There's a loaded pistol and a bottle of whiskey on my nightstand. One is for peace of mind and the other is for silencing the demons in my head, but a lot of times I'm so swallowed up in despair that I can't seem to remember which one serves which purpose. What I mean of course is that I have two very different ways of taking a shot. One of the simplest examples of the failure of American society is the fact that a man like me is not forced into rehab and forbidden from owning a firearm. They knew about the suicide attempt, yet still they let me walk in there with six hundred bucks and then out with a gun. They are as cruel as cruel can get. To be clear, I pose no danger to anyone save myself and the motherfuckers who run this country. Our epidemic of mass shootings baffles me because I see no reason for random killing. If you're going to kill, then kill the ones who've shown that they deserve to die. Abiding by the law is the most certain way of failing to attain justice. Never in history has peaceful protest ever led to significant change; the only method of holding government to higher moral standards is ironically enough the shedding of blood. And perhaps that isn't actually true irony, since the argument can be made that bloodshed is sometimes required in order to uphold morality. In any case, this isn't meant to be a political treatise. I just needed to write something, anything really, as writing has always been there for me to help kick that can of depression down the road and live to die another day. Evidently it was high time for me to spend a few sentences railing against society on paper. I don't have the patience for my usual poetry genre today, so I'll just run with this rambling personal essay format and see what comes of it. This is the kind of writing that gives me immense satisfaction because there are no teachers to grade it, no editors to reject it, no bible-thumping grammarians to go off on it shrieking about all my sins to their crowds of faithful imbeciles. I simply write what I want to write and hit publish, damn the torpedoes, full fucking steam ahead. Forty feels lonely to me. I think I might be obsolete. I've lived here for six months now and still haven't made any friends, unless you count the people who work at the two local liquor stores. This is one of those sleepy little towns where it takes a good deal of work to dig yourself in and seize that status of accepted citizen, and I'm simply not interested in putting in that kind of work. Besides, I move around too much; in another six months when my lease is up, I'll likely be living in some other sleepy little town entirely. No matter what angle you observe my life from, the loneliness I experience is almost entirely my own fault, and any complaints I have about my situation are quite frankly rather unfounded. On a more positive note, if my life is fated to end with the option of being aware of my impending death before it strikes, I will probably not fear it nearly as much as the next guy in line given how well acclimated I am to the stresses of loneliness and suffering. I suspect that death will be much more amusing to me than frightening, if in fact it frightens me at all. How many men could say such a thing? In this way I am a very twisted sort of fortunate. Someone just knocked on my door. Who could possibly be knocking at this hour? As I said before, I have no friends here, so I'm not sure why anyone would be knocking. Yes, of course I'll get up and go answer the door. It would be exceedingly rude of me to do otherwise. Plus, I'm sure you're super curious to find out who it is. Who knows, this mysterious caller could potentially become my very first real friend in this sleepy little town! So yes, don't worry, I will definitely go answer the door—but first, I'm gonna take a shot.