It’s much easier for me to conceive of this behavior occurring in kids, as Tank Girl describes, but to think of it happening among 40+ adults strikes me as being just crazy. Young people, teens/late teens, have such a drive for identity and have so much angst typically because of this process of the emerging self that it expresses itself violently kind of a lot.

In adults, though, I’m afraid I would have to chock it up to pure human fuckery. If you’re 40 and acting in a way that could only be justified if you’re an ignorant child, that’s nothing but shameful. I find it absolutely shocking that it’s actually happened that way.

The Chelsea Grin I’ve heard about – that actually comes up in the movie. I wonder how many cases of that have actually happened and if the one in the movie was inspired by the one described here.

It’s pretty astonishing stuff. This kind of personal violence is basically unheard of here. Our violence consists typically – the violence that is reported to the police or in the media, say – is generally impersonal, a result of drive-by shootings, say. Almost always with guns. When people fight here, fights are brief and seem to be over before anyone gets hurt to this extent, though occasionally things like curbies* are heard of, but they’re generally regarded as being so rare and so shocking that they almost enter the realm of urban legend.

*forcing a fallen combatant to open his mouth over a curb, top jaw/top curb, lower jaw/vertical part of the curb. A kick the back of the head…you can imagine the rest.

Just to give an idea how rare this is, I saw it happen once in a movie and I have seen a lot of movies, and heard about it happening once here in Reno about 13 years ago, but the occurrence is unverified.