We all want a little excitement during our workday. Fuck, it’s why so many people take advantage of the alcohol at Mexicue–it’s not tasteless drinking if you’re in a “restaurant.” But what office workers and the tourists that envelop them in Times Square don’t want is the possibility of being mowed down by an unhinged 26-year-old whose drug habit has more sinister than fun-loving results. It would almost make more sense for such a decision to be driven by terrorist motives than those of a more “Hey I’m on PCP and masturbating in my van in the Lincoln Tunnel” reason.
But no, it was just sheer rage and depression turned to madness, unleashed on twenty-three unsuspecting victims for the sake of loosening the ugliness inside of himself so that chunks of it could ricochet off others. This isn’t peep shows with STD-ridden strippers, or bootleg porn videos being sold out in the open. This is the kind of “fortitude” that makes people like Willa Ford pursue music. It’s gall at its worst, and, if this is what modern folk interpret to be grit, then, well, one supposes it’s best to just keep quiet by shoving our Pret-a-Manger down our throats, accepting sanitization and not wishing for a bygone era that can only be dredged up in the most horrifying ways, like that Black Mirror episode where the woman decides she wants her dead husband back via the algorithms of all the things he’s ever said on social media.