Sunday afternoon, an overcast, somewhat steamy day on the West Side of Los Angeles. I'm in a Starbucks not far from Loyola Marymount University, where I live.
Suddenly a young woman at a table nearby starts saying 'Oh my God. Oh my God!' I look up to find she has left her seat and stares out the glass doors, where four men are fighting. 'It started here,' she says.
I'm not sure what the right response to this is. Do I join her in watching? I realise everyone else in the store has. A few 20-something men smile, the whole thing immediately an inside joke for them to post/tweet/snapchat/distance themselves from. But the rest of us just stand there, like we're in shock.
And maybe we were. Certainly I haven't been in the vicinity of an actual fight for quite a long time. Maybe the torpor that's come over us is a natural response, an inbred riptide of uncertainty and helplessness developed over millennia to keep us away from the chaotic and dangerous.
Still, it brought to mind other disconcerting experiences I've had in the US of late. Like seeing a man and a woman arguing in a coffee shop in an unusually confrontational way, and instinctively considering the possibility that one of them might have a weapon.
Or hearing someone shouting furiously behind a high wooden gate, and immediately considering the terrain around me with an eye on what might protect me from possible gunfire.
Or just the tyranny of anxiety that seems to be more and more looming over our collective unconsciousness, our media's brutal, nonstop fusillade of stories about the latest scary/awful/wacky thing said or done by Donald Trump like a slow-dissolving acid eating away at any sense of wellbeing.
Maybe standing there we weren't afraid about what was happening across the street, but the fraying at the edges that it represents, the insecurity that the gospel both of Trump and against Trump seems to be creating in our society.
"My father worries about my 17-year-old nephew travelling in the daytime to downtown Chicago because there have been 2000 shootings in the city so far this year."
It echoes the same insecurity we hear in the Brexit vote, and the appalling treatment of both ethnic British citizens and immigrants that followed. Likewise, the resurrection of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party. When she came on Q&A, a Muslim man described to her how his family