Philip Brunetti holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Georgia State University and was the recipient of that university’s Paul Bowles Writing Fellowship while in the program. Brunetti writes innovative fiction and poetry and much of his work has been published in various paper or online literary magazines including Word Riot, decomP magazinE, The Boiler, Identity Theory and The Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. He is currently seeking a publisher for his experimental novel Newer Testaments, of which excerpts have been published in the latter two journals above.
Mass Shootings
1.
They’re giving out these pills to increase mass shootings. Don’t ask me why they’re doing this. And don’t ask me how I know. Let’s just say the statistics and data are there even if they’ve been buried and obfuscated. But they’re definitely giving out these pills to increase mass shootings. It has something to do with the gun lobby and something to do with the pharmaceutical industry or Big Pharma as some call it. It’s beyond an insidious plot but it’s all there in black and white, with evidence to back it up…if you can find it.
There’s a particular kind of drug—a supposed anti-anxiety, antidepressant, marketed as such. These drugs, under multiple brand names, are categorized as SSRIs: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. They might inhibit the reuptake of selective serotonin—whatever that means exactly—but what they really do is desensitize the soul and dehumanize the spirit. They slowly but surely turn people prescribed this drug into automatons and eventually, if the dosage is large enough and the time period over which they’re taken long enough, the desensitized automaton experiences sharp impulses of violence and destruction. And such impulsive violence and destruction periodically manifests as a mass shooting.
But this is all bullshit. This is all a conspiracy theory and skewered statistics and everything else that’s partly fabricated and false. And besides it’s not necessarily the SSRI drugs that are the root cause. There are other undisclosed drugs that are out there. There might even be something they’re putting in the water or that’s being transmitted subliminally through social media or Smartphones. I know I sound like a madman, a paranoiac, and someone deeply disturbed. And of course I am deeply disturbed—but I’m disturbed by what’s going on. By the fact that these mass shootings aren’t accidental or inexplicable but instead are being fostered by powers that are far more evil than you and I could ever fathom.
2.
I should remain silent. I shouldn’t say a word about this. After all, it’s not like I’m an investigative reporter with insider contacts. I’m just a poor and lowly poet with a deranged sense of reality. Anyhow I should just go out and look at the butterflies and enjoy the beauty of nature. Too bad it’s the late fall and freezing cold already. The butterflies are nowhere to be seen and most of the trees are leafless and silhouetted like spooky stick figures in a darkening expanse…I’m not up to the task of facing the fall this year. There’s been too much death—and this is just more death. But at least it’s natural death, it’s seasonal and cyclical; at least whatever portion hasn’t been affected by Climate Change. And it’s possible that these abnormalities—the bizarre shifts in climate—are also affecting the minds of the shooters. Or the minds of those on the brink of losing it. I’m not one of them—I’m not going to lose it. But I’m noticing it, I’m aware of it, and I feel it. I feel the shifts and changes and I feel the fear and anger. It’s palpable. It cuts the air and drains away human commonalities. Anyhow this is what I’m seeing. But I’m a dark figure—I’ll be accused of being a dark figure. But I intend no ill will. I’m simply pointing out what’s becoming plainly visible. These patterns of doom that are upon us and that seem strangely intentional. ‘Thoughts and prayers’ might be just another trick language…a triggering language. Or maybe those are simply words of innocence. It’s doubtful though because they sound somewhat complicit—they sound like a code for something. A code of doom maybe. I’m sorry, I’m not saying everyone’s guilty. But someone’s guilty—and someone needs to be charged. Not me, no. My job’s only that of revealer. A pathetic revealer perhaps. But only that.
3.
The horror of some of the mass-shooters’ faces. And the outward normalcy of some of the others. Most of them look as normal as you and me. A couple were walking death masks or beyond death masks. Flesh faces of death, with wild, bulging-orb eyes, sickening sneers or rabid expressions. A ghoulish longing for horror and destruction, dastardly and demonic. Or just the human heart inversed and exposed: radiographed. The evil’s within—and within all of us—if all of human nature’s encompassed and included. But the mass-shooting evil is not quite inborn. No, instead human nature’s been exacerbated and infected—by the SSRIs and other drugs, by social-media, by subliminals, and by the course of current human history.
I am indebted to my sensations and perceptions for this. I am indebted to my powers of observation and my scrutiny of the shift in being and time—an artificial age, with plasticized hearts, numbed souls, corrupted brain chemistries, the whole tortured shebang of what’s afoot…The eyes of the dead. Some men are walking around with the eyes of the dead. And the next moment we can expect that there will be a woman, an infamous woman, to enter the picture and claim her infamy. A visit to Dick’s Sporting Goods—or, better yet, the local gun show. No background checks—so booty up the armaments! The bigger the clip the better. The more automatic the semi-automatic, the better. She’s as beautiful as she is deadly. Maybe somebody will headline that. A new form of celebrity founded and refounded as the female mass shooter of the species.
Anyhow this is a long way down. We’ve come a long way down and the ‘thoughts and prayers’ have sucked us more downward into the vortex of impotence and abetment. These people will die and then those people will die. Let’s hear about the victims, let’s give a block of time to the victims. But not the first block, not the lead block. The victims are boring, they’re dead. Dead people are often boring—they can’t help it. The killers are more marketable, even dead. But let’s pretend not to market them. Let’s withhold their names or say their names as little as possible. We can give body counts; after all, it’s become a competition. I think that Vegas shooter’s the winner so far. But don’t forget McVeigh—if we can include bombs and bombings. No, that’s a separate category and even a different algorithm perhaps. There’s overlap in the arenas of mass murder and death. There is that overlap. But it’s still different.
4.
Yes, madness. We’ve come to an age of madness and the solution, then, is of course more madness. More guns and more weapons and more armaments and everything that’s needed to stop these shooters or secretly support these shooters too. Let’s have more pharmaceuticals as well, we’ll come up with catchy names and maybe the name will be so catchy that no one will notice the potential side effect of death. It’s a pity that we have to say this aloud, that we can’t just have this scrawled on the screen. We’ve really got to get that law overturned. It didn’t used to be like that. Just a few years ago, a couple of small-print onscreen sentences were all we legally needed. The damn liberals or leftists or some other enemy of capitalism and mass death changed this law. The goal—not for the safety of the country but for the lining of rich company’s pockets—is to change it back.
I am a man. I am one man. I will lose. There’s no hope for a single, solitary man. I know I’m not alone—but I feel alone. I feel very alone. And it’s just a matter of time before I’ll have to cringe again. Before the ‘Breaking News: Mass Shooting’ announcement is made again via CNN and all the rest. Here we go again, the stupor, the stupefaction, the senselessness, all that. But still, it’s got to be covered. This is news—this is our society. A society of death. Of random mass murder. Shoot them in schools. Shoot them in shopping malls and open-air settings. Soft targets. Whatever soft targets are available. And a good guy with a gun too. Get them all involved. Friendly fire. Run, hide, fight. That’s what they tell me, have trained me, are my workplace options—run, hide, fight—when the blasting begins.
5.
It’s inexcusable. It’s horrific. It’s ongoing and seemingly eternal. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ as my high-school English teacher Mr. Bounty used to say. Somehow, then, it all made more sense. Even The Painted Bird made more sense, as awful and outrageous as that was, because at least that was war. All-bets-are-off war but now it’s war all the time as Mr. Chinaski posed. Whatever’s happening now is, unfortunately, just the early phases and stages. The moon’s gone and hung itself too. I don’t know what to ask from my neighbor or from my good friend. Here’s a version of a good friend today: Let me drug you and rape you. Here’s another version: Let me murder and dismember you in the bathtub with a power-saw. Then I can bag you up in plastic and dump you in a landfill…
Ah, maybe I’m watching too much ID TV. There are at least 24 murders a day taking place there. It’s not that unusual, I suppose. I guess it’s time for good feeling—a drastic mood change. It’s time for legalized pot—in New York! If that’s where I live still. I can’t recall. I was planning on leaving the city long ago. And even left it. But then I came back. What’s funny is that the shootings started shortly after I came back. Like two or three months later, there was Columbine. A sign post, a milestone marker. How those two fools with multiple weapons killed so few is the real question. And then they turned the weapons on themselves. Mass shooticide denouement. Not a virgin birth in sight, I take it.
Go find your funeral home. That’s a sweet soft target for you. Go find the dead mourning the dead and see what you can do, how many you can strike down.
Nah. I’m being sneeringly sarcastic and overblown. I’m sitting on my own trash bags but thankfully they’re not filled with body parts. Instead they’re just piles and piles of shredded paper. Because my identity’s been stolen and I expect it to be stolen again. I suspect I might even be dead in the next mass shooting—but not as myself. No, instead as someone who stole me away, stole my documents, stole my name and the lines on my forehead even.
It’s an insistence. It’s a way out for no one. And for everyone, too, from alternate perspectives.
Cold dead hands, I take it.