If you bleed on my carpet, I'll shoot you again.

I stepped on his face by accident the first time, with considerably more force and vigour the second. He had fallen backwards, his teeth spiralling upwards from his mouth, followed by a delicate tendril of blood, the kind you usually see in comic books. Having been separated from his senses by a forceful application of knuckle to cranium, I saw my opportunity, and took advantage of the window it afforded me, small as it was. I remember being conscious of the eyes of the people around me being trained solely on me. The combination of confusion and visceral horror offset the pleading in their eyes for something to be done about the situation. I felt the dull thud of his head as it hit the ground near my foot, and I heard the small patter of blood droplets as they hit my shoes. Reflexively I lifted my foot in annoyance, and it came back to rest on the side of his head. I lifted it again and brought all the force I could muster in my heel to bear on his cheekbone. There was a crack, and a small resistance that gave way to a malleability that should not be present in the human skull. I was revolted at the damage I had inflicted. He gurgled and spat blood and saliva in equal proportion. The crowd dissapated in horror, and a lack of willingness to be associated with this kind of behaviour, and a young woman stood up, brushed the glass from her hair and the blood from her face. She walked towards me, and the now unconscious man who had glassed her. She spat on him and slapped me with considerable force. 'The saddest thing is you probably think you were helping...' she said.

Lesser forms of filth.

I met Mick as he lent on my bar on a Friday night. Congenial for the most part, he dripped bravado, and purported by action a strength of self so intent and focussed it was hard to interpret as anything but contrived, if not extremely well rehearsed. In a room full of art, populated by those who occasionally allow their creativity to become palpable, he sipped on cheap red wine, and sang at people as he stirred his claret with what appeared to be his not inexpensive spectacles. The room was full of character and characters alike, but none sought to be recognised quite so much, and for a small amount of time, this was an endearing trait. Amid the flurry of beverage facilitation, it was always tempting to seek this one among the crowd and see what poorly executed frivolity he was attempting to indulge in. At one point he placed his head in a bin and remained static for almost ten minutes. I was most impressed at the indifference displayed by passersby. It came not from a sense of judgement, but seemed to strike people as resoundingly normal behaviour. He was a sad man in a happy mans shell, and the effort was not lost on me. I lost track of Mick without noticing as the night progressed, and I was perfectly content meeting people and having wordless discussions in a discourse of smiles that only happen over a sufficiently loud bar. As my fingers pruned and thawed on account of their numerous trips to the bottom of ice bins in search of adequately frigid beer, I heard a reference to nudity. Not shocking or uncommon given the delicate filth of the poetry that had been plastered to walls on that given night, but the quiver in the voice lent credibility to the fact that this was nudity, recently witnessed with the eyes of the speaker, and was one part curious to nine parts unpleasant. As my eyes scanned the crowd, they came to rest, for better or worse on Mick. He was in the go-go cage windmilling his penis with abandon and pride. Not my proudest thought, but I recall thinking that he looked like a hobbit that had been sold into sexual slavery, and was quite pleased about the fact. Five foot four inches of portly belly and manicured beard coupled with the depressive exhibitionism of someone who was pleading to be noticed, garnished with a public display of phallic mediocrity. He flailed and thrusted, stumbling out of the cage eventually, only to be greeted with a suggestive and authoritative tap to his scrotum by my broom handle. I suggested he perhaps consider clothing himself. I mentioned, and immediately regretted, using the term decorum as it made me feel prudish given my company, but I dismissed the thought, and watched this amorphous wee blob of misery and exuberance plod his way the length of the building. He was clearly beyond the point of self accountability and reason, a fact that would benefit him later in the evening. As was statutorily required of me, I requested to Mick, at first kindly, that we would call him cab, and the rest of his evening could be more productively spent cultivating what was going to be a well earned hangover. He jovially brushed me off, at which point, I reinforced my point, with escalating severity. I would be lying if I didn’t admit readily I was hoping he was going to disagree. He indulged me, and began to descend into a mess of snorting, hissing, expletives and callow self pity. He was in essence begging to be ostracized for his behaviour, with apathetic references to his self worth, and wholly inappropriate and disingenuous assertions that he would take his life creeping into his slurred rebuttals. Not being able to stomach this from a nude man any further, I decided to find his clothes. In hindsight I’m unsure how to feel about the fact that I was affronted more by his naked body than I was by the notion that he would potentially do away with himself. Having work to do, I found a vaguely concerned acquaintance of Mick's and out-sourced management of this volatile man-child. Having heard the news that Mick was refusing to get into a cab, my patience began to erode rapidly. I conferred half heartedly with the people around me. I know enough of men to realise when someone, be they blessed with a chance at victory or not, wants to fight. The abuse didn't concern me, it was merely symptomatic of the combination of core emotional deficiency and a liberal application of alcohol confined to a human form. It did however cause my hands to shake with the excitement of the potential for combat. I urged Mick to be reasonable and, if at all possible in his state, assess his behaviour. In the face of a man who was begging to be dealt with was also the shadow of a good person who was sad enough to truly believe he was not in control of himself, and this tempered my desire to remedy the scenario physically. When he belly flopped onto a table, I lost any and all patience, and it came to be that Mandy, employing her womanly wiles to great effect, gently took his hand, led him out the door, and as his face slowly de-creased itself, allowing a friendly touch to disarm him, she locked the door behind him. Transmogrification of problems is commonplace, and Mick presented as many obstacles asleep in the gutter as he did in his previously animated state. Glaring evidence of a lack of personal accountability on his part, and our indulgence of it in order to take his money. To my chagrin we had to get him back inside. He did not take kindly to this course of action. To have someone throw a punch at you while you a trying to help them is no big deal in and of itself, and it took a lot of discipline to not send his teeth through the rear of his skull by means of my knuckles, but to see this man, small in stature pawing at me with no hope of inflicting any damage, physically or otherwise, made me quite reflective. The last time I hit a person, he had pissed in my kitchen, dousing my pots and pans in urine. Though in no state to defend himself, I nearly choked him out on the floor, dragged him into my front yard and smacked him in the chops. I was keen to avoid a repeat, and for both our sakes I left that night with a battle unfought, knuckles unclenched, but with a taste for war permeating through me. Intellectually, I am quite pleased, but when I have a quiet moment, unencumbered by the world and its thoughts and expectations of me, I know in my heart that I live for this shit. When presented with these situations, I seek the purity of action, and the swiftness of violence applied with no economy of force, and it has nothing to do with exploiting weakness. It’s the strongest parts I generally seek to destroy.