This is how it works. I ride my bike down the street looking in apartment windows until I see a TV set. I ride right next to the sidewalk, letting the very hot air move over my arms and chest. When I see a TV set, big blue square through the parted curtains and behind the translucency of the insect screen, I reach behind me and unsling the biathlon rifle from my back.

Fucking sights are bouncing all over because it’s a standing shot - always hard - and my heart rate is way up. I wait for the old ticker to bump the sight picture back up and snap it off. A gratifying “glass rod breaking” 4 pound trigger pull and I watch the TV go dark and listen to the screaming from inside the apartment. One down.

I used to read a lot of E2 and to write a bit there. It’s an older chunk of the Internet, and a younger me loved it. The story I’m linking to is one that stirred up proto-anarchist impulses me in, and is also just a great bit of short fiction. I go back and re-read it every year or two; I strongly recommend that you do likewise. It is still relevant, sadly. I expect that the part about TVs will become irrelevant much earlier than the part about the police forces and the evil idiocy of the authoritarian state.

Both as a writer and as a reader, you are an archaeologist: you are constantly interrogating the past. So I try to make a habit of pointing out things from the past—I had a strong LiveJournal habit of doing that, and if you followed me on LJ in years gone, well, you’ll probably see some of the same pieces popping up again. They have remained sweet, bitter, and enlightening.