Updated 2 months ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/nyregion/nyc-homemade-bombs-man-charged.html
Way back in the spring of 2000, one sunny, crisp morning I was coming out of an afterparty in the East Village in NYC. I was with a Swedish female friend.
We were all shiny and smiling. High as kites. We were chatting up with random people on the street.
Some weird guy, I’ll never forget his broken face and listless eyes, kind of looked like a fetal alcohol syndrome baby, very quickly went from “hey dude!” to harassing my female friend in a strange, subtle way. Stalky. It’s like he locked onto her and didn’t wanna let go.
She got scared. We got in a cab very quickly.
Twenty years later. May 2020. COVID had shut everything down. I got a friend request on this account from someone named “Michael Michael.” We messaged a bit, he said he was homeless and living on a roof in SoHo. He hated the masks. I seem to remember some mutual acquaintances in the music scene. He was obviously mentally ill. I felt bad for him. I tried to commiserate with him, telling him I too had been briefly homeless after a spat with my girlfriend.
One time, he deleted a comment disparaging Hillary Clinton once people reacted negatively. He seemed pretty MAGA and would go on rants.
I was curious, so I picked his brain a little. We went back and forth, he wrote about how hard it was to live on a rooftop, tapping out messages on a phone.
I remember asking him how we met. How he knew me. I really wanted to know. He wasn’t sure.
I decided to dig a little.
He used some cartoon or something as a profile pic, so, curious, I went down through his pictures.
Then I saw his face.
It was the same guy from 2000.
Do you remember that scene in Breaking Bad where Walter goes through the pieces of broken plate, only to find it’s missing a shard, and that’s the shard the prisoner pocketed with intent to kill him?
That’s how I felt.
I kind of nervously blurted out my memory of him… he remembered me as well. Then he very quickly started asking about the Swedish girl he had been harassing, how he could contact her.
I immediately blocked him.
Cut to today. I saw the news today, oh boy. I went back in my block folder, the profile was gone, so it must have been deleted.
Luckily I don’t think he’ll ever see the light of day again. It’s tragic after all the One-flew-Over-the-Cuckoo’s-Nest mental institutions were closed in the late ’60s, all the mentally ill are just roaming the streets now left to their own explosive devices.
I really need to stop being so overtly open and kind with strangers. It has its ups, but I don’t want to see the downs. Between 1% and 4.5% of all people are psychopaths, and that doesn’t even include all the lost children such as Michael Gann.
Keep running those numbers, and eventually you’ll find your special card.
Addendum – a friend (Renegade Virus Charlie) just posted this:
Well this is sad and upsetting. I know Mike, he actually returned my lost cellphone to me after losing it in a moshpit. He has helped pack up after some undergrounds and Hes known to be a good person , while i cant say that he didnt go without mental illness.. I can’t defend these actions either, the fireworks in the video seem like everyday fireworks you can buy in Pennsylvania for the 4th of July, but the story says they were 600x the legal limit for consumer grade. They could have caused serious damage, killed people and or derailed a train possibly.
Life in prison would be very hard to prove when no one was hurt and it doesnt say he even lit any of the firework looking explosives. Neither did he makes terroristic threats on paper or social media. He sometimes spoke in gibberish. I will be keeping up with the investigation. While known to many of us, he did choose a life of gambling and housing instability.
I hope Mike gets help, and whatever time it takes as its clear he is not stable for society and could have hurt civilians
