A meditation on violence, and fuck knows what else, I'm basically making this up as I go, I don't even have a mission statement, just a blank space

on the screen. Fuckin' title box has a character limit, what the fuck is that about?

Good evening, and welcome to A Meditation on Violence, by Lee Molnar. Presented by Very Fun Words.

I've been writing an essay on Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find". This'll contain spoilers, so if you have any desire whatsoever to read the story, drop whatever your doing right now and find a copy and read it. Of course, the story's still great if you know what's going to happen, hell, I knew what was going to happen and I still loved it. Anyways, in the end, everyone's dead, killed by a fugitive without faith in his life. The ending is incredibly violent, with 6 people, a family, complete with grandma and baby, are shot execution-style in the woods. And the killer takes their cat. The point is that it's incredibly violent, and it makes you feel that violence, but no where is it gratuitous. I guess I'm talking about gratuity here. Because there's so much media that desensitizes violence, make a gunshot a commonplace thing. In so many ways, person-on-person hatred and violence seems like the norm. But there are some media that make a gunshot a gunshot again. I hope I'm not ruining anything in The Departed when I mention that people are shot in it, but it is about gangs in Boston so that's kind of to be expected. The Departed handled gunshots and death really well, and so did this story, and it took me until this story and meditation on this story to realize why. In so much, the gunshot is the exclamation mark, complete with onomatopoeia and capital letters. BANG! That's the gunshot, the gunshot is encapsulated within itself. It doesn't matter who's holding the gun or who it's pointed to or why person A wants to kill person B, all that matters is that the gun is fired. I think that, for violence not to be gratuitous and self-relishing, the gunshot needs to be a period. What I mean by this is that it shouldn't be an end in itself, it should not jump out of the page at you, and the lead up to it should be more important. Also, the death should be more important than the gunshot, the action of the person falling over, and how and where they fall, should be more important in the character's and reader's minds than the gunshot. Non-gratuitous violence should be jarring and disturbing, and if it isn't, then it's either gratuitous or it's not violence.
Sometimes I feel uncomfortable because of violence. That seems obvious, but let me explain. I am a man, or at least I have all the necessary parts to make one. And violence is supposed to be the realm of man. Our muscles are designed to throw punches and spears, our teeth are supposed to tear meat off the bone and drink the blood of the innocent, our minds are designed to make bigger and better weapons to hit each other with. But the thing is, I'm a 140 lb, vegetarian poet. I'm not a warrior, I'm not a fighter, the thought of holding anything above a paintball gun at something living scares the shit out of me. Sure, I sometimes wrestle with my friends, give them punch-buggies and stuff like that, but violence with any real, competitive or malicious intent is out of my ken. And it sucks because when a guy pushes me at a party or whatever, my ingrained muscle memory is telling me to push him back, to punch him in the face, to stake my claim on his woman and his food, but I can't do that, and I don't want to do that. I don't know, it's just frustrating when your genetic code is telling you to do something you just don't want to do. I guess I'm just a pussy, but all I want to do is go cool places with cool people and write a poem about it afterwards.
Peace out, Planet Earth.