Barbelith Underground > Conversation > So what was your most memorable fist fight?

Yeah, I just love that adrenaline rush after the fight. Nothing beats that sensation that spirals up inside you as your reason and higher brain functions continue to try to talk him out of attacking you. The way your chest tightens, your heart races and your peripheral vision closes off in a grey fog, The tiny tremors in your hands, the feeling that something is rising within you, shunting off to one side all that makes you you, more than an animal, more than the primitive. The terror of losing control and of what you are capable of doing to another human being.

You know what’s even better though? It’s all the sensations that flow through you if you don’t get the fight. You know the ones I mean. What could be more fun than walking home shaking uncontrollably, bruising your knuckles on a tree because you fear it’s going to escape you at some point and you’re not alone? Vomiting and flashbacks for the next couple of days even though ‘nothing happened’?

Grow the fuck up, Jack. Fighting isn’t a male rite of passage, it’s not a reasonable response to drunken morons hassling you. It’s released, unchecked violence. It’s revelling in the fact that we still have the capacity to dominate another, physically. It’s abandoning all that we have slowly evolved into for the fleeting pleasure of seeing fear in an enemy’s eyes. I guess you don’t still hold guilt for what you did over twenty years ago, I’m assuming you’ve never come to your senses in the middle of a local park terrified of what you can’t remember doing. I hope you’ve never felt an overwhelming sense of relief and self-loathing when you realise that the blood flowing down your arm is yours and not anyone else’s even though you don’t know why it’s there.

It’s because of people like you that I don’t go to nightclubs. It’s because of people like you that I know what it feels like to have a chair smashed over me because someone wasn’t getting enough of a buzz out of drinking and dancing. This isn’t ‘Highlander’, someone is search of a fight will pick the most likely target, but they don’t have a sixth sense as to who’s ‘up for it’. Violence is not served solely on the deserving or willing. No-one picks a fight hoping to lose. Think I’m over-reacting? Then stop endorsing casual violence because the effects are never casual, short-ranging or temporary. There is no good fight, there is no just war. There is only rage, pain, blood and guilt.