The Lake Tahoe Place

Well. The Caldor Fire has apparently topped Echo Summit and is burning downslope toward the Tahoe Basin. Summer people and year-round residents are packing up and leaving, though evacuations have not yet been ordered for the South Lake Tahoe area. The smoke, they say, is driving a lot of people to leave now rather than wait for the order.

The Lake (as it was called, still is, I imagine) was a refuge from the summer heat in the Valley. My sister's first husband's family had a "place at The Lake" that they'd go to when the Valley heat got to be too much, but by the time I knew about the Tahoe place, most of his family had either died or had moved away, so the "place at The Lake" sat empty some summers. 

One year, though, we all went up there. My mother, me, my sister and her husband, and their (then) two kids. 

It was kind of crowded, but we made do. The place was no mansion, but it was charming, old and a little creaky, dusty and musty. It appeared to be a log cabin -- and for a log cabin, it was very large. I learned that it wasn't actually built of logs, though. It was a straightforward frame house that had split log siding on the outside, and log-style panels applied to some rooms of the inside. There was a big rock fireplace in the living room made from rocks collected near the building site. That site was on the South Shore, right on the Lake. There was a steep stairway down to the beach and from there was a dock and boathouse. The boathouse contained a Chris Craft speed boat, very elegant but small compared to some of the other boats plying the lake, and not nearly as fast as they were either.

There was a garage on the street, and the back end of the garage was fitted up as a maid's room with a bathroom. There was no maid, though, and my brother in law said they hadn't had one for as long as he could remember. So the room in the garage was kept as a potential guest room but hadn't been used for that either. 

The place/cabin/house itself had two bedrooms and a bathroom, and there was a room upstairs that had a bed in it but was really just an unfinished attic room. There was a "winter kitchen" when you entered (from the back of the house) that had a wood range, and a "summer kitchen" just beyond that had an old gas range on legs and a small old electric refrigerator. 

The living room had an open ceiling, and hanging from the rafters was a huge (at least to me) gas chandelier. Well, it had originally been gas but was converted to electricity. There were other gas lights in the house that were now electric. There was a calendar in the kitchen dated 1904, and my brother-in-law said that this place was one of the first "cabins" built on the South Shore, if not the first. It was very plain and primitive compared to some of the mansions that had gone up since. 

Decorating the place were many Native American baskets, some used for storage but most just on display. I'd say, thinking back, there were probably 20 or 30 altogether, mostly small or medium size, tightly woven, while a few were large and held kindling wood and paper for the fireplace. I thought they were fascinating, and I was told they were purchased from Natives that lived (at one time) in the area.

Furnishings were made of logs, though the beds were brass. There was a dining table set up in the living room. There was a big picture window in the living room facing the lake. A long, not too wide porch was accessed from the living room, but the door stuck, and so the porch was actually reached from the yard after going out the kitchen door which scraped on the floor but wasn't stuck. The yard was dotted with pine trees and was quite large, especially the front yard. The bathroom had a corner sink, a toilet with a high tank and pull chain and a clawfoot tub. 

Altogether, the place seemed idyllic and I enjoyed the time we spent there. It was something completely new to me. It was something that rich people did. My brother-in-law's family was upper middle class. I thought of them as rich, but they wouldn't have agreed. When my brother-in-law's grandmother died in 1962, the place a Tahoe was sold as part of settling her estate. I don't recall the amount it was sold for, but it was not much for such a prime location, and I remember my sister said it was sold essentially for the land value, and she thought it wouldn't be there in a couple of years as the older places on the South Shore were being bought up by developers as tear-downs to be replaced with condos. 

That was a sad thought, but "progress" was what it was. I didn't really think about it much after that. 

Maybe ten years later, I took my wife to Lake Tahoe and drove around looking for the house. I told her I didn't think it would be there any more, that it had probably been replaced with condos like so many had been. We drove down the road on which it had been, and I didn't find it. I saw lots of condos instead, and it made me very sad. 

Turns out, I hadn't driven far enough. In fact the house/cabin/place is still there, looking from the outside almost identical to what I remembered. I found it one day idylly cruising Google Street View. How about that? It surprised the heck out of me. "That's it!" Yep.

Then to my even greater surprise as I was re-viewing the area because of the looming fire catastrophe, I found a listing for it on Bookings.com -- a listing that said it wasn't available now, but had been available for short term rental since 2016. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.

This is the listing:

https://www.booking.com/hotel/us/lakeview-holiday-home-897.html

There are 24 photos in the gallery. Some has changed, but much is as I remember it. 

This is the back of the house/cabin/place. The log siding has been replaced with board siding. Where the deck is was a lean-to addition that had the wood-range in it. There was no dormer. Everything else, though, including the pine trees, is as I remember it. 

This is the front porch, lake in the background. Note the slender log posts. This is as I remember it.

This is the living room. Some changes have been made. The fireplace is the same, I think even the mirror over the fireplace is the same, though the wood-stove insert is new. We had an open fire to take off the chill of morning. The picture window is similar if not identical. I don't remember the dining table in front of the window, though. I think it was on the opposite wall. What is so strikingly different, however, is the whiteness of the room and the closed ceiling. It really changes the feel of it. When I was there, the ceiling was open to the rafters above. The walls were paneled in faux logs. It was dark-feeling. But not actually dark because of the big window. The big electrified gasolier that hung from the rafters was turned on at night and despite it five or six globes, it cast a soft warm light rather than the bright light I expected. I wouldn't be surprised if the light bulbs had been there forever and were original Edison 25w or something. 

This is the opposite wall of the living room. I won't say for certain, but it's possible this is the same furniture as was there when I was there, just with new-ish cushions. What was there was made of logs, so... could be. There was no wall heater, no heat at all except for the fireplace, the walls were the faux log paneling, the ceiling was open, and there was no opening in the wall from the kitchen. Other than that, the table and chairs were on this wall, the sofa up against the picture window, and the other chairs were by the fireplace.

Another view of the living room. The corner cupboard was there. Filled with Native baskets and odds and ends. The door to the porch, I think, had glass in it but I could be wrong. All the windows had to be shuttered for the winter, and the shutters were kept in the garage. Taking down all the shutters was quite a job. 

This is the kitchen. It's hardly changed at all. You can see the bathroom through the door at the end. What's different is newish flooring -- I remember rough boards. The walls are white. I remember a kind of buff tending toward orange. The stove is newish, but it's in the same place as the leggy gas stove that I remember. Beside the sink is a laundry tub but the sink is the same, the laundry tub is the same, and the window is the same. There was no window into the living room above the stove though. The open shelves look to be the same as well except for the color. The butcher block next to the stove actually may have been there, but I don't remember it. The ceiling in this part of the house was enclosed as it is now.

This is the bathroom. The sink and little medicine cabinet are the same. The glassed in shower, no. As I say, there was a clawfoot tub. It may or may not have had a shower attachment and one of those oval shower curtain rods. I think it did, but I can't be sure. I know it smelled a little musty. The toilet was where the camera is for the photo.

This is the front bedroom where my sister and her husband slept on a brass double bed. The chair may be original, the bed and nightstands aren't. The enclosed ceiling, though, is what I remember. 

This is the back bedroom where my mother and I slept on two twin sized brass beds. I don't know how they fit in there, but they did! The kids, I remember, slept in the living room, one on the couch (the girl) and one in a sleeping bag on the floor (the boy.)

This is the lake-side front of the house. Except for the dormer, it's the same.

And finally, this is the lake view from the front. You can barely make out the stairs to the beach in the distance. There was a dock and a boathouse with a motor-boat, but they're gone now, I suspect lost in one of the storms that rocked the Lake some years ago. They may have been removed due to policy changes. I don't know. But they're gone.

I also don't know if the fire will get as far as the South Shore. Probably not, but just the chance that it might is disturbing, depressing. I've been seeing some of the consequences of the fires in California on the AlertWildFire website, and it's terrible. 

I don't think California will come out of this fire season the same at all. I grieve for what has been lost, as I did when Paradise burned to the ground. Ironic? Emblematic? I don't know. 

There have been many wild fires in California in the past, and when I was a kid, I used to watch the San Gabriel Mountains burn every year. But this time... it's different. 

I'm planning a trip to California -- probably for the last time -- in October. I hope the fires will be at least contained if not out. But you never know. 

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Going back and embiggening the pictures, there's no doubt that this is the house/cabin/place at The Lake I visited and stayed at many years ago, but my memories of it are... cough... somewhat faulty. 

First, I'm not sure now that the interior and exterior were log or imitation log. That's how I remember it, but looking at the pictures, I suspect the board siding was what was on the place when I stayed there and the interior was wood paneled but not to resemble logs. The rooms were not painted white. The kitchen and bathroom were painted, I think, but none of the other rooms were. The living room had a ceiling over part of the space, but there was no ceiling over the picture window and fireplace area. I note in the pictures that there is a lean-to addition at one end of the kitchen but I remember one where the back deck is now. My memory also turns the kitchen around. What I'm wondering is whether there was an entrance door through the current lean-to as well as an entrance in the now-gone lean-to. There had to be some place for the wood-burning range, and there appears to be no place for it in the current arrangement. 

As I've said before, memory can play strange tricks on us. Sometimes the most crystal clear memories are, for lack of a better word, false. Other times, they're like dreams. Elements are real enough, while a good deal of what we may remember is not real. It didn't happen, or maybe it happened but not the way we remember it. 

This is the place at The Lake, no doubt about it. And it's much the same as I remember it. But details, let's say, are not as sharp as I would like to think of them. 

----------------------------------

So the fires were diverted to Kirkwood, and all is sort of kind of well at SLT these days, smoke or no. 

I loved the media narrative that the folks who had to evacuate were "blue collar workers" who can't afford to live anywhere else in the Tahoe Basin. Yeah, right. 

No, most weren't. They were year-round and summer people, newcomers and long timers who see The  Lake as a kind of Paradise Escape, who -- mostly -- brought the suburbs with them, and their condos and "cabins" showed it. Their places, for the most part, weren't the mansions of the hyper-rich that dot The Lake's margins, but they were by no means shacks of the poor and working class. They are very much upper middle class substantial suburban houses and condos set in the forest. Had the fires come into South Lake Tahoe they would have wiped out this expensive notion of Paradise, like many suburban Paradises -- including Paradise, California --  have been wiped out before. It would have been sad, and for some, tragic. I wouldn't have liked to see it at all. 

But if these people were "blue collar" the notion has no meaning at all.

Some Thoughts on Chaos and the Crazy

The other day, I was pondering the chaos and crazy some of my ancestors and relatives experienced in their lifetimes and now, and of course I was relating it to my own life, and I was extending that thought process to the chaos and crazy that's been afflicting the United States and the world at large for many long years now. 

As I go through these exercises, I start to see more clearly how we are not only all connected but in reality we are all part of the same thing, in Buddhist parlance, we are all the same thing. This was a realization I came to (in a form or flash of enlightenment) many, many years ago, but the details were always elusive. As I get older, the threads of connections and the ground state of being becomes clearer and clearer. 

Afghanistan is "falling" to the Taliban we're told, but in fact, it has never not been "fallen" and the Taliban (however they are conceived) have never not been pre-eminent. They are the Afghan people, whether our establishments and ruling class like it or not, know it or not, and beating them back can only be accomplished through a campaign of extermination, genocide in a word. That hasn't happened... not yet... so the end-state, outcome of the Afghanistan campaign was foregone: right back where we started from. 

The whole campaign was a crock from the get... in a manner of speaking. 😞

It was wrong and wrong-headed and it's led us back to where we began, or nearly so, as time is a spiral not a straight line. 

Not unlike the case of Vietnam, to which comparisons are made more and more starkly and openly. We've been down this road before, haven't we?

How many of our lives are just like that? In many ways, mine certainly is and has been.

What have we learned from our mistakes? What have I learned from MY mistakes?

And how much farther do we have to go?

I'm reminded of an opinion column by Mark Morford from 2017: 

HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR END TIMES, AMERICA?

Please read it. And realize he wrote this four years ago. How little has changed. Even though... everything has. 

So What's Next?

Wow. I've been going through some of the hundreds of reports and posts I wrote during Occupy -- a decade ago now -- and... wow.

It was a nascent revolution that... fizzled out. Not meant to be? With all the talk about co-opting and infiltration of Movements these days, it is glaringly obvious that Occupy was partially co-opted and heavily infiltrated by informants during its brief lifetime in the public square. In the end it was brutally crushed and dispersed by a nationwide coordinated police action that resulted in thousands of arrests and hundreds injured.

I reported on some of what I witnessed, including the presence of obvious provocateurs, instigators and informers. I also saw public officials openly manipulating the encampments for their own political purposes, police experimenting with new and improved crowd control tactics (it was a game to them), and political party operatives trying to "guide" actions on their own behalf.

It was fascinating and stomach churning to watch. Not so much fun to participate in. 

And I saw and reported on one Occupy encampment after another disintegrate into squabbling factions almost always due to two things: unfamiliarity with anarchist and intentional community principles and practices, and the presence, sometimes by invitation, of mentally disturbed loudmouths who were almost inevitably allowed to take over.

While the public face of Occupy disintegrated and dispersed, the underlying energy has only grown stronger, and we've seen it manifested in a proliferation of intentional communities, many set up as quasi-independent associations for self-sufficiency and sustainability. The anarchist form of governance is still very alien to the US, and black bloc and diversity of tactics scares a lot of people. 

What I saw was that an anarchist intentional community-- as most of the Occupy encampments were set up to be -- is almost impossible to sustain among strangers. It's far too intimate a situation and responsibility for strangers to undertake with one another suddenly. That's how Occupy was organized, and in essence, the encampments were designed to fail. And they did. The brutal destruction and dispersal of the Occupy encampments wasn't necessary from an organizational standpoint, but it seemed to please the Powers That Be immensely.

The millions of people who participated in the Occupy movement in 2011 were followed by many more millions who marched and protested and assembled in the United States and all over the world on behalf of causes like stopping wars, gun control, women's rights, an end to police violence, protecting the environment and so on. Millions have taken to the streets, encampment tactics have been widely adopted, governments have been overthrown, and yet...

What has changed for the better?

A global rightist/fascist reaction has set in. Trumpism is fully a part of it. But it is by no means limited to Trump and his ilk; it's very wide-spread, heavily funded by the billionaires, and so far, it's been successful in taking over governments and largely suppressing dissent. 

From appearances, it aims for permanent dominance.

Barring the unforeseen, it will achieve that within short order. 

There is no vigorous, strenuous and determined counter-movement, let alone a more than flaccid Socialist or Communist ideological movement. 

So what's next?

I don't know. Every time I ponder what might be, I face a blank wall. 

Some things to consider...

After yesterday's detention hearing for the guy who assaulted me -- our neighbor calls him Ben but that's not the name he's being held under -- I thought much more about what happened, who those of us involved are, and what may be the larger meanings of it all, or if there are any.

One thing that instantly popped out was the absence of police brutality. The officer who arrested "Ben" or whatever his name is arrived within five minutes of my call. I saw him in the front courtyard of the house across the street apparently idly chatting with "Ben" who appeared to be sitting calmly on a bench shortly after his arrest. 

At the hearing yesterday, the officer stated that he knew "Ben" from a previous arrest. He didn't say what for, but I assume it was the joyride "Ben" took in the police chief's car in April. 

He described the most recent arrest this way: he saw my wife in the street and asked her where the suspect was. She pointed to the house across the street from ours. He got his automatic rifle and went to the front door and... knocked. "Ben" opened the door. The officer said he saw two knives, one in each pocket of "Ben's" jeans and that "Ben's" left hand was concealed behind the door. He ordered him out of the house and onto the ground. "Ben" did not immediately obey, but was somehow persuaded -- without violence -- out of the house and onto one knee in the front courtyard. The officer handcuffed him and relieved him of three weapons, the two knives in his pants pockets and the hatchet/tomahawk he'd assaulted me with.

And then they waited for backup. "Ben" sat on the bench; the officer stood beside him. The officer said that, yes, he knew "Ben" from a previous arrest.

During the hearing, an extensive arrest record was mentioned as well as sentencing to prison and probation for previous offenses. "Ben" is no stranger to The System.

He is, however, arguably severely mentally ill. While he rattled off a litany of diagnoses, it comes down to paranoid schizophrenia and addiction with violent tendencies. They are only partially controlled by medications and counseling. And in this case were not controlled.

I had this grand notion of how I would want him to be treated post-conviction. Held in prison for up to a year, then in a locked mental health care facility for up to three years while he undergoes training and therapy to manage his condition. then in 24/7 supervised release where essentially his is under observation of a minder all the time for as long as necessary. 

Seems, at least in outline, that's the treatment he was under, and yet he was able to slither away from custody rather easily and engage in mayhem.

He'd been remanded to a locked Department of Corrections drug and mental illness treatment and recovery facility (for I don't know how long) and after two days he was out and about. He said he was denied his anti-psychotic meds at this facility and he began to act out so much that he convinced the staff to transfer him to a hospital where he may or may not have received any treatment (apparently no treatment and did not receive his medications) and where he was able to call our neighbor to come and get him. This is not quite the story she tells, but anyway... he said that someone else came and picked him up and took him to our neighbor's house where he had stayed without meds for he didn't know how long (a few days) before he was arrested for assaulting me. 

He was on probation, he was under court order to complete treatment at the locked recovery facility and to report to his probation officer regularly. He did neither, and he was able to basically walk away from the hospital where he was taken when his psychotic behavior manifested at the treatment facility.

The treatment I suggested was actually partially under way, and it was ineffective; given what I heard, it was grossly counterproductive.

So.

Where do we go from here? That'll take a while to come to grips with.

A Few Further Thoughts on Being Assaulted Last Week

I've tried not to dwell on the incident though I occasionally find myself mulling over what happened, trying to remember and trying to forget simultaneously. "Trying" is probably a waste of time, but I seem to spend so little time on it, with so many other things to think about and to get done, that it doesn't seem like any loss to me to occasionally ruminate on the topic of being assaulted and what it may mean in the larger scheme of things.

At the simplest level, it was a "knock upside the head." It left a mark, yeah, but primarily it was a reminder of the need for redirection in my life and activities. This has happened to me repeatedly and it probably happens to others in different ways. We become complacent and habituated to whatever routine we're following. It's our lifestyle. We may not even think we should be or need to be on a different path, following different needs and desires, serving ourselves and others differently than we have become used to.

After that "knock upside the head" I was talking to the neighbor the guy was staying with. She's a friend. We're not close, but we get along fine and we have mutual friends and so on, and we help each other out when we can. We're neighbors. 

One of our mutual friends was for years my "helper" Wes. He came around first when I was in a very bad state from rheumatoid arthritis and could literally barely move. He offered to take care of whatever I needed, and I was very grateful for his help. I paid him for his trouble, and he was very grateful for the extra money and for my company for he'd been having many problems himself.

He was about 50, a diagnosed schizophrenic, on disability and living with his mother. She was a retired nurse. He had a son who he loved dearly who lived with his mother (the boy's mother) in Arizona. 

Wes's mother received his disability checks and doled out very little cash to him because she didn't think he'd be responsible with it, and she was probably right. For example, he'd buy cigarettes with the money I gave him, even though he had bronchitis, COPD, emphysema, and sometimes showed clear signs of walking pneumonia. I counseled him against smoking tobacco repeatedly, and sometimes he'd stop for a while, but then inevitably, he'd start smoking again. Having been a heavy smoker myself, I knew how hard it could be to quit, and I told him how I did it, recommended he try it and offered to help him through the rougher parts of the process. He tried but ultimately failed in part because he continued socializing with people who smoked cigarettes and who mocked his efforts to quit. 

Come to find out tobacco wasn't his only unhealthy habit. He didn't drink that I was aware of, but I would learn he used just about any illicit substance he could get his hands on. And it would kill him.

According to my neighbor, he was partying with "friends" one night, and he injected a cocktail of drugs -- she didn't know exactly what -- and went unconscious and never woke up.

I can well imagine how it happened; I can put myself in his place and recognize how vulnerable he was to a partying culture and recognize how tempting and easy it would be for the partiers he was with to take advantage of him and in effect cause his death. "Here, try this! You'll love it!" And he'd do it because why not?

And I can also well imagine that the partiers he was with had no remorse at all. They probably didn't even feel the loss.

Wes was less than nothing to them.

Just so when it came to my own brush with Death last week.

This time wasn't the End, but who knows how close it came? I felt -- absolutely -- the first time I encountered this dude the day before he assaulted me that his intention was to murder me. I didn't think he would do it, but there was no doubt in my mind of his intent.

Where did that come from? On my end, there's a long karmic chain. I can trace it back to 1904, but it probably goes back much farther. My mother's maternal grandfather was murdered (as it happened by his mistress) in 1904, and it's possible but not certain that my mother's father was also murdered in 1916. I actually had long thought that the accident that killed him was no accident, but the more I learned about it, the less sure about it I became. So I don't know. One of my mother's uncles was also murdered (I believe it was in 1898.) He was a police officer who was shot by one of the combatants when he tried to break up a fight in a bar. On the other hand, my mother's father was chased through the streets of Downtown Indianapolis by a police officer who was firing his gun at him. Didn't hit him, but caused quite a lot of damage and mayhem before the chase ended.

An uncle -- my father's older brother -- was accused of murdering his wife, and some of my relatives are convinced he did it and got away with it, but again, I'm not so sure. It's possible, but so is his alibi. So I don't know what really happened there, either.

I've had plenty of brushes with Death throughout my life. How many, I can't say. But enough to constitute a common theme, and it's something that I think most people never experience. I've been shot, mugged, robbed, assaulted, threatened, etc, etc, etc, many times. So far, I've survived every one of these incidents. 

I wrote "many times" and until now, I don't think I realized how often these things have happened to me. And how unusual it is in most people's lives. At least I assume it's unusual.

Part of it is due to my own rebel nature, something I have little or no control over. I tend to be a rebel, I tend to resist convention, I tend to prefer alternatives to expectations, and some of those alternatives lead directly to trouble, including life-threatening trouble. I suppose it's related to dare-deviling. Maybe I get an adrenaline rush from pushing the limits. I'm not sure what the reward is, but the risk is something I have often taken, more or less automatically. There is essentially no conscious intent on my part. 

In the recent incident, I sensed immediately that I was looking Death in the eye. I wasn't frightened. More concerned once he got in my house to keep him occupied so he didn't go looking around and finding my wife. Just keep him occupied. He was clearly fucked up on drugs, couldn't figure out how to do simple things (like working a doorknob or a lock) but he had a fixed idea: to dispatch me with his tomahawk. Maybe somewhere in his mind he saw himself as a hero. I don't know.

I don't remember him saying more than a few words the whole time, most clearly I remember him saying "Sit down" shortly before he struck me on the forehead with his tomahawk. Afterwards, I thought: "Is he counting coup?" But I think that's too sophisticated an idea for the state he was in. No, I don't think he was thinking at all. Some other process was going on, driven by drugs, his mental disabilities, and by something deep inside him. I asked him repeatedly, but he could not tell me what was wrong. 

So here I am, still recuperating. The wound is healing, and the black eye the doctor expected to develop is very faint. There's some pain now and then, I sometimes feel disoriented and dizzy, but it passes. I suspect PTSD, but on the whole, each day is just another day, plenty of tasks to get done, and remember to lock the doors and keep the gates closed. 

I contacted the Zen center to get more information on their prison outreach program. I'd heard about it from one of the Zen priests some time ago. He said, if I recall correctly, that it was focused on drug and addiction rehabilitation through Zen practice in the prison setting. I thought that might be something valuable for the guy who attacked me. I'm pretty sure the Zen priest himself has gone through rehab, probably more than once. Which is no negative reflection on him. What I recall being told about the guy who assaulted me was that he had "gone AWOL" from the rehab program he was in (probably by court order) and he had been partying with friends, got fucked up on something -- who knows what -- and had been flying high for several days. He had not been taking his anti-psychotic meds. And he had threatened or run off several other men who'd come to the house of a neighbor where he was staying. He believed, I was told, that every man was a predator on children.

So what do you do? Just send him back to prison and forget about him?

I'm sure some people would do just that, but that's not the way I think about these things or about people in crisis.

I was listening to an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh the other day. One of the topics was "terrorism" and how a Buddhist responds. Or should. He said, "Listening. Deep listening. Compassion." Not with violence. Of course, that's an ideal. It may not work, and it's not always possible, but without even trying, you're sure to see the cycle of violence repeat. Again and again and again. Why not stop?

The question is how to do that without enabling further violence. I was using tactics of Zen compassion and listening during the encounter with the guy who attacked me. I could see a little bit of a change in his behavior every time I asked him "What's wrong?" But it was only for a few seconds at a time, then he'd revert, we'd go around again, and finally he whacked me on the head. I suspect Thich Nhat Hanh would probably laugh at the outcome, and at times, I have laughed too. He would also say, I think, that simply by asking and listening and staying in the moment, I was moving the situation in a positive direction. Yes, some blood was shed, my own, but think how much more there might have been had I not done what I did.

But how to do that without enabling his demon-mind? I know there are ways, but I'm not skilled at them. That's why I'm reaching out to people who might be. 

One thing I didn't think of is the golden Kamakura Daibutsu 

By User: Bgabel at wikivoyage shared, CC BY-SA 3.0

that sits in the Buddha-shrine in the living room, something he must have seen though it may not have registered. In other words, he probably didn't know what it was, but he must have seen it, and eventually, just the sight could have profound effects. 

Who can say?

So. 

That's all I can say for now. 

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A bit of an update. Ms. Ché and I have been subpoenaed for a custody hearing on the guy who thwacked me with the tomahawk. Apparently the prosecutor wants us to testify as to what happened and why we think he should stay in custody and not be released on bail while awaiting trial. 

It's fairly simple. He's a danger to others and himself. 

We learned while discussing the case with the police captain that the dude has a history we knew nothing of. He was, for example, arrested in April for stealing the police chief's car and joyriding. He returned the car but refused to surrender his person, so he was tased, trussed up, and taken into custody. At the bail hearing the judge released him into a supervised rehab program which he left a few days before he assaulted me.

Police are very concerned that this not happen again with this dude. 

They want him locked up and not allowed to roam free. We do too. Clearly the rehab didn't work. If he is schizophrenic and he refuses to take anti-psychotics, but will self-medicate with drugs that enhance psychosis, then he's not really capable of handling freedom of any sort at this point.  

I told a friend that what I'd like to see happen is that he is imprisoned for up to a year, then put in a locked mental health care facility where he learns how to manage his condition -- maybe 3 years minimum; then if he demonstrates that he can and will manage his condition with medication and meditation, let him be on supervised release with a minder, essentially 24/7, for up to five more years.

She laughed. "There are no facilities, and no programs like that." I said, "Sure there are if you're rich enough. He's not. So what happens? Turn him loose? Or put him in prison for years and leave him to rot and let him continue to be a threat to others when he's let out?"

We'll see what happens.

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There was a pre-trial detention hearing for the guy who assaulted me. We attended by telephone and both Ms. Ché and I testified. She was was traumatized by the experience and retraumatized by telling the story to the court. I felt terrible for her. Wasn't there an easier wasy? Well, I guess not, and by tomorrow I hope she'll feel better. I realize how much she's been holding in. She was in a terrifying situation, and though she handled it masterfully (she'd trained for years) she was really badly shaken.

Dude got to tell his side, and what a tangled tale. He has quite a record, including assault and burglary. His charges now are aggravated assault and aggravated burglary together with false imprisonment. He rattled off a list of clinical diagnoses for which he is prescribed several anti-psychotic medications. He said he had been in a locked men's recovery program run by the corrections department as a condition of his probation after a conviction. He was denied his anti-psychotics and began to act out. He said he asked that an ambulance take him to the hospital, he was hearing voices and having delusions. He was taken to the hospital. It's not cleat if or how he was treated. 

He said he called our neighbor while he was in the hospital and asked her if he could stay at her house, and could she come pick him up. Someone else came, and he was brought to our neighbor's house on Sunday. He did not have his medication and he was becoming more and more delusional. I first encountered him on Monday. Our neighbor was not home, but he was there with her children. 

On Tuesday, he came into our house uninvited and assaulted me, scared my wife, and returned to our neighbor's house where he was arrested a few minutes later.

I'll say this for him. He was lucid during the hearing. He didn't make sense, but at least he could speak in full sentences. 

The judge decided he would stay in custody until trial -- for the safety of himself and others.