Revolution in the fog
It was wet.
It had been raining for days.
The heat from the sun was unusual, hot and pale.
At first the soaked roads and fields began to steam. Then thick clouds of fog moved in on the slow moving cold fronts. Gathering the moisture and hovering, a gray moist mass dominated the entire region for 24 hours. An entire day in gray blindness.
Something strangely energetic was exhaled from the wet earth along with the first fog. Crackpots called it Chemical Ether but did not mean anything chemical or relating to ether as it is understood in early electromagnetic theory. Orgone Energy it might have been called. Deadly Orgone Energy as some other kooks call it, with a dark relish.
So charged with Static Electricity was the air that even in this moisture long sparks were discharging in the atmosphere. Long sparks arching off everything that moved. Now exhilarating, then agitating, but then came something worse. An over all change of demeanor. A savage aspect with a sort of oversexed glee, but nothing to do with sex. Strange tensions in everyone soon led to all sorts of little arguments. Everyone was bickering and fighting. Some worse than others.
It happened slowly. Gradually. As everyone fought amongst themselves they discharged more or less much of the energy that had accumulated on their nervous system. As countless disputes and irritations, long term misunderstandings and feuds, and all sorts of problems that irk us in life were addressed, as these problems began to come to solutions there was seen one thing to be blamed.
It was a system. Even governments and authoritarians were in on this growing revolution of sentiment. It was time itself. They did not dare call it The Great Alarm for they rarely used clocks. This was a village in the remote past when clocks were things that the Monks had in their monasteries. Bells. It was the tolling of the Bells that finally turned the citizenship into a frenzy. For in the middle of the night after the 12 bells that 12 more bells were sounded.
People emerged from their sleep enraged. Pouring from their houses wearing their bedclothes. Screaming with twisted faces of homicidal fury.
It didn't take long for the mob to realize that well it was a mob and therefore no longer restrained from action by the boundaries of any particular individual, nor of course could it be any longer taken for granted that any particular individual would feel inclined to restrain him or herself from the action that the mob would take, which was to rage aimlessly for days. No discernible purpose to the mayhem that left 73 people dead. 18 of them were cops. 22 of them were children.
One of them was Luther Reedweep.
