“Hey, Eric. You don’t share your feelings that often. Why is that?”

Why is that? Because in my chest, where my heart is supposed to be, there is a small red box, and inside that small red box is a putrid yellow hair monster that will swallow you in a single gulp, catching your skin along its teeth as it pulls you further inside it with its over-sized grey tongue.

Is that what you want?

I am beyond furious with the news of the Orlando massacre. I want to scream, loudly, my voice bellowing, a sonic wave spreading around me forcing everyone in its path to bleed:

“I DON’T WANT YOUR FUCKING GUNS”

Your shotguns, your handguns, your antique guns, etc. Yes; even your AR-15s. I don’t want to take them from you. I don’t want Obama to take them from you. I don’t want you to lose your precious rights because our precious rights are precious to us and they are “Freedom” and they are “Liberty” and they are “Red, White, and Blue and Bald All Over” and no one wins if I or anyone else oppresses you. I don’t want your fucking guns.

But you’re goddamned right I want the sale of high-powered, high-ammunition PEOPLE KILLERS reined the fuck in! Yes, I said “people-killers”, because if you need to shoot 800 rounds a minute with a 100-round clip to hunt geese, you don’t fucking deserve to eat. Now, do I know that guns don’t kill people, but rather it’s people that kill people? Yes; I do. I’m not a fucking idiot. Do you know what else kills people, with the help of people? Capes. Tools designed for right-handed people in the hands of Southpaws. In 2013, a man in Belarus was killed while man-handling a beaver into a selfie, and it bit him in the leg, catching a major artery, and he bled out. Did we blame the beaver? You’re goddamned right we did! And I can guaran-fucking-tee you that some asshole heard that story and considered the legal and fiscal ramifications of weaponizing beavers.

A gun at rest does not kill a person, unless perhaps dropped from a great distance, and let’s be honest: you’d have to be trying pretty fucking hard for that to be effective. You know what else wouldn’t kill a person at rest. ANYTHING! Except perhaps a virus. But for the sake of conversation I’ll choose something, so you can have a tangible example and we can move on with this discourse. Something purely innocent, but can be used by an angry, disillusioned, and/or tortured soul to cause death and terror in the hearts of Americans. Let’s go with a baby blanket.

So there’s an AR-15 and a baby blanket sitting side-by-side on the floor. What would you like your child to crawl towards and begin to manipulate in their tiny, underdeveloped, lack-of-self-preservation-guided hands? Take all the time you need.

The baby blanket? Cool. Now take the baby blanket from the baby and give it to an angry, disillusioned, and/or tortured soul. Sit the tortured soul down and ask it questions. Who does it hate? Why does it hate them? What would it do on any given day if presented with many examples of this hated specimen? Bombarded by, even so? After you’ve tallied the results, get to Google and find that angry, disillusioned, and/or tortured soul some place to cull the herd of hated, and send him there.

With a baby blanket.

Chances are, he’ll be able to choke at least one person to death before he’s apprehended or possibly even spotted. But try to sell me on a body count along the lines of

49 Dead, 53 injured????!!!!!?????

I challenge you to tell me the last time that you did ANYTHING that affected 102 people in one night. Anything. Walked into a crowded pub and farted after eating nothing but fish, cheese, and butter all night? Maybe. Maybe 102 people will be subjected to that. But can you imagine ever having killed 49 people in one night? Wounding 53 more?

I had a very violent dream last night. I was in a movie theater, completely alone, watching a black-and-white film. The film stopped on one frame and held it for a long time. It was a a man, finely dressed, standing before a concrete wall. He wore a small smile, and his face was weathered with jagged edges. The screen jumped and I stared at his sparkling eyes and knowing smile, then the film resumed.

Only now I’m in the movie and I’m an assassin. I am in the man’s house, and as he rounds the corner into his bedroom I smash him in the chest with a hammer, killing him. Unbeknownst to me, his four bodyguards spring to life, aiming at me with bows and arrows. Only they’re each upwards of 80 years old, and when they let their arrows fly they do so slowly, lazily, and land on me with no effectiveness whatsoever. So I unsheath my katana and dispatch three of them quickly. The first man gets his leg chopped off, the second is skewered through the stomach, and the third slashed across his body. I sit down on the bed, watching blood drip from my sword to the carpet below, and remember that my wife had asked me to bring her some blood as a souvenir. I find the request odd; obscene, almost, and I’m reflecting on this when the fourth man starts waving his hands frantically and shouting in panicked yelps “John! John! John! Isn’t the cocktail party tonight? We have to go to the cocktail party, John!” I nod, and whisper “yes”, and then in one measured swing I take his head. I find a clean white sock in the man’s bedside drawer and wipe the blood from my blade. I tuck the sock in my pocket for my wife and walk out of the room.

I woke from this dream very disturbed, but as it lingered with me throughout the day, I pondered its timing and meaning. In my head, in my sleep, I killed five people. With a hammer and a sword. But what if I’d had an AR-15? I could have dispatched of ten times as many. Is that something to celebrate?

Anyway, I’ve veered dangerously off-topic. What I meant to say at the start of all this is: This is why I don’t talk about my feelings. Because once I start I don’t know when or if I’ll finish or if any person may be left standing after the deluge. Hence the picture of Dot Warner’s pet. That’s what I think of when people ask “Why don’t you share your feelings?”