Just saw this at truthout.org; sorry if a dupe:
(snip) That's when the unexpected help showed up. As I was sliding my key into the back door of my apartment building, a young man emerged silently from the bushes behind me. I turned the key, and suddenly it felt like my head had exploded. The man from the bushes had thrown what was later revealed to be a large, 20 lb. cobblestone at me. It bounced off my shoulder, blasted into my jaw, and dropped heavily at my feet.
I reeled into the door but didn't fall. The fellow, assuming that anyone struck with a 20 lb. rock was ripe for the picking, started to come at me. I turned, and in a moment of truly dumb Braveheart macho testosterone rage, charged the guy. He stepped back in surprise, and then turned to flee. I pursued him down the street, brandishing the can of ravioli over my head while screaming unkind comments about his inappropriate sexual relationship with his mother, until my jaw reminded me that it might be broken.
After the cops and the EMTs and the x-rays were finished with me, the diagnosis was that nothing was broken or loose. My face is pretty torn up, but I should be able to chew solid food in a couple of days with the help of the Ibuprofen/Percocet cocktail the folks in the emergency room were kind enough to give me. As for the guy who threw the rock, I have no idea where he came from or what he was about. There are a few junkies wandering my neighborhood, so I assume this was an attempted mugging...possibly the first mugging in American history to be thwarted by a thick skull and a can of Chef Boy-Are-Dee.
Beyond the pain and the big scare, I am actually grateful for what happened. This may seem strange, but getting belted with a boulder did wonders for my perspective. If his aim had been a little better, just a couple of inches to the left, I'd probably be dead right now. I have the rock sitting on my desk in front of me, with an inscription written on it in indelible ink: 'There Are Worse Things Than Losing An Election.' A narrow perspective, to be sure, but a hard one to avoid while living inside my own bruised head."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110504A.shtml 
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