T-7

I am frenetic. I am the screaming id that wants to kill anything it can’t fuck and fuck anything it can’t kill. I am the monkey let out of the Skinner box. I am the college kid who was home-schooled and finds himself at UCLA. The universe is too big, the pleasures too many and various, the time I lost too much ever to make up and my hunger to make it up therefore too great ever to sate. I am the wendigo, cast out for crimes against the tribe and transformed into a monster with a heart of ice who must eat and eat and never be full. I am appetite. I am wishing, in short, that I had been in the heart of the maelstrom out at Yucaipa. Everett Shankly I could not give a shit about. You kill five people, you get what’s coming to you. But to be in the mob, to be free…I’ve got a VR rig in my head, and there I’m seeing the muzzle flashes. There I’m hearing the thwop of the helicopter rotors, there I’m weeping with tear gas and ducking my head when the batons come down, and you know what? Because it didn’t really happen, I love it. I’m proud of myself for imagining it. I wasn’t there, but I wanted to have been there, and this fake courage feels to me like the real thing. Man, I didn’t know until just now what an asshole I was.