Several things have come to my attention.
1) I paid $12 for this domain name.
2) I like writing for fun more than anything else.
3) I signed a contract that says I need to edit and submit my manuscript by March.
4) this blog seems to get views, however rarely, so why not give people something to read?
Here is a short story that had to be written so badly I woke up at 4AM to write it. I wrote the important details down so I wouldn’t forget them, got a glass of water and went back to sleep. At 10AM I woke up and wrote some more, just letting it flow, not thinking too hard. I spent a good hour reading, re-reading, and editing, elaborating where needed and cutting what was not needed. Total time spent on this piece, about 2 hours. Questions, comments, go ahead.
This is a TOTALLY FICTIONAL STORY, for you rigid SOB’s.
My advice to these misguided souls? Fucking relax before you say anything about the content.
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I’m not like most people. Your average American walks through life grazing; fattening themselves up, thinking they’re safe from what lives in the jungle. But they’re blissfully unaware that there are no fences to keep out the monsters. They’re dead wrong; there are always predators closing in, waiting to sneak up and take a huge bite out of their ass.
Not me. I’ve always been alive, alert. I couldn’t really help it. My dad was prone to drink and come at me with a knife. In that situation any ten year old would develop what professionals call ‘hyper-vigilance’. Anyway, since then, I’ve always felt like a meat-eater among cattle; nice polite cattle. Too polite, as if the cattle know what I really am, but they’re terrified to admit it to themselves. They make short eye contact and smile, as if pleading ‘don’t eat me a-fucking-live’.
Not him, he’s like me. There’s this kid a few seats in front of me. I say kid, but he’s gotta be in college. He bumped into me when first I walked onto the airplane. He chatted me up for a second, but I get the feeling he just wanted to get a good look at me, size me up or something. Ever since I sat down he’s turned around to look at me twice. Both times he wore the biggest shit-eating grin I’ve ever seen (I’ve seen a few) and he’d raise his eyebrows, as if to share this great joke with me that he knew only I’d understand. It was weird, that second time he looked, I could swear I almost heard… not really heard, more like sensed that he was trying to tell me, “Hey, these silly fuckers around us, right?”
I let it go for a couple hours. It was a long flight and I needed some rest. It was going to be a long few days ahead of me. I was going to be meeting with two highly ill and volatile patients almost nonstop at a psychiatric hospital. Then I was headed to a public high school to commence observation of the student body and try to identify possible candidates. Oh, a bit of explanation for that last one is in order I guess.
I’m a psychiatrist that specializes in homicide prone adults and adolescents. My patients are the types of people that shot up their high schools when they were kids, or grew up to be serial killers. At least, I attempt to treat the ones that didn’t off themselves rather than be taken by the police. Recently I’ve started doing field research to see if it is possible to detect the symptoms of what I simply, others say crudely, call ‘predators’. People with this ‘illness’, or ‘predators’, are for all intents and purposes already murderers at heart. My goal is to implement a standard procedure for identifying and treating these ‘predators’ before they can do harm to anyone, and hopefully live a functional life.
I call them such because that’s what they are; predators among plump cattle. In high school though, most of the cattle are none-to-polite, which is a marginal part of why they become murderers. Needless to say, or sadly for many maybe it desperately needs to be said, I’m not talking about group therapy or some nice cozy sit down with a fucking guidance counselor. I’m talking about an extremely difficult process of identifying a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s the difference between a depressed and unmotivated kid; the typical angst ridden teenager, and the one who’s making pipe bombs at home and planning in detail how to block off the escape routes. On a surface level they are really quite similar, so it’s a difficult, time consuming effort to identify the serious threats.
I am in a unique position, however, to practice in this field. I used to be one of those kids. A few argue that I still am a predator, and an unstable, dangerous liability. They say I’m a time bomb that could go off at any moment. Frankly, fuck those guys. They have no faith in medicine. Their fears aren’t unfounded though. I was not an angry kid that listened to Slayer and cut himself. I wanted fucking satisfaction. I didn’t have a huge plan. I just bought a .38, some slugs, and waited, praying God would give me some reason not to do it.
Why I’m not rotting in jail is a matter of two seconds. I had my gun in my lap, sitting right in the middle of class and no one noticed. I was almost in tears because I really was going to kill these people, starting with the fat kid that was so insecure he was a total douchebag. Two seconds before I stood up and made the fat kid trade the Moon Pie in his mouth for a gun barrel a miracle happened, depending on who you ask. A bunch of kids started shooting up the school. They had rifles, pistols, and I think an Uzi, but God knows where they got an Uzi.
I’m not sure, but I think I praised God that I was in the right place at the right time for once in my life. And what is a lot weirder is that one of the main things on my mind was that, “Hey, I actually want to keep living, so now that I bought this gun, I can use it and go on living and not regret wasting the money!” Yeah, in the middle of a firefight I was thinking how nice it was that I’d bought a gun, and assuming I’d survive, how nice I’d feel later for having the good fortune to buy a gun.
Long story short, I killed the three kids with that gun I was so happy to have bought. I didn’t get away scot-free; they hit me in my shoulder, my arm, my back and thigh. I also wasn’t able to stop them from shooting a bunch of other kids and killing a bully and one infamous teacher that had been their main targets. I was sent to the emergency room, and was put under police guard. Everyone wanted to know why an underage kid had a gun on campus, and some said I should be locked up. But there were over two dozen witnesses, including one injured cop that was on duty during the shooting and the principal, all who claimed I saved their lives.
It was months before I could get out of bed to stand trial, and even then I was in a wheel chair with a neck and back brace and my leg in a cast. There were weeks of deliberation, and the entire time the judge looked like he wanted to flay me alive. But between the media storm totally over-romanticizing my story, the horde of protesters calling me a ‘hero’, the countless witnesses I had ‘saved’ and their grateful families, the prosecutor never stood a chance. His final statement to the jury was that “I could well have been one of the original killers and just betrayed my collaborators.” That was his defense, that I had betrayed a bunch of psycho kids that had a gun to the principal’s head before I shot them.
In the end, they dropped the murder charges, it was self-defense sure enough, but as soon as I could feasibly do so I was supposed to be committed to a psychiatric hospital for no less than ninety days for evaluation, and pending the results they would make a ruling on me carrying an illegal weapon on school property. That was where they discovered I really was one of those psycho kids, but had had a change of heart. They kept it confidential, and released me after my ninety days. Their official statement was that they “deemed me mentally healthy and not a danger to society or myself.” They put me on two years’ probation, during which I could not own a weapon of any sort and had regular mandatory mental health checkups. If I fucked up once they’d throw me away for felony possession of a deadly weapon. Just a little snippet, my stay in that hospital gave me time to think, and that’s how I decided to become a psychiatrist in my specialized field.
I think that’s enough of that tangent, back to the airplane. My work had been exhausting me, so on the plane I started to doze off, but that kid kept coming back to the front of my mind. He looked to me like a hunter, like he couldn’t wait to chew on the old lady sitting next to me. That got me thinking about what if the plane hit a storm, and had to land at some random airport and we got delayed for hours. The old lady talked nice enough, but my guess was that she’d be the first to start pouting and stomping her feet like a child that didn’t get the candy she wanted. I was just thinking how I’d be the first to shut that cunt’s mouth when I realized I needed to write this messed up train of thought down. I asked the old lady for a pen and told her “thank you soooooo much, you’re faaar too kind.” She didn’t get the joke, but that kid glanced back at me with his shit-eating grin, like this was the funniest fucking thing he’d ever seen. It was starting to annoy the crap out of me.
That was when I noticed the dude walking really fast. No one else did, they probably thought he just needed to take a shit really badly, but not old meat-eater me. I noticed immediately that he was walking to the FRONT of the plane, towards the cockpit, and he had something in a bundle under his arm. For some reason I felt the urge to look forward, and there was the kid again. He still had the exact same god damn expression, but again in that weird way I sensed, rather than interpreted, that he was saying “Well this is going to be fun, isn’t it?” I still had the ballpoint pen in my hand. My grip on it tightened, as if squeezing the shit out of it would make this all stop. I hadn’t even taken my notes yet.
