This is pretty cringe to be honest, and I'm not really sure why I'm sharing it, except to shine a wan light on the madness and mild insanity that prevailed in the heyday of the Alt-Right.
Back in the day, I was considered so edgy, out of the box, and generally übercool that I attained, for a time at least, a semi-mythic status. This got me mentioned in a couple of song lyrics, while mysterious women frequently contacted me out of the ether. But, even weirder than any of that, one odd guy, an Aussie writer of some kind (who will remain anonymous), thought that me and my then close associate Andy Nowicki would be suitable templates for a couple of hardboiled characters in a piece of apocalyptic fiction, tentatively called "Tribes" (see illustration above). There was even going to be a novel published, to which I laughingly agreed. This was 2014.
But all I ever got was this one chapter (included below). It is complete crap in my view, and, although I often interacted with this dude on Facebook, he totally failed to create a version of me that anyone who knew me, especially me, would recognize.
A couple quotes were selected to preface the story, although they seem somewhat extraneous to me.
________________
"We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place."
Joseph de Maistre
"Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior."
"Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior."
Friedrich Nietzsche
THE SEEKERS
NEW YORK CITY
Ten minutes off a long-haul flight from Japan, Colin Liddell wasn't happy.
Not that he could, offhand, recall the last time he'd actually been happy. No... that wasn't entirely true. He could vaguely recollect feeling something vaguely resembling happiness the night he'd been asked to sit on the BBC panel of talking heads during the announcement of the results of the Scottish referendum on independence. He'd been quite happy that night, or so it seemed from the footage he'd watched after the fact. Then, as the results had tumbled in, and the frequency of his "bathroom breaks" to slurp single-malt from a hip flask increased, he'd rapidly made the shift from amiable banter to poisonous invective.
A lack of journalistic impartiality, is how his producer had gently phrased it, as he gave Colin the first of what was to be many punishment details, as far from the British mainland as possible. He'd gotten off lightly, he knew. In the course of a single, slurred diatribe, the last he was able to make before security men forcibly removed him from the studio, he had managed to offend the English, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Homosexuals, Women and Jehovah's Witnesses.
'You're lucky to still have a feckin' job,' is what his mother had said.
Scratching at the tangled mat of blonde hair on his head as he stared at the terminal map, he idly wondered what the cameraman he'd been paired up with would be like. Would he be angrier than Osman the Turk, who had spent their entire two weeks shooting in Istanbul railing against his wife? Or perhaps he'd have a distracting facial tic like Andre from the Ukraine. Colin's personal favourite so far was Kiko, the pre-op transsexual and Yukio Mishima devotee who'd drunk him under the table in Kyoto and later got into a punch-up with the police for dancing on said table in a skirt that left nothing to the imagination.
As it turned out, Andy Nowicki found him first, the tall, pleasant-faced midwesterner sticking out a hand which the Scotsman, hung-over, stared out for several seconds before warily accepting.
'How was your flight?' Andy asked as he helpfully picked up one of Colin's bags.
'Where's the bar?' Colin replied, turning back to the map.
They spent the next hour in a booth in the courtesy lounge overlooking the busy runways and the soaring buildings of Manhattan beyond. Over drinks (Scotch for Colin, soda water for Andy) they'd discovered that they were both bachelors, had sharp senses of humour, a healthy cynicism for their business and a conviction that their skills were underappreciated by their employer.
'So you were in the shit,' Colin said in response to learning that Andy had spent more than a decade following the welter of conflicts which had broken out since 9/11 happened just a short distance from where they now sat.
'Deeply,' Andy nodded. 'I was a freelancer. I covered the invasion of Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban prison breakout at Qala-e-Janghi, the Madrid Bombings and even managed to get the scoop on the Boston Marathon bombing.'
'How'd you manage that?'
'I was running in it. A piece of shrapnel went past my head. So I got out my phone and started filming.
'So why are you covering crappy domestic stories for the BBC?'
'Gambling debts,' Andy answered honestly with a shrug. 'I like the ponies and my accountant likes the fatter paychecks that the BBC pays.'
Colin was about to make a witty, self-deprecating remark when the lights in the lounge suddenly went out. Turning for a second, he saw what looked like a blindingly-white beam of light either coming up from or going down to the centre of Manhattan. There was no sound, no indication of trouble, and if anything, the light looked somewhat... beautiful.
That was when the first fully-fuelled commercial airliner slammed nose-first into the tarmac about 800 meters away. The shockwave of the impact rattled the plexiglass windows and shocked the stunned customers out of their alcohol and fear-induced stupor.
'Got your camera?' Colin asked as he made sure to finish his scotch.
'Yeah,' Andy said as he pulled it from its case. 'Wait... no, something's wrong.' He pushed some buttons, peered through the lens and shook his head in frustration. He changed the battery, and grunted when still he got no response. 'It's dead.'
The second and third planes to hit the ground were five and seven hundred meters away respectively. The sounds of the erupting fireballs were swiftly drowned out by the screams of the commuters who were busily panicking. Neither Colin nor Andy panicked, but it did occur to them that at any moment a plane might fall out of the sky directly on top of the terminal.
'Let's get outside,' Andy suggested.
'Good idea,' Colin replied as he stole a bottle from behind the now-deserted bar. 'After you.' Together the two men ran with the tail end of the terrified mob as it wound its way toward the exits. They emerged into the sunlight on LaGuardia Road just in time to hear and see a giant Boeing glide no more than fifty meters above their heads. The pilot was clearly valiantly attempting to bring the plane into line with one of the runways, but he was too low and the plane first grazed, then impacted with the main terminal building. The sound of the explosion, not muffled by layers of plexiglass and less than two hundred meters away caused both men to clap hands over their ears.
'What the hell is this?' Andy shouted the question over the tumult.
'I've no idea,' Colin said as he craned his neck upward, attempting to spot any further planes that might be on their way down to the ground. Distant echoes of additional explosions reached them now and then, great plumes of black smoke began to rise over Manhattan, testifying to additional impacts. A man, running without looking, suddenly slammed bodily into Colin. a short distance away, a policeman with a hand clamped over a bloody cut on top of his forehead and the other clutching a gun which he seemed to be vainly attempting to fire at the fleeing man, staggered toward them. Colin punched the stranger once solidly across the jaw, sending him spiralling to the ground with the handbag which he'd managed to grab from an elderly woman in the confusion.
'Thanks,' the cop spluttered as he drew near, putting his gun away and cuffing the unconscious stranger. 'This bastard glassed me when I tried to stop him.'
'Was your gun jammed?' Andy asked, still scanning the sky for inbound planes-turned-missiles.
'No,' the cop said as, his prisoner secure, he pulled the gun out and examined it. 'So far as I can tell there's nothing wrong it with. But it won't work and neither will my radio.'
'Use my phone,' Colin suggested, handing him his Samsung.
'It's dead,' the cop replied after a moment.
'It can't be,' Colin answered, taking it back from him and pushing some buttons. Stubbornly, the phone refused to respond.
'Mine's down too,' Andy said. 'It's like the battery's dead, but I charged it just this morning, so that's impossible.'
'This must be some kind of solar flare thing,' the cop suggested as he revived his prisoner and pulled him shakily to his feet.
'A solar flare that affects guns?' Colin shook his head.
'I gotta get this guy to the precinct,' the cop said, clearly not having heard Colin. 'Thanks for the help guys.'
'Yeah, seeya,' Andy replied before turning back to Colin. 'Well, I think that's the last of the planes. If we can snag a taxi or a bus, I've got relatives in Brooklyn who can give us something to eat.'
Any hopes of snagging anything with a functional combustion engine faded the instant they turned their attention from the skies to the road. Nothing was moving, nothing was even running. All cars, vans, trucks, buses and motorbikes were non-functional. Most people were still vainly peering beneath the hood at their vehicle's dormant engine, or sitting in the driver's seat, turning the key, getting no response and screaming in rage or fear. A smaller number had already given up. Just ten minutes into whatever this was, and already there was a vast fleet of abandoned vehicles lining the roads leading into and out of the airport.
'This is biblical,' Andy breathed.
'I'm a pagan,' Colin replied grouchily. 'Let's just fucking walk to Brooklyn.'
Not that he could, offhand, recall the last time he'd actually been happy. No... that wasn't entirely true. He could vaguely recollect feeling something vaguely resembling happiness the night he'd been asked to sit on the BBC panel of talking heads during the announcement of the results of the Scottish referendum on independence. He'd been quite happy that night, or so it seemed from the footage he'd watched after the fact. Then, as the results had tumbled in, and the frequency of his "bathroom breaks" to slurp single-malt from a hip flask increased, he'd rapidly made the shift from amiable banter to poisonous invective.
A lack of journalistic impartiality, is how his producer had gently phrased it, as he gave Colin the first of what was to be many punishment details, as far from the British mainland as possible. He'd gotten off lightly, he knew. In the course of a single, slurred diatribe, the last he was able to make before security men forcibly removed him from the studio, he had managed to offend the English, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Homosexuals, Women and Jehovah's Witnesses.
'You're lucky to still have a feckin' job,' is what his mother had said.
Scratching at the tangled mat of blonde hair on his head as he stared at the terminal map, he idly wondered what the cameraman he'd been paired up with would be like. Would he be angrier than Osman the Turk, who had spent their entire two weeks shooting in Istanbul railing against his wife? Or perhaps he'd have a distracting facial tic like Andre from the Ukraine. Colin's personal favourite so far was Kiko, the pre-op transsexual and Yukio Mishima devotee who'd drunk him under the table in Kyoto and later got into a punch-up with the police for dancing on said table in a skirt that left nothing to the imagination.
As it turned out, Andy Nowicki found him first, the tall, pleasant-faced midwesterner sticking out a hand which the Scotsman, hung-over, stared out for several seconds before warily accepting.
'How was your flight?' Andy asked as he helpfully picked up one of Colin's bags.
'Where's the bar?' Colin replied, turning back to the map.
They spent the next hour in a booth in the courtesy lounge overlooking the busy runways and the soaring buildings of Manhattan beyond. Over drinks (Scotch for Colin, soda water for Andy) they'd discovered that they were both bachelors, had sharp senses of humour, a healthy cynicism for their business and a conviction that their skills were underappreciated by their employer.
'So you were in the shit,' Colin said in response to learning that Andy had spent more than a decade following the welter of conflicts which had broken out since 9/11 happened just a short distance from where they now sat.
'Deeply,' Andy nodded. 'I was a freelancer. I covered the invasion of Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban prison breakout at Qala-e-Janghi, the Madrid Bombings and even managed to get the scoop on the Boston Marathon bombing.'
'How'd you manage that?'
'I was running in it. A piece of shrapnel went past my head. So I got out my phone and started filming.
'So why are you covering crappy domestic stories for the BBC?'
'Gambling debts,' Andy answered honestly with a shrug. 'I like the ponies and my accountant likes the fatter paychecks that the BBC pays.'
Colin was about to make a witty, self-deprecating remark when the lights in the lounge suddenly went out. Turning for a second, he saw what looked like a blindingly-white beam of light either coming up from or going down to the centre of Manhattan. There was no sound, no indication of trouble, and if anything, the light looked somewhat... beautiful.
That was when the first fully-fuelled commercial airliner slammed nose-first into the tarmac about 800 meters away. The shockwave of the impact rattled the plexiglass windows and shocked the stunned customers out of their alcohol and fear-induced stupor.
'Got your camera?' Colin asked as he made sure to finish his scotch.
'Yeah,' Andy said as he pulled it from its case. 'Wait... no, something's wrong.' He pushed some buttons, peered through the lens and shook his head in frustration. He changed the battery, and grunted when still he got no response. 'It's dead.'
The second and third planes to hit the ground were five and seven hundred meters away respectively. The sounds of the erupting fireballs were swiftly drowned out by the screams of the commuters who were busily panicking. Neither Colin nor Andy panicked, but it did occur to them that at any moment a plane might fall out of the sky directly on top of the terminal.
'Let's get outside,' Andy suggested.
'Good idea,' Colin replied as he stole a bottle from behind the now-deserted bar. 'After you.' Together the two men ran with the tail end of the terrified mob as it wound its way toward the exits. They emerged into the sunlight on LaGuardia Road just in time to hear and see a giant Boeing glide no more than fifty meters above their heads. The pilot was clearly valiantly attempting to bring the plane into line with one of the runways, but he was too low and the plane first grazed, then impacted with the main terminal building. The sound of the explosion, not muffled by layers of plexiglass and less than two hundred meters away caused both men to clap hands over their ears.
'What the hell is this?' Andy shouted the question over the tumult.
'I've no idea,' Colin said as he craned his neck upward, attempting to spot any further planes that might be on their way down to the ground. Distant echoes of additional explosions reached them now and then, great plumes of black smoke began to rise over Manhattan, testifying to additional impacts. A man, running without looking, suddenly slammed bodily into Colin. a short distance away, a policeman with a hand clamped over a bloody cut on top of his forehead and the other clutching a gun which he seemed to be vainly attempting to fire at the fleeing man, staggered toward them. Colin punched the stranger once solidly across the jaw, sending him spiralling to the ground with the handbag which he'd managed to grab from an elderly woman in the confusion.
'Thanks,' the cop spluttered as he drew near, putting his gun away and cuffing the unconscious stranger. 'This bastard glassed me when I tried to stop him.'
'Was your gun jammed?' Andy asked, still scanning the sky for inbound planes-turned-missiles.
'No,' the cop said as, his prisoner secure, he pulled the gun out and examined it. 'So far as I can tell there's nothing wrong it with. But it won't work and neither will my radio.'
'Use my phone,' Colin suggested, handing him his Samsung.
'It's dead,' the cop replied after a moment.
'It can't be,' Colin answered, taking it back from him and pushing some buttons. Stubbornly, the phone refused to respond.
'Mine's down too,' Andy said. 'It's like the battery's dead, but I charged it just this morning, so that's impossible.'
'This must be some kind of solar flare thing,' the cop suggested as he revived his prisoner and pulled him shakily to his feet.
'A solar flare that affects guns?' Colin shook his head.
'I gotta get this guy to the precinct,' the cop said, clearly not having heard Colin. 'Thanks for the help guys.'
'Yeah, seeya,' Andy replied before turning back to Colin. 'Well, I think that's the last of the planes. If we can snag a taxi or a bus, I've got relatives in Brooklyn who can give us something to eat.'
Any hopes of snagging anything with a functional combustion engine faded the instant they turned their attention from the skies to the road. Nothing was moving, nothing was even running. All cars, vans, trucks, buses and motorbikes were non-functional. Most people were still vainly peering beneath the hood at their vehicle's dormant engine, or sitting in the driver's seat, turning the key, getting no response and screaming in rage or fear. A smaller number had already given up. Just ten minutes into whatever this was, and already there was a vast fleet of abandoned vehicles lining the roads leading into and out of the airport.
'This is biblical,' Andy breathed.
'I'm a pagan,' Colin replied grouchily. 'Let's just fucking walk to Brooklyn.'
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