I’m only able to write this now because Diane Larson, the veteran UPS driver who services a stretch of Belltown, fended off two would-be shoulder-bag robbers until they fled. Otherwise, I’d be without the computer on which I write this.

That happened around 12:45 p.m. Wednesday. Later, in the Two Bells (where I told Diane I would be after I thanked her for her help), I told a uniformed cop (with a plainchothes detective standing behind him) what had happened.

I’d just been to the bank, and was walking north on Fourth Avenue toward the Two Bells for lunch. I was thinking this solstice day was the first day of the rest of my life–that from this day on, I vowed, I’d have no more financial worries, no career worries, no stress. I would have to say goodbye to my old existence of being waylaid by constant panic.

Then, out of my peripheral vision, a stringy-haired, unshaven white guy person lunged toward me, cornered me against the wall near the Chinese Wok restaurant, and grabbed at my shoulder bag (containing, among many other things, this laptop). I held onto the bag for dear life (no pipsqueak punk does THAT to ME!) and yelled “NOOOO!” repeatedly.

A stocky black guy from across the street ran toward me and the crook, yelling “I got it. I can handle it.” Instead of helping me fend off the crook, he lunged for the bag himself. (He might or might not have been a mate of crook #1.)

I held onto it like it was part of me (the computer is, of course, my most intimate tool and even an extension of my mind). A half dozen Chinese Wok patrons came out to yell at the crooks but did nothing more.

Then Diane came, stomped her foot on the fallen bag to keep it in place, and held both crooks at bay until they chose to run off.

That, my friend, is what Brown can do for me.

I learned: For a self-styled lifelong passive weakling/wuss, when I have to I can be as feisty and ornery as my Snohomish County bad-boy upbringing has reared me to be. I’m also good at making a spectacle of myself; my stubborn “NOOO,” one of many frustration catch phrases which have often cused others to dismiss me as a weirdo and a freak, effectively helped save my ass. I’m a fighter. I’m a survivor. I triumph against all odds. I’m a “real man,” damn it.

While I couldn’t give a good enough description of the crooks for the cops (who told me “tunnel vision” often occurs in people at moments of sudden panic), I still remember the steely, desperate, focused evil look of the first would-be thief, and how he instantly turned into a running coward when he knew he’d lost.

Some guy in The Nation a few years back wrote about having been mugged in New Haven, CT. He said that, far from turning his back on urban society and wanting to cocoon in the burbs, he was grateful his crime took place in a city, where passersby were immediately there to help him and where emergency-room care was only minutes away.

I feel likewise today. If I’d been mugged in Woodinville (and, yes, it happens), I’d have been stuck one-to-two against the muggers with no one to hear me for miles. Heck, if it’d happened in one of the nether regions of West Seattle where I sometimes find myself wandering off of buses, I’d have been TSOL.

I also can’t stop thinking of the thieves, not as the opposite-race subhumans the conservatives would claim to protect me from, but as right-wingers without resources. These dorks wanted to take my stuff for no good reason, offering nothing in return, just because they believed they had the power to do so.