Eh, I would have had a headache anyway.
Okay, so we were down at Max's of Broadway, a bar in Fell's Point, and after ringing in several time zones worth of New Years with the appropriate number of Heavy Seas (the Winter Storm is really quite a pleasant little beverage), we were on our way back to the car. Suddenly, out of nowhere, this young gentleman was really pissed at me. (He was also, to mix my dialects a bit, really pissed in general.) The only theory that the rest of us were able to come up with after the fact was Kerry's—she thought she might have brushed up against him and he thought it was me, possibly coming on to him or something, which is plausible enough given the way drunk logic works. Anyway, he punched me. One shot to the left cheekbone. It didn't really hurt, and in fact it was a little while after that before I realized what had just happened—I just felt a lot of pressure in my face, saw some stars, all that exciting stuff.
After that, my concern was defusing the situation and getting my friends out of there. Me and my friends outnumbered the guy who hit me and his friend by about two to one, and the guys I was with were both willing and entirely able to pummel them both into the sidewalk, but I didn't want them to, for various reasons I didn't do a very good job of explaining. Fortunately, our designated driver Alex (who's about three times my size) was on the same page as me, and the combination of sheer physical presence and sobriety that he brought to the table was enough to prevent what had seemed inevitable. I shook hands with the guy who hit me (his name was Matt), he and my friend Yoni looked for my glasses (apparently they weren't enough to stop him punching me after all), Yoni found them under a car about eight feet away from where I had been standing, and I thought we were okay. One of my friends, Mende, did manage to get in a small altercation with Matt's friend (Dave—apparently the secret to remembering people's names is mild head trauma) which I didn't really see but which ended up with Mende in the gutter, having evidently busted his head on the way down. It bled a fair bit, as head wounds are prone to do, but it was a small cut and didn't require stitches or anything.
Anyway, after that we got everybody out. I felt bad that I had let a friend get hurt defending me, and even though I know I did the right thing trying to defuse the situation, I still felt very old and prudent.
The eye is fine; a bit of a bruise on the cheekbone, a couple small cuts from my glasses. No shiner. Mildly uncomfortable, but not painful. It was a good experience, honestly, or would have been if Mende hadn't gotten hurt too. I've always secretly wondered what it's like to get punched—I think a lot of people do, otherwise Chuck Palahniuk would be a lot poorer.