Toby's absent-minded shower thoughts arrive for your edification.
By Toby McCasker on April 23, 2014 at 7:39 pm
I hate guns. Hate them. I often sit around thinking about how America has 99 problems and the gun is a big one. They know it, too. Obama wants to take those guns away, just ask the internet. The people cling to their grammatically unsound Constitution and cry, "How will we protect our homes tho Bamms?" It's hard not to sit there and go, "Fair call. If there's a home intruder, all bets are off – but why does it need to be a lethal killing stick? Why not replace everyone's guns with phasers set to 'stun'?" They're bad, don't like 'em. I play a lot of shooters though, and I love shooters. I love shooting all them things. Uh?
I was wonder about how that makes any sense in the shower just before. Picture my suggestively lathered moonlit complexion and the pensive look on my face. I'm absently applying a loofah to my nether regions, too. Right, so. Thought process: Guns suck. They kill folk and seem entirely unnecessary in a society that has patented leopard print tasering weapons that fit in a handbag.
And yet as I scrubbed the ingrown hairs from my legs and tended to a heinous pimple on my shoulder, I remembered a particularly fond moment in some FPS or other where I killed a guy in the face. I laughed churlishly and said hello to my neighbour through the semi-open bathroom window. That dude, he's always walking by when I shower.
I realised it goes like this: For many people – men especially – guns represent absolute power and dominance, a need sometimes made intrinsic if that man is in any way consistently disempowered in his daily. When I play online, I often get a sense of this when someone is frothing excessively over the fact they just killed someone. Like, really frothing, as if that person ran over their cat or something. They are usually young and weedy-sounding, or older and prone to a broken voice. This vibe I can understand, if not relate to. That primal human need to kill shit is a powerful one that no amount of civilising can ever truly tame. Not in everyone.
In me, yes. I don't want to kill anyone. Or anything. I get upset when I accidentally step on a snail. The allure of guns for me is not one rooted in reality (shot a pistol thing once, did not have fun), but in the context of gaming, it's an extension of catharsis. The journey between bullet to other person is what appeals, not the act of besting someone via fatality. I don't care about that. It's the amazing nuances that can lead to spectacular destruction – and, yeah, some death – that I want to be a part of. Nobody even has to die, and this feeling of release applies even when I'm the one who kicks the bucket.
It is just to have flown and ejected and landed and shot and been shot at, mayhap scattered all my grenades into the air like unfriendly confetti before leaping from the fray and into uncertainty. I had taken some bullets, and my health was low. It was not the bullets that killed me, but the fall I made for myself.
Put the internet to work for you.
