Bad Things Do Happen Everywhere

Writing is therapeutic. So for the third night in a row I have stayed up in my bed unable to sleep and thought this time typing a little bit might help me.

It's 3:48 a.m., not too late, but I am more tired than I have been in a long time. Still, all I can do is think. The past weekend really woke me up to the unfortunate reality that people, many people, are bad. I'm 20 so it's probably time I learned this, maybe even a little too late.

On Friday night, a group of 3 guys yelled at my friends and I when we passed them on Harvard Street.

"Fags! Hippie fags!"

Big deal. Clearly (though apparently not so clear to me when I was drunk and eager to flex my beer muscles), these kids were looking for a fight. After something, probably a beer can, struck me in the head I turned around and confronted who I thought was the leader.

Bam. Blind-sided by his friend, who unleashed a flurry of punches on my face and skull. After the "fight," we were mercifully pulled away from each other.

I gave the kids the finger while walking away with my back turned before
Again. Cheap blindside attack and another easy sparring session for the kid before I could even raise my fists.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. It was nothing compared to things that happened a few blocks away, however.

Around the time some stranger used my cheeks and temples as a speed bag, a 21-year-old lay dying in an alley on Glenville St. after either falling or being pushed from a four-story roof following a huge, bloody brawl inside the apartment building.

Accounts of the fight that Matt got for his story are scary. Unlike other drunken party-fights, this was apparently guerilla warfare. Kids ripping bannisters from staircases to stave off their enemies while others smashed beer bottles on their foes' heads, splattering blood on the walls. An assassin allegedly wielded a hammer to mutilate faces.

All possibly resulting in a dead Art Institute of Boston student.

Since I've been at BU, something like 12 or 13 students have died in various ways--hit by cars, suffocated in fires, and fell from windows. None affected me as much as this kid, Shawn Dow's, death, though.

I think it's because it occurred at the same time as my ambush and the third violent crime.

My friend, a girl, was robbed at gunpoint while walking on Beacon St. near the Art Institute toward Kenmore late Saturday night. It's worse to think of what could have happened.

I've heard it so many times from other students, police officers, school leaders and my parents, and maybe it's a tired thing to say by now, but this weekend really shook me because I think of BU as a safe little bubble. It's not. I wrote the crime logs last year. I know it's not.

Big deal, I got jumped by a couple douchy guys looking for a fight outside a bar. But that, a trivial occurence compared to a brutal death and an armed robbery, coupled with those things made me feel weird.

People are out there, even a few blocks from the Brookline mansions of celebrities, politicians and professors, or outside the apartments of a few kids studying for their GREs or LSATs, who want to hurt other people. And I guess it took a dead kid and shaken up friend for me to realize it.