As bad as this is, it is horizontal and not heretical predation. Nothing about this morally goes against the violent hierarchy of the State, but rather mimics it crudely. To be heretical, aggression must challenge the State, a minion of the State or an entity operating under State protection.

In the course of the exposition of my violence studies, I have often referred to predator and prey, or the target of violence being, in a very real sense, food. That is psychological food for the dominance obsessed human, whether it is the 15-year-old wannabe thugs that chased me down the street this past summer, or the 15 year old boy that chased me down the street 42 years ago and beat me up, just so he could feel powerful. Indeed, current violent trends are almost exclusively cases of psychological predation, and mirror the literary trend in vampire fiction, which I believe are part of the same complex.

In a society where a sense of power is denied on every level but the feminine urge to voice a heeded opinion in elections and in viewer participation in reality TV programs, there are many power-starved souls, many Draculas of the mind, who seek to drain others of their sense of autonomy and gather it to their own wan self image. The dozens of black mob attacks that target blacks and whites alike in Baltimore, every week, have, I believe, this common source, the sense that those subject to the State hierarchy are under daily attack by society itself and have the right to strike out.

Note that classes of people throughout history who have been net receivers of tax revenues, have always been more violent than those who paid rather than received taxes.

61-10: night, seconds, first-person defender.

“I was twenty-four, drinking in Mother’s Strip Club in Fort Worth Texas. About one-thirty in the morning I went up to this guy playing pool and asked him where the bathroom was. He put the tip of the cue in the corner pocket, snapped off the heavy end of the stick.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘That’s stupid.’ Then he hit me in the side of the head. I was out. My buddy had left. A girl got me outside and told me that they were going to throw me in a ditch out in the country. I had thrown up and gone into convulsions. She took me home.

“When I woke up my hair was matted with blood and my pillow soaked all the way through—‘squish.’ I felt the side of my head and it was soft, mushy like a sponge. My wife said, ‘We can’t afford to take you to the hospital.’ But I knew I had to go, so I called my mom.

“The doctor said, ‘Were goin’ to get an X-ray. I had the most excruciating headache of my life, and this guy comes running out with the X-ray, ‘Oh my God, did you see the guy with the head injury?’ He had hit me so hard that the skull had fractured in seven places just above the ear. If he had hit me lower the eye would have popped out. It had cracked so good it had drained itself. The doctor said it was pure luck that I was alive, and that being drunk had helped by thinning the blood.

“They put me on a gurney and put me in next to this Mexican dude who’s friend had caught him humping his wife and shot him in the ass with a short twenty-two, and they were trying to extract it. I could see my mom and dad crying. The doctor said that I was the luckiest person he had ever seen. If I hadn’t been busted so good I would have died in my sleep. I spent three or four days in the hospital.

“I never really saw the guy’s face—could tell you he was short, and one of three brothers who were known for being bad news. I looked into things a bit after I recovered. All I remember was a flash of light after he snapped off the tip. It was probably best I never went back. I had the name. Knew where they lived. But I figured their life would catch up to them some day.”

Bradley is well, and in middle-age, working as a long-haul trucker.