Somewhere in my genetic pool, the fight or flight gene must have drowned. It's just not there. Whenever my back's up against the wall, I'm gonna hit you. Cut me off on the highway and you better watch your fenders. It's nothing personal. I can't help it. I suppose it's just my disposition. I'm disposed to do it. If you look at my family line, you can probably see it coming, like a Mack truck. I am the culmination, the logical conclusion. Don't piss me off.
Long Night's Done
Camus and Kafka on a strange journey with Joseph Conrad, as told by Dr. Watson.
It was the morning I feared. Only the morning. The cold, growing morning. Each twig that scratched the air, every dried up leaf that skittered across my view, collecting in drifts. It wasn't so much the creaking sound of the trees, or the cutting rustle of dried leaf against dried leaf that unnerved me; nor was it the strange, inescapable actions they represented. It was more than that. It was that they were there. They were there and would continue to be there. No matter what had or would happen, they would be there, untouched, unchanging, scratching, swirling, drifting. The fact that it was indeed morning, dawn of a new day, lessened nothing. It seemed to make the events of last night more real, imagination written indelibly; consequences nothing to the reality. Perhaps it was the lifting light on my sleepless eyes that distanced my recollections from their deeds. But I could not dismiss them as dream, rationalize them as fancy, gone and best forgotten. They crept up on me like the dew lifting skyward to an ultimate truth. And weighed down on me as if I were the one spot in the universe where everything came together. I'd never known more darkness, or a greater sense of fear. It wasn't a fear of what was to come. No, nothing could match the events leading to that solitary morning. It was the fear of persistence, of what had already happened. What had undeniably and irrevocably happened during the dark hours of that wholly surreal night. What I had become standing in complete contrast to the reality and freshness of the morning that surrounded me.
I sat in the middle of the wood, summer long gone with Winter but a month away. The light that