Sunday, July 22, 2012

The Killer's Dead Part


“’I don’t know, Bob,’ I said, ‘there’s a couple kinds of laziness.  The don’t-want-to-do-nothin’ and the stick-in-the-rut brand.  You take a job figuring you’ll just keep it a little while, and that while keeps stretchin’ on and on and on.  You need a little more money before you can make a jump. You can’t quite make up your mind about what you want to jump to. And then maybe you make a stab at it, you send off a few letters, and the people want to know what experience you’ve had—what you’ve been doin’. And probably they don’t even want to bother with you, and if they do you’ve got to start right at the bottom, because you don’t know anything. So you stay where you are, you just about got it, and you work pretty hard because you know it. You ain’t young anymore and it’s all you’ve got.’”
Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, pg 129.
The autopsy report showed the lines of worry scrawled all about his youth, a shadow index of all kinds of perplexity…and as he aged, in a generalized sort of way, they seemed to coalesce and send rigors straight from his forehead through to his sternum, shorting out what bit of heart he had pickled because he needed to save face at the regular assembly of his peers he secretly hated.  Those men who stupidly listened to, and accepted all of his spiteful, lying diatribes on just about anything current events had to offer, to the extent that his belittling intelligence trusted no one but the unknown experts he believed weren’t just toying with their own ideas about nothing.  Those thoroughly practiced individuals from some region just East of L.A. who popularized such great notions from bunkers in TV land, complete with historical histrionics reenacting parts from grander stages when battles were fought and things that a man did were real in the eyes of hedge fund managers.  With a bit of spunk and derring-do, just about any man with good sense could glean private property from the hands of Native extraterrestrials with plenty of good, clean land for the flagging.

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