August 14, 2018

two halves of the same impulse *

There is a man on the screen of a security camera with the fuzzy outline of a gun
pointed toward the clerk. Behind him, out of view, another man is crouching
lower than the lowest row of candy bars, squeezing the life out of the cross
at his neck. In a few minutes, another man will break through the glass
with a single bullet, and make a different sort of headline on the evening news.
Fear brings the war out of us, the beast and the bully, the brave and the battered,the broken and the believer, and I am thinking of the way boys wrestle for the role
of good and evil, never quite certain which one will keep them safer,
or which will score the most points, or leave the most becoming scars, or take
the terror away for good. Meanwhile, the gun. The gun. The fucking gun.