Vomit

The 1st Amendment is the right to spew.

Everywhere, constantly spilling over into the air, fighting for space in the soundscape, whittling away lives with a constant stream of borrowed thought, there's vomit.

I don't think it's bad or anything. It's important to cough up something every now and again, proving sentience through demonstration of rationality, debate of a problem, finding a solution to a dispute, making something beautiful.

It's just messy.

The right to speech fills everyday with slogans, signals, billboards, boasts, quiet condemnations, generous gestures, and vitriolic tirades all hacked up for some reason or another. It's the right to open your skull and let everything out, pour it into the world and watch what happens.

It demands you must.

Make a lie of yourself, say what you want, pick your moment; regurgitate your favorite things until no one can see you under your chosen words.

Better yet? Display yourself. Flay yourself. Make a filet of your mind and serve it up for us. If you don't how will you ever know if you're really alone?

There's no choice. It's baked in. You're doing it, one way or another. There are laws for it, complicated restrictions, elaborate justification for why one way is good and another is bad. The bottom line is that the 1st is a clumsy way of spelling out a right to assert that we exist, a clumsy way to justify the frantic need to simply be heard. The 1st is two fingers down a throat.

The 1st Amendment is the right to vomit, puking up pieces of a person so others can see.