cheekbone and 
two breaks in my jaw. I woke up yesterday with my jaw wired shut and a nurse 
informing me that she was going to yank out my catheter. This same nurse 
apparently was not aware my jaw was wired shut, because she tried to 
force-feed me jello and kept telling me to open my mouth and stop being 
uncooperative.
Then, as I was waiting to be told I could go, a pastor came in to my room 
for some reason and began to blabber incessantly in mild platitudes. He wore 
a collar and nametag which read "Pastoral Services". His eyes were a 
beautiful intense blue, like a gunman. But they were glazed over with 
religion. I've seen people like that on buses and subway trains. He was high 
on Jesus.
I'm generally tolerant of the human need for spirituality, but the last 
thing I needed was a yammering simp with an armload of pamphlets who could 
not give me a straight answer about anything. He took advantage of my 
handicapped verbal capacities and the fact that I was a captive audience. So 
I fought back.
"You're a religious man, right?" I said, as best as I could.
"Uh, yes, yes I am, and I think that-"
"OK," I said, interrupting. "I've been attacked randomly twice this month. 
The only common factor was that I was wearing the same pair of pants both 
times. My question is, do you believe in luck?"
It took him about 15 minutes of CONSTANT, breathless preaching to tell me he 
didn't know. In the meantime I turned back to watching ugly redneck love 
triangles fight it out on "Montel".
When he got annoying again I interrupted him. I had to talk fast so as not 
to leave any holes for him to fill with blabber.
"Now Christian tradition teaches that once the world gets bad enough, Jesus 
is gonna come back and send the good people to Heaven, the bad people to 
Hell, and that's the end of the world. Right?"
"Right." he said, and opened his mouth to continue.
"OK, George Bush is a pretty devout Christian, in the fundamentalist, 
Evangelical tradition. My question is, is Jesus coming back a GOOD thing? 
And if the president, believing what he does, tries to bring about  the 
Second Coming throught his foreign policy, is that a good thing? Is that the 
sort of foreign policy goal a good Christian president should have?"
His squirming was nearly as entertaining as the inbred, prefab controversies 
on the television next to his head. He wrestled with that question for a 
long time, but never really got anywhere with it. Finally I dismissed him 
when I had to urinate. He never stopped talking, the whole way out of my 
room. I could hear him talking, his voice fading as he walked down the hall 
to the next captive victim. He never even gave me a pamphlet. Some salesman.

Anyhow, my bike is gone, my jaw is wired shit, I look like a cyborg 
chipmunk, I'm goofy on liquid vicodin, and I can't talk, which is about the 
only thing I consistently can do well. I don't even want to think about the 
bill I'm going to get. I think I gave them the wrong social security number, 
so maybe that'll hold them off for a while. May has kind of sucked for me. 
The good news is, June is right around the corner . I wonder what it holds 
for me.
I hope you all are doing well. You can reach me here, or you can leave a 
message for me at my cellphone (510)xxx-xxxx. But just don't be surprised if 
I don't respond for a while.
Rainbows and sunshine,
-Zombie Dan