Jer, I do know that neighborhood -- it's a lot nicer now than it used to be -- and I've been there on my own in the middle of the night. No goofy Fight Club quotes come to my mind either, just some advice I got from Sensei Takagi twenty years ago: "Say you're walking down the street and someone tries to grab you, what do you do? Well, first, don't walk down that street."

He had a whole hierarchy: First, don't walk down that street. If you have to walk down that street, look like somebody they don't want to mug. If you see bad guys coming toward you anyway, cross the street and walk on the other side. If they cross the street, run. If they run faster than you, [insert here several moves that end up with the bad guys on the ground while you apply torque to their joints]; then once they're on the ground, you kick them in the leg to give them a bad charleyhorse, and *then* you run away.

The martial art of Running Away was the most useful single class session in all my years as a student.

If you're staggering home late at night, alone, perceptibly drunk, in an ill-lit neighborhood that doesn't have a lot of through traffic, you're wearing a sign that says "LUNCH". I'm middle-aged, a bit dumpy, and partially disabled, but under those conditions _I_ could take you.

What would I do if I lived there? If it was important to me to be able to stay out late drinking, then go home alone, I'd take a cab. My advice all involves having other people around because I work hard at avoiding deserted areas.