It’s late. I don’t feel like sleeping. I’m a little hungry. I don’t feel like eating. I feel like drinking. I feel like writing. I feel like, if I was a younger man with less of my experience and personality, I’d be calling people looking for drugs. Drugs to help me stay up later and write faster. But I’m me. I’m alone. I’m not going to do any drugs because I don’t do drugs, but also because I don’t have any. I’m going to drink until I fall asleep or run out of beer. This much of a conclusion I have come to.

And what the fuck, anyway? I’ll be on a bus to Chicago tomorrow. I can sleep on the bus. Fuck it. I can sleep when I’m dead.

I’m not dead. I’m alive. I’m alive and awake. I’m alive and awake and drinking. So what? I have to write. I have to.

So. What does one write about when there’s so much to say about so much? What does a twenty-seven year old white male really have to say that is any different than any goddamn thing any other bullshit, idealist, millenial dude-with-an-IPA-fixation also have to say? What makes me so fucking special that I think that my opinions are so rare and important that I should not only write them down, but that you should read them? Fuck. Nothing. Nothing except an ego that is self-sufficient; a mind that is so crammed full of these thoughts that I don’t give a fuck who’s reading it and who’s ignoring it because, fuck…fuck. I mean, seriously.

There arose such a clatter. A clatter in my mind. Something toppled over and spilled my deepest worries all over the fucking place. And in cleaning them up…fuck, this is cleaning them up, isn’t it. This writing…it’s all I can do, mother. Up against the wall. I feel up against the wall, but I shouldn’t. No, I should. I should because the things I think are true. Because the beliefs and ideas I hold are the correct ones. I’m not asking any fucking questions here, really. I’m really not. I’m not asking you to agree with me because this isn’t a fucking conversation. This is a bloodletting. I gotta get this shit down on paper…on screen, as it is.

And so what am I going to say in this bullshit? What am I not going to say? What lines do I draw to seperate myself from myself enough that my words ring so true and dearly that anything I don’t write here is what you’ll be thinking about…

Let me just say a few things:

1. Guns are made to kill people.
2. Religion is made to guide people.
3. Extremists have no faith.
4. Radical is not a dirty word.
5. Socialism exists already in this country, it just happens to exist mostly upside down.
6. Facism exists in this country in the name of the Republican Party.

Do I stop there? Do I continue in earnest? Can I do both?

I’ll do neither. I’ll just leave you with a poem:

Atop the burning sun arrives a darling.
He is stood upon the fire but he does not burn.
He includes with armored wills, a passing triad; a hummed tune.
He sings like rivers, cold from mountain snow.
And with only pause, delivering a wanton disregard for sin, he is but worried for his brothers and sisters who sleep under moons.
So without a callous will, he feeds the embers to his only son and he breaks with the God he believes in.
For it is but with shifts that one regards hallways in which evil speaks through darkness.
And it is in swallowing the light that we do perish.

And when nothing is sacred,
All things are profane.

I’ve been sitting and wondering intermittently my entire life. It’s those moments of thoughtfulness each day that I live for. The trapeze act of coming to conclusions; the strange connotation of silence and its power; the wandering around topics until a circular idea has been formed, has been linked with the psyche until all is but subtext, the awful quagmire released into the abyss of perpetual space. It is what drives us, the human race. We are people in search of constant evolution and revolution of the mind and the mind’s eye, taking it upon ourselves to grow in spite of ourselves, as we breach our consciousness literally, arriving at a place we, perhaps, didn’t used to think possible. This is the definition of epiphany: all else but a singular knowledge is extricated from our thoughts; the proverbial candle is lit. And it is with this process that we grow as people.

And so, I am sitting on a chair in front of a computer and I’m writing this and you’re reading this and it seems like we should walk together in the spirit of that search for epiphany; to reach a sort of agreement. For when we preach to the choir, what do we do but drown the singers in rhetoric?

But perhaps that isn’t even a question. It’s a statement of purpose. Because, my friends in arms, I have nothing but rhetoric, really. I’m not an expert on any thing but the history of The Beatles and how to write a song in the general I-IV-V structure with a middle-8 utilizing the minor on the 6th. And, honestly, anything I really ever write is for me and me alone. It’s my version of reaching a truth. I need a thing to look back upon and smile, and to think, “my God, what have I decided? My God, it hasn’t ever been so clear!” I have to write these things.

The last couple days have been another time of this sitting and thinking; this wandering around in mindfulness. And what I have honestly figured out, I can’t be sure. But I have to write it. And in writing it, I will perhaps realize that it’s more of the same feeling, the same ideas, and, yes, the same rhetoric as it’s been for years.

Because our country has only gone further into its insanity. And what do I reach for as a basic truth. I think I know the one that tops my list of disgust.

And it’s that I despise violence in all of its manifestations.

And this goes for just about anything, mind you. I can’t watch a football game without getting pissed off a little about what’s visually happening; Fuck UFC completely. Hell, I can’t watch America’s Funniest Home Videos and not cringe when that guy falls into his crotch again and again. It makes me physically repulsed. It is visceral.

But this is a personal issue. I just don’t watch those things if I can help it.

But when the violence which is sensationalized becomes that which is steeped in a cold, bitter reality of there being weapons for all occasions – and not only their existing, but that any person who is breathing in this country can go out and buy these machines – I feel that it is in my best interest to have a visceral reaction. In fact, I think that it is my duty as a person living in the Grand Mystery to be so outraged, so disgusted, and so tired that…what? That I sit down at my computer and put words together…

What should I be doing? Is it really just that I should say pointedly and without hesitation that if you’re the kind of person who still – in 21st Century America – thinks that you do now or will ever need a gun in your possession, you are completely and utterly wrong on every level. Go hunt your food if you want. That’s goddamn weird, because we’ve figured out better ways to do that, but I respect your passion in this regard. If you think you need a handgun or – God forbid – a military grade, high-powered machine gun, you’re just wrong. You don’t need those things. In fact, nobody does. In fact, they should never have been invented in the first place. They were and are expressly made to kill people. Not food. People. And so if you want one for that (which: how would anyone know if you do or not when you’re buying one) you obviously shouldn’t have one.

But then we arrive at the arguments for having them that we explicitly return to over and over again as a society. Self-defense is one thing, I suppose. But paradoxical. Perhaps I should just leave that as it is, because I could easily just say that if you knew the other person didn’t have a gun because guns can’t be bought anymore, then you wouldn’t need one…altough, of course, you wouldn’t have been able to get one anyway because, like I said, this is a utopian vision of a country without them at all…I digress.

Because I feel like I should address the idea that the freedom to have one is the real reason. The “because I shouldn’t not be able to have one” argument. Silly. Silly people with silly opinions. Sorry. Not sorry. Because it’s a truth. You shouldn’t want to feel such power. No one should. If you honestly just want to go out and shoot a gun to unleash some sort of primal thrill deep inside you, I not only disagree with you, I am frightened of you. You terrify me, in fact. But perhaps I’m alone in my principles. Perhaps not. Perhaps you even understand what I mean. But if what you feel is anger – and, christ, we all feel it, I’m no different – hit a punching bag. It’s physically good for you. It’s exercise, even. Don’t you see? I feel like you should see…

And if not, then it’s okay. Go think your thoughts. Go reach your conclusions. Go get your epiphany. I have mine. And I’ll continue to preach to the choir. Our song is just a little sweeter anyway.

P.S. The 2nd Amendment calls for a “well regulated militia” which, in modern America, is called the National Guard, which anyone can join if it feels to them their calling. Regardless, no “right” is unlimited. Not one.

It is a cold, rainy day, and I’m walking into the corner store to buy cigarettes; the TV inside is on. I glance at it and keep walking toward the counter, but as I’m asking for a box of Pall Malls, I turn back to the screen. I see people. I see police. I see a message scrolling underneath the moving pictures, and all it says is “San Bernardino First Responders”, or something of the like, and I know immediately what’s going on. There’s been another shooting. And as I listen in to the report, I hear that the situation is ongoing: the killers are still at large. I get my cigarettes. I exit the store and begin walking back to my apartment. I take a smoke from the pack and place it between my lips. I light it. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. Repeat. The cheery looms at the end of three beautiful inches of paper-wrapped tobacco product and another inch or so of fiber filter.

One foot in front of the other, dear boy. Step by step. Let’s take this shit step by step.

I turn the corner and catch a glimpse of myself in the window of the bar around the corner from where I live. I’m dressed well. I’m a white man. It doesn’t matter. I’m alive. I’m not in San Bernardino. I’m in Cleveland. It doesn’t matter. People were probably shot and killed somewhere around here today as well. Probably not 20; definitely not 20 or it would have been “Cleveland” scrolling beneath moving pictures of a scene of an absurd and terrifying reality. Guns. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fucking. Fuck, motherfucking goddamn pieces of shit. Pieces of whole, fucked up, fucking goddamn bullshit.

I turn the next corner and see my building. A self-conscious smile plays around my lips. I’m a happy man. I have a home. I’m alive. No one I know has died from gun violence today.

But fuck. Fuck, fuck, fucking fucking, fuck, fucking fuck.

There were two goddamn, fuck, fucking mass murders today in this country. Two, goddamnit. In one goddamn day. Fucking pieces of shit. Fucking fucked country. Fucking fucked world. Fuck.

There aren’t enough curse words. Fuck is the best one but it’s not enough. There isn’t enough pain to go around.

I unlock my front door and climb my stairs. I open the next door and my apartment is warm and inviting. I put my cigarettes and keys on the table. I sit down in a chair and I close my eyes. I open them again and burst into tears.

Fuck fucking fuck, bullshit, fuck fucking fuck.

What are we going to do, America? What the fuck are we going to do?