Do you ever look at the world and just say to yourself "What the FUCK?!?"

I mean, what IS this place we've collectively created? What is inside some people to make them so insidiously evil?

I get caught up in my own little corner a lot, overanalyzing something stupid that I said or did, like last night. Last night I got all banged up in NYC for the first time in a long time. I got together with people from college I hadn't seen for years and it was like I was back at school, 20 again. Carefree.

Later on I went to Hurricane's 30th birthday party. He moved away to LA about 2 years ago and I've only seen him once since he left. He and I used to have such a great time together and last night, it was like we were 24 all over again. We were drunk and I was spilling my drink all over anyone I was shouting to in conversation and he and I did shots and laughed and eventually, started swinging from the heavy velvet curtains hanging across the doorway to the backroom of the bar. Swinging and laughing our faces off, until two large, black bouncers came over and lifted us both off of the velvet and displaced us in another area of the bar until we swore we'd behave.

Today I was broken, but I went to work and beat myself up over my behavior. I'm 29, I really shouldn't be misbehaving like this. What do people think??

I came home and watched "American History X" and I just thought about this world. Anger and frustration begetting violence that begets violence. And amid this tornado of violence, there is an act of understanding that leads to a new lease on life. And as fast as that happens, in a second, perhaps the longest second of any film frame, violence takes a life and everything is undone by a simple act of misled thinking.

That's what life is, isn't it? These people exist, in the world.

When I was 15, a group of 30 skinheads broke into the house of some upperclassmen I was friends with in high school and dragged them out into the street and beat them within an inch of their lives because these kids were German Lutherens hanging out with a Filipino kid. They beat these guys with numchucks (sp?) and chinese stars. They used boot knives to pretty much stab the shit out of them. One of the brothers suffered a punctured and a collapsed lung from the stabbing and the beating. He was on this machine to breathe for months. That's how he spent the remainder of senior year of high school because he hung out with a Filipino kid and some other people didn't think that was right. They didn't like him betraying his race. WHAT THE FUCK?!?

I forgot all about that until I saw this movie. That shit goes on. It's no Hollywood fiction. I wasn't allowed to go to the mall without my parents after that for a year because my family was so concerned about my exposure to these skinheads who just flooded our town. It was like an epidemic.

And then there's that Aryan freak from a couple of weeks ago. "At least you're white," he said to me when he offered his chair.

What about the other things that tie us all together? How about, at least you're kind? At least you smile? At least you laugh? At least you bought that woman down on her luck a piece of pizza? At least you value human life. At least you've never spilled someone else's blood in anger?

I don't know, man. I just feel sometimes like we are inching forward into nowhere; we're losing the focus of forwarding the cause of humanity by devoting our energy to each of our little concerns. Losing sight of the big picture, that one of coexisting in a harmonious manner.

This violence, where will it bring us? How will it make anything better? It's one thing to eliminate a known evil, but to take that judgement in civilians terms? There are a lot of people out there playing God and that scares the shit out of me. It makes me feel so powerless.

And then I sit here and think who the hell cares about me spilling drinks and swinging on velvet drapes? At least I'm not walking around like a ticking time bomb, filled with hate and a lust for false justice.

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