Sister Rosetta Tharpe licks her wounds and oils her cords, a casual observation to start things off, to jump-start the mind with the cables that undoubtedly fuelled Ms. Tharpe's canon, or cannon if that works in context. Just something, anything, to jolt the good old stream-of-consciousness into action, for my mind to finally get the guts to 'inspect' that "empty" rathole where the guns of the 'enemy' are waiting in vain, my mind thinking (by itself) that if I wait long enough I can starve them out. But my mental adversaries are cunning and adept, able to go without food for days, weeks, months, eating moths, worms, rats, and slitting the snakes open to drain their juices. The snakes, the snakes, the snakes, my ultimate fear; the snake around my neck. Hung on the scaffold, standing ovation. Maybe I can burn them out..?

There we go, I writhed you loose, you ******.

I click a four-count in my silent mind, and I crawl in, like the good soldier I am, thinking all the time that I should have read Manual of the Warrior of Light by Paulo Coelho; without a doubt, judging by the title alone, it would have done me good. The last click of the four-count is the cocking of the hammer on my tool, be it a torch or a pistol; proxy war gunslinger, existential riot. Nothing to lose, and nothing to gain, ******* long nights in the hole, nothing to hope for once I escape, but another batch of darkness, and another painted face, asking "Are you okay?" ME answering in my male hangup "Why wouldn't I be?"

Now onto the metafiction cliché:
You can always escape, but you can never hide, like the cheddar cheese villain in just about every movie known. And never were it more true. Contemptuous nature can lie benign in the brain, prostate, or breast for a long time before it becomes malignant; and escape is always an option to prolong the inevitable. But I come from a people of brooders, an own ethnicity in its entirety devoted to judgement and yuppieism. There we go; another red-dot-underline to signify the royal introduction of another previously foreign '-ism.' Standing on the conveyor belt, side by side in a circle **** of prejudicial rhetoric: "Everyone are so unpleasant and gross," comic-book thought-bubbles in every direction, through every head, like malicious rays from the omnipotent sun of groundless hatred.

No sun for the land of the brooders.
No real sun.
But it will still fry your skin.
4th degree burns.

Return of a friend;
Return of a fiend.
Might be both, and it might be neither, but it doesn't matter, as all eyes are fixed on their feet, and the few inches of pavement in front to avoid any collision.