Your kindly Uncle William loathes all things worldly except PJ Harvey, coffee, big-bore pistols, his girlfriend (who is at Oxford for the next year), and his housemates; he also suffers from crippling seasonal depression and incurable headaches. No one is more poorly equipped to handle the holiday season. If you see Uncle William and he is smiling and has his hands in his pockets, run for it. I will kill you with all the rest.
Perhaps not you, actually. Maybe you too smell only corruption and decay on the cold winds of Autumn, sickly like commercial bathroom disinfectant. Maybe you too shudder with sickness at the thought of the gray months ahead. And you will come to the Mall with me.
We will start before Halloween, pulling carjacks outside of Nordie’s to build a war chest. With our stolen plastic we will purchase cheap autopistols and shotguns all over rural Virginia and stockpile ammo. The authorities will trace these transactions and presume we are mere baseheads on a rampage, but by the end of November there will be cops and cops and cops at the Mall, hot and itchy, bored with shepherding jumpy consumers to their cars.
December we will spend crimping pipe bombs and wiring mercury switches. We will convert oppressed Tech-9’s to full-automatic, we will circumcise shotguns. We will study builder’s plans, foot-traffic patterns, cop placement and habits. We will get double espressos at Nordie’s.
In the late afternoon on December the twenty-fourth, the heaviest shopping day of the season, we will come to the mall already burdened with packages, many of which we will deposit in trash containers near major entrance/exits, central open areas, and major structural supports. When we have all taken to high ground and unwrapped our presents, the Muzak will inexplicably switch from belligerently treacly seasonal anthems to Wagner’s Die Walkure. Or, perhaps, the long remix of Jesus Built My Hotrod. There is still time to decide.
