Trevor Part Two

During Trevor’s time in the Marine Corps, he never really saw combat. Never killed anyone. But he had seen people die. Thirty or so Afghan civilians in an airstrike based on false intel (the kind that “enhanced interrogation” provides). And six marines, two of whom he considered to be friends, when their truck ran over an IED. Mostly, Trevor had spent his time in Kabul smoking cigarettes and complaining about the heat. What do marines say about the Marine Corps? Eat the apple, fuck the core.

He left the military with a sickness and disillusionment which never went away. His optimism was erased, along with patriotism and Christianity and whatever other feel-good bullshit American children get taught to believe. Trevor considered America to be an evil place populated by evil people.

When he got back to the states, he found himself disgusted with the people he had known, and also the people he met. His family was so proud of their little soldier and Trevor hated them for it. Dallas was still a dump. Trevor still had no close friends, no romantic connections. Nothing to be proud of except for his willingness to be sent halfway across the world to subjugate an impoverished nation.

Having been the strait-laced type in high school, he decided that after Afghanistan he would try things that he was too scared to do before. He discovered that he loved drugs. He loved LSD and MDMA and DMT and most of all, cocaine. And living in his mother’s basement without paying rent meant that 100% of the money he made working thirty hours a week at McDonalds could go to cocaine.

Cocaine gave him the energy to stay up all night surfing the internet. He would trip by himself, watch porn, jerk off, drink monster energy, sniff a line every ninety minutes, and take the occasional bong rip. He found an easily reproducible state of ecstasy in, high as hell, reading Wikipedia articles and reddit posts. He could read much faster on cocaine and the reading somehow became pleasurable instead of tedious, no matter the subject.

Did you know that the founding of Liberia was promoted in a joint effort by the Nation of Islam and Ku Klux Klan? They both thought that sending former slaves back to Africa was a good idea. And worked together to that end, although the vast majority of resettled “Liberians” died of starvation and disease on a continent which was foreign to all but their great-great grandparents.

And that Iceland was still completely uninhabited by humans as late as the eighth century CE?

And that, according to the WHO, over 50% of humans on Earth are infected with HSV-1?

(Trevor eventually graduated from powdered cocaine to a full-blown freebase crystal meth addiction).

And that during the Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao ordered sparrows to be hunted nearly to extinction? He deputized millions of civilians to bang pots and pans near trees so that sparrows couldn’t rest and died of exhaustion. This was because sparrows were suspected of eating crops — but the sparrows also ate insects and without them, the locust population ballooned to biblical proportions, decimating crop yields. After tens of millions of Chinese citizens starved to death in the Great Famine, the government had to import hundreds of thousands of sparrows from the Soviet Union to restore balance.

And that the rate of death by drug overdose among Americans increased by a factor of fourteen between 2012 and 2019?

And that 200,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest are burned or chopped down every single day?

And that by 2050, areas of coastal Bangladesh where tens of millions of people live will be underwater?

That hurricanes are getting worse every year. That four billion plastic microfibers litter each square kilometer of the deep sea. That pollution from fossil fuel emissions kills nine million people a year. That our geologic era, the Anthropocene, is marked by one of the greatest mass extinctions since the loss of the dinosaurs. That the sum of pain and suffering experienced by conscious mammals in the global meat and dairy industry is staggeringly and unimaginably large. That greedy people whose fortunes depend on oil wealth exploit Citizens United to buy congress like a commodity, and manipulate American policy so that wars are fought to secure foreign oil reserves? That capitalist greed will within the next two centuries lead to the extinction of the human race via anthropogenic climate change.

The anger Trevor felt when learning about The Evil System of Capitalist Modernity was almost as intoxicating as the speed. He had swallowed the red pill and there was no going back.

When he looked in the mirror he really and truly hated himself. He hated himself for having been stupid enough to believe in the good of the system. Risking his life for it. And he hated himself for playing right into the empty consumerism which made it all go round. Working at fucking McDonalds. Getting high so that he didn’t have to feel how dark his thoughts had become. Eating cheeseburgers and living in complacency.

And so, as great minds do in the face of overwhelming unpleasantness, Trevor began scheming. He could kill himself and opt out, like a coward. Or he could do something which really made a difference.

He could kill an oil executive.

He could kill an oil executive.