Everyone has his/her own Hit List. It may not be manifest/written down/concretized, but it’s there somewhere in the dark spectral cavities of one’s essence. Having a Hit List – in however nascent or amorphous a form – is a measure of one’s sanity: without one, one can/will go quite mad in all the senses of that small word. 

What then is a Hit List? 

Quite simply a plague of names in tabular form, an inventory inscribed in one’s mind somewhere and not generally written down unless one is so determined to seek retribution or is so angst-ridden because of the actions of one of the beings bearing one of the names, that one tries to more subtly suffuse the demon by scrawling it in cipher form. The order of the names may change, as of course will the number: the actual names themselves may/will be withdrawn or added to as Time plays its dirty tricks on our lives. Rest assured, there will always be someone at the top of the Hit List. 

What then are these nomenclatures? 

Quite simply, entities – almost always inevitably human (although some may want to include Time, Fate, Contingency, Bodily Decay and Ill-Luck!) – who have crossed our serene passage through existence in some devious/nasty/ultra-annoying/infiltrating/backstabbing/energy-sapping/  restricting fashion. People – men and women – who have gone out of their way to hurt us. To destroy us, or ours, generally in some devious manner. To betray us. To go behind our backs in some nefarious way. To cheat us. To rob us, not necessarily of worldly possessions, but, more, our spirituality. To parasite our every nuance. To spoil our lives nastily and unnecessarily. To impinge on our forward momentum. These are not necessarily ‘conventional’ criminals in the legal sense of the term: their actions will not generally be imprisonable offences. No, these are faux beings who – like succubi – suck our very shades of self dry when we least expect it and leave our life-blood drier/thinned/tainted. They will gossip behind our backs; attempt to steal our partners, our loved ones and our ideas; inveigle themselves with our bosses and turn the knife on us in office tete-a-tete; filch our privacy; demand our attention relentlessly; borrow our items and never return them – or if returned, in a squalid, broken-down fashion; shadow and bully us; negate at vital times; leech our patience; steal our trust; whore themselves upon us until our very being erodes: the list is endless. They will cut down the life choices available to us via their very actions and attitudes. They are the tacklers of us – the game players – just as we are about to score a try, except that we do not have the ball at the time! Their life-cheating demeanour and dealings counteract us in our own territory. Let’s maintain this rugby allusion: the Hit Listed are the guys and gals on the American Gridiron field whose whole task is to snuffle out our onward progress, our ground-gaining, via their shirt-grabbing, blocking, foul tactics and gang-hits – all while we are attempting to support the ball-carrier in our own team! 

We want retribution. Some sort of reprisal motive fuels us to the extent that we want to somehow decimate/disintegrate/void these quintessence-plundering scoundrels. They make us irate beyond rage. We may never, nay, probably will never, go to the extremities of succulent corporeal revenge. We just carry the names as a panacea, a nostrum to tide us over. We don’t need these Double Agents*, these Bastards, these Mind-fucking Parasites in our lives. For this is an Existential Hit List. This is our sometime salve of existential redemption. 

The mere presence of such is often enough to appease us. To assuage the ire inside. We sometimes mentally thumb through our list as we lie awake at night. As we drive/are driven on our long journeys. As we reflect ontologically in those fleeting moments when a metaphysical mode breaks through the diurnal dross and we are gifted a hiatus from contingency. “You’re on my Hit List. I’ll get you, you Bastard, I’ll get you sometime”, rummages through our reflective synapses. It palliates the pain of life. A magic message in the form of a Hit List soothes our souls. The religious recitation of its contents enhances us, its excoriation mollifies us. We gain choice from the conscious cataloguing of the agencies who are deliberately confining this very choice. 

Because of course, we share the monikers amongst ourselves. The same names all too often appear on the Hit Lists of Others! We compare notes and lo and behold! The same Bastards and Double Agents lie there also, peer out offensively at us in our shared incubus of frustrated annoyance. How much more we want to subjugate and annihilate these life-stealing rapscallions, these minacious meddlers, when we find that they affect many of us, much of the time. The moral mass infiltrated by the malevolent minority. 

For there seem to be two oppositional genre of humanity ‘out there’. Good/bad/honest/dishonest/ charitable/miserable/ingenuous/calculating /givers/takers/used/users/positive/negative/life-evolving/life-destroying are just some of the polar parameters at play. The Hit List is the spiral delineation of the latter groupings: the former are all too often the victims of them. I am tempted to modify such a rigid distinction and say that these latter entities do not deserve the accolade of ‘human’ at all, but exist more as deformed freeloaders upon our very selves.  They are the monkeys on our back, ‘in our face’ ad nauseam. 

Subscribe to your own inner Hit List. Formalize it should you so desire. Share it with those you trust. There is some hope that in a communality of victimization, its very amplification will expunge this evil that gnaws and nibbles at us all, ever ready for one massive foul slurp with its pendulous rapacious lips and its nitid fangs on our exposed and innocent necks. 

Oh rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm that flies in the night,

In the dark, howling storm,

Has found out thy bed of crimson joy,

And his dark, secret love does thou life destroy.

Wrote Blake, sagely.

It is time we had some sort of cathartic assignation and named the names, for in so doing we may expunge via illumination these beasts whom feed upon us. In knowledge there is action. This would be no dangerous Hitlerian delineation, but a mighty democratic marking of the judges’ cards. Blake also once wrote: “Without contraries there is no progression”: this, however, is one divergent schism in humankind none of us need, given the point that they are less ‘stand-alone’ contraries, than anomalous symbiotic organisms. Whatever they are, we will progress further and faster without them! Let us be awarded the penalty try we deserve. Let our mind-penis/clitoris* distend exponentially and eternally without the flaccid machinations of the aberrations as universally exposed in the Hit List. 

* Double Agent: one who claims to be an ally but in ‘reality’ lurks in the shadows of a pledge to another oppositional force. A subtle betrayer par excellence.

* Mind Penis/Clitoris: like the sexual organs, the Mind is capable of a tremendous inspirational swelling, and like the sexual organs is capable of attaining explosive epiphany, albeit via differing originating stimuli. Like the sexual organs too, sadly, the Mind all too often recedes into limpidity. What we aspire to is a permanent mental erection!

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