Years of videos and headlines like this have really started to get grating. Like those “heartwarming” stories about kids paying off each others’ lunch debt in America or whatever.

I don’t want to be “built different”. I want people to stop pointing at me when horrible shit keeps happening to (and around) us. The sax man looks cool, but like do you know how hard it is to get a good gig as a saxophonist here? My guy wants to eat good this week. He’s a professional. You need to have nerves of steel to survive.

My friends from around the world sent me the video over and over, wow you guys are so badass, as if half a city wasn’t razed to the ground by more munitions than an actual battle’s worth mere months ago. Maybe it’s badass to stare a killer in the face. But that shit wears on you.

If you run to your car and drive home when you see this shit in the sky and you’re the target you’re dead anyway. Of course we keep dancing. In moments like these we feel like we’d be better off dead anyway. I see shit in the sky all the time now. I only finally understood I had no faith when I saw drones getting shot out of the sky from the window of a plane, when I understood that for me, if this is it, this is fucking it. What the fuck else can I do in that moment.

I get that you’re saying something positive here, but I just want to literally not have a rapacious snarling serial killer pushing the cold metal of a Glock against my forehead for twenty fucking seconds of my life, I want to be known for who I am and not for the inescapable Russian roulette jigsaw trap I’m stuck in, that has to be reasonable, right? I’d love to hear about some horrible dystopian hell technology called “Dad is Here to See his Loving Kids❤️✨” and not immediately think fuck my life there isn’t a chance in hell I’m not in that database.

Addendum on “that shit wears on you”: seeing unhinged LinkedIn screenshots of rattled genocide fans bragging about working from home in the bunkers under their houses. Nothing says peace lovers like living in war infrastructure. My bunker is a bottle of gin and an eclectic mix of old Arabic songs and YouTube videos of two goofy South Australian men jerry rigging an old Fiat back to life. Fuck you.

On the topic of something you explicitly mentioned here. There’s some unpleasant but critical subtext about people dancing “two blocks away” from a man made Hell on earth. Some people believe that they are from the “good” ethnoreligious community and that they won’t get bombed, and that their “forbidden lovers” on the other side of the border are cleaning out the rabble to some extent. The shit I’ve heard people say... I lost friends this past year, and these friends I’ve lost are alive and well. Let’s put it like that.