If Uli had won, none of this would have happened!

I hate Times Square. I hate everything about it. I hate the lights; I hate the noise; I hate the street vendors; I hate the crowds; and I hate the tourists.

I know, I know...the hating tourists thing? It's just so damn unoriginal. But hear me out. Does it make me angry that tourists walk in packs of 12, or even in horizontal lines of 4, occupying the whole sidewalk and traveling at snail pace? Yes. Do I grow frustrated when they stop dead in their tracks to take pictures during rush hour when I am practically running towards my freedom from the office and have to catapult myself out of the way to bypass running them over? Yes. But the number one reason I hate tourists is because they're such fucking ASSHOLES. They have this preconceived idea that NYers are "hard" and "tough" and in a desperate effort to blend in, become rude and mean and awful...but I suppose a lot of them are just like that anyway.

Wednesday night while commuting home from watching Project Runway at a friends apt., I discovered I was on an express train that wouldn't be stopping again until 72nd Street. So despite living a meager 10 blocks away, you can imagine how thrilled I was when I realized I would have to get off at the highly dreaded and avoided 42nd Street stop.

Times Square: tourist central: my nightmare.

So anyway...I'm walking up 8th Ave, trying to get out of tourist hell, when a juvenile delinquent CLUBS ME IN THE THIGH WITH A LEAD PIPE

....okay so maybe it wasn't a juvenile delinquent a much as some pre-teen bitch strung out on MTV...and maybe she didn't so much club me, as she did walk by me super close. And looking back at her as I rolled around on the ground in pain, it was hard to distinguish what her weapon of choice was.

What I do know, is that: it was strapped to her back in the fashion one would wear a tennis racquet (or drafting tube), it was concealed in a non-tennis racquet case (possibly dripping with my blood), and that the cantaloupe sized bruise on my thigh says IT WAS A FUCKING LEAD PIPE.

God, now I know what Nancy Kerrigan felt like. Lucky for me, the winter Olympics aren't until 2010...though I may never recover.

I've developed a composite sketch of the criminal in hopes of a speedy arrest. Please help.