There is no more dangerous assumption in this election than Joe Biden is too old. There are too many problems inherent in changing horse midstream, particularly since Kamala Harris is the logical choice should the Democrats drop him from the ticket. She represents everything racists hate, which would only make the NASCAR vote bigger than the YASCAR’s…………. or at the very least, close in an election where it shouldn’t be close. If you are on the “Biden’s too old” train, you are not seeing the forest for the trees. People don’t like changing presidents in times of war. They just don’t. Biden will likely squeak by with a win just because even though we’re not at war, we’re in a war mindset. We are emotionally involved in Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine.
Let me say for the record that my heart is for both sides in the Middle East. I hate the Israeli government, not Palestine or the Jewish people. To conflate hate for Benjamin Netanyahu as antisemitism is going against the wishes of most Israelis and Palestinians, who live side by side ruled by a government that does not give a shit about its own people. If they die, they die. Netanyahu doesn’t give a shit if he “wins” when he bombs integrated neighborhoods. Antisemitism is not the issue here, Dude. Netanyahu has decided that in terms of war, he’s the one who knocks. Palestine has rocket launchers and rocks. Israel is armed with nuclear weapons. it’s not a fair fight, and Netanyahu gives absolutely no fucks.
If Trump is elected, we stand the very real chance of Ukraine not being able to stand up to Russia anymore, because if Trump extorted Zelenskyy once, he’ll do it again. That’s because he’s already gotten away with it once, the most moronic thing about Trump being a sane candidate in my eyes. That’s because for the whole Trump presidency, the GOP showed its true colors:
Jed: Theirs is the party of inclusion. Charlie: That’s what they tell me.
For the uninitiated, it’s a conversation in “The West Wing.” Jed is the Democratic president, and Charlie is his body man (and at one point was almost assassinated for dating the president’s very white, very ginger daughter). It’s tongue in cheek because Charlie is black. The GOP’s true colors are showing because they’re afraid of everything progressive. No historically intelligent Republican would take all this lying down. No self-respecting one would, either. I often wonder if William F. Buckley, John McCain, and Ronald Reagan are rolling in their graves. If we’re going to talk about the crimes of the GOP, even Richard Nixon is like, “I’m out.” He broke into Democratic headquarters (or was the mastermind, anyway). Now, Trump is making him look fucking adorable.
I think people are greatly underestimating how good Trump is at being a Russian asset, because he doesn’t have to come out and say he supports Putin no matter what he does. Putin impresses him and feeds his ego, and he gives away information freely, even classified because it’s not that he’s willing to sell secrets. It’s that he’s genuinely too stupid to remember what’s classified and what’s not…. or at least, that’s how he comes across to me. He’s a Useful Idiot, not a proud FSB operative. We are going to stumble into Russia getting whatever they want just because Trump is impressed.
Meanwhile, the United States is trying to keep Ukraine sovereign. That won’t happen under Trump, because he’ll play both sides. He’ll support the country that gives him the most, because all his relationships are transactional. At this point, we are not talking about two candidates that are the same. On its surface, the election looks like two old guys, but one of them is not like the other. We’ve already been warned by Russia about “getting involved.” So, do we fold to that pressure by electing Trump?
Let’s not.
When people talk about a Trump presidency, they generally have either forgotten or never knew how bad it was. Trump didn’t choose the best and the brightest around him. He only hired people that would toe the company line, which is how Trump does business. Hire people who never disagree with him, then don’t pay them.
This election is not about the candidates, but the baggage that comes with them in terms of staff. You are not voting for a party, you’re voting to keep things the same. Sometimes, it’s better to keep the devil at bay.
I mean, maybe there were only two Corinthians. We weren’t there. Not every sermon is a hit.
What’s the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?
My oldest coffee mug says “SPY” and it features the Culpeper Ring, the men that won us the Revolutionary War because we didn’t win the war by outgunning the Empire. We won because we had better spies/scouts than they did. It’s a toss-up to me in terms of history what would have happened if we’d lost. In some ways, I think we’d be happier. In some ways, I think we’d be furious. If they hadn’t taxed our tea, we would still be importing PG Tips like it was more important than the water bill. They turned an entire population against something that would have bridged our cultures. So, go them. We drink coffee like the French.
So, if you’re wondering about a business that could have sustained you for centuries like Disney bailed out Doctor Who, you done goofed. You come to the US and complain about our tea, the height of entitlement over a problem you created. The British influence was so strong in the south during the Revolutionary War that it’s how iced tea became the house wine of the south. So, thank you for that. I think. It’s actually really interesting because to me the South is the strangest transformation in history. Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore were just as English as New England and New York. I wonder what caused those two cities to diverge in the woods, and it only takes one answer. England abolishing slavery. There were about 50-60 years between when England freed their slaves and we freed ours, because the Southern economy would have gone to shit without it.
I have heard differing stories because African American culture is not a monolith. Some people of color blame the English and the Americans for slavery. Some blame the African kings who wanted to get rich and sold their ancestors to white people. It depends on who you ask, and a wide spectrum of brilliantly defended propositions. There is no way I can walk a mile in a black person’s shoes, but as I queer person I can empathize and relate. The institutional pain between black and queer people is similar, yet not on the same playing field. We’ve always both had problems with the police, except that now that history is in the past but we’re all still touched by it. There haven’t been enough generations where queer kids come out in peace.
I do not know if black people had a special shape in the Holocaust, but I do know I did- a pink triangle. There is no such thing as competitive suffering, so even though it’s not the same, I feel some of the same scars on my skin. I have only recently become a citizen who can get married like everyone else, and I am still persecuted by Christians who aren’t right, but they’re certain.
The older I get, the less certain I am about anything. Discovering at an early age how gender and sexual orientation affect me led me to end up believing that everything is a spectrum and not a binary. There are too many permutations of human behavior not to believe there’s a wider range than we are originally led to believe…. whether people tell others about it is another matter.
If you don’t tell anyone anything, you don’t realize how lonely you are, because you’re not giving anyone a chance to feed you. Part of being fed by your emotional support is feeling heard. That no feeling is invalid. You talk about the logic behind the feelings, but you don’t discredit the feelings themselves. You discuss why the other is helping you to feel one way or the other, being willing to compromise until we meet in the middle.
It takes an enormous amount of strength to talk through a conflict, and I know that I got frustrated with Supergrover early because I was so tired of everything that had happened before. Her being half in didn’t make sense to me, and created more turmoil in me than I wanted. Like, why do I continue to pour energy into this relationship when it’s clear it’s not wanted? I have learned that it is wanted through context clues.
We don’t have to work on the fact that we’re connected for life and cannot suddenly stop knowing each other, and I don’t want a relationship where she’s half in and can’t plan for shit.
When I mentioned getting together, she said, “I don’t think it’s a good time.” That’s fine with me. I’m not thinking about the up close and personal future. I’m autistic, so I have different ways of feeling out getting together with people. It takes a very long time for me to process that information so I don’t chicken out at the last minute. Perhaps she did feel like I was nickeling and dimming her for her time, but I hope she’s known me long enough to know that I didn’t mean anything sudden. She won’t retire for a while, and any plans I have that have to do with her giving of her time is at a time in her life when she’s had more bandwidth than she’s had in years. Getting her time right now is impossible, but it’s not impossible to work towards later.
That’s the goal that keeps me going- preparing for later. I don’t presume this is the end because the end never is. We repel and attract like magnets, because I’m a silver penned devil. 😉 My friend John gave me that nickname and now I want it in 18pt font up my arm, bigger if it fits. 😛
But what I mean in terms of friendship is that by working out our problems on my own here, they are often touched by what I say. I am attracting energy to me, rather than seeking attention.
I do hope that Supergrover finds something she does want to discuss with me, because it’s the highlight of my day. She’s not the problem. We are. There’s a big difference because we are both perfect, and I mean that sincerely. We are beautiful in all our flaws. Bad communication is its own thing, not whether either one of us are good people. We’ve been friends long enough to know beyond a shadow of any doubt that she’s good people.
My biggest fear is that she only wants to be a fan, and doesn’t want to be my friend. That’s why the pattern doesn’t change. It breaks my heart, because her criticism is more important and more impacting of the direction of this blog than anything else.
But if she’s just a fan taking pot shots from the peanut gallery, I can’t take it. She’s my friend, one of the great loves of my life because I fell into her charm and I’ll never get out. She deserves every bit of that love, but we don’t communicate well enough to be able to tell each other that. We did, and she decided that being vulnerable once was enough to her, and her next interaction seemed rule based and yet not. I do not know where to go, and so I’m resting in Zac because I can. She only means more to me due to the number of years I’ve known each, not because one is closer to me than the other. I was happier taking a break from thinking about the problem, because I hit a land mine almost immediately and she told me to go to hell.
It’s on brand, so I want to figure out how we are both contributing to that problem or not interact. I am overcoming a lot of feelings all by myself that I don’t know how to navigate, because I don’t know how to talk to Supergrover and as a result, I don’t know how to talk to me about her, either. It’s confusing because we are both entitled to our feelings and privacy. I also think our relationship would look a lot different if it wasn’t moving at the speed of the Internet- that it would take longer for us to be angry if you got a letter two or three days after you sent it, not immediately. There’s no time to calm down and absorb anymore, and you seemingly can’t reframe anything because someone else knows what you mean better than you do.
It’s hard letting them go because they’re right about you. It’s just that their perceptions are their experience of you, not who you are.as a human being. What someone interpreted you as saying may or may not be correct.
Because my second oldest coffee mug is one she bought for me.
The only books that matter are either by Jonna and Tony Mendez or they were presents from her. She can pick my books at any time, because our interests overlap occasionally and we’re both suckers for amazing prose. I am so glad that she has sent me books by Kindle, because they’re presents I’ll never misplace; she’ll always be with me in one way or another. I feel like that’s enough, because it takes two to tango. I do not want to cut a rug all by myself. I do not think I was impulsive to say that I was struggling with the odds on “happily ever after,” because there was no new information to take in. I have to just keep saying it over and over- I do not judge any friend as not worthy to hear my story anymore because they are not worthy as a friend. They become unworthy to hear my story when it’s not an exchange of information. It’s just me pouring energy into you without feeling it in return. I’ve been in that relationship with lots of women, and I’m done. That’s why I thought I’d found the one for all time. It’s really, really hard to break up with someone you’ve never dated. My joke about this is that her husband may not be at her next wedding, but I will. The reason it’s a joke is that I love Michael almost more than her because he’s the one on the ground taking care of her. I don’t have to worry as much as I would if she didn’t have that kind of support. I’m the kind of friend to call if you need support in absence of a partner because I’ve been doing pastoral care a very long time. I am not going to be offended at what you tell me, who you need me to call, what you’ve taken, etc. This is because I’ve been single for a very long time, and you need your friends to step in for you that way. But that doesn’t mean that I want to be the conductor. I just want to be in the orchestra somewhere. Maybe one of these days she’ll let me play lead. I just don’t think she thinks I have the temperament for it because I am so shy and retiring in writing.
“Custody over Supergrover” is my favorite thing in life. The hardest part of having a pet monster is dropping her leash. The other hardest part is not joking that each of us are the oldest thing we own. We’re both in that nebulous age where a group of people is a “no, thanks.” I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I actually get more time with her when we’re just e-mailing than I would on the ground, because her diary/schedule is so full that I’d wait months for anything on the ground, possibly years. Just e-mailing each other allows us to be together no matter where the other is.
I have also said that the silver lining of the pandemic is that now everyone has friends they’ve known for a long time without meeting in person, so there’s no need to explain so much. Emotions run higher because you’re more brave with the wall of anonymity. You don’t say things with as much social nicety as you would in person and there’s no way for anyone to hear your tone or read your eyes for context clues. And still, emotions persist.
The way I feel about my relationship with Supergrover over 11 years is that it is very much akin to having dated and decided we didn’t work as partners, but we worked as friends. The only kink in that logic was that Supergrover is straight and in a relationship, so she wasn’t dealing with the same issues as me. I could stop wanting her, but I couldn’t stop being programmed to protect her and give her everything she wanted that was within my power. I say it just that way because we’re the same person. When we have power, we use it responsibly because we really don’t want it. She’s the type boss I respect, that she doesn’t give her team anything she wouldn’t do herself, and I believe that she’s an excellent trainer without even really having to think about it. Instructional design is a theme in both our lives. Nothing in our lives is transactional, either. When I say that there’s a lot in here about what she won’t do for me and not a lot about what she will, I am not saying that from a narcissistic perspective. I am letting you lay out your bandwidth, I lay out mine, and we meet in the middle after conversations.
At the very least, this should have been a deescalation and not the end, but ultimately that’s not my call, either. One of my readers talked about Supergrover ghosting me or being half out. I want to talk about that here, because she didn’t ghost me or say she was half in at all. She explained her reasoning perfectly, and she would have been spot on in her analysis if she’d gotten my actual intent and not what she thought I meant. She reads through my words and picks out the worst possible interpretation she possibly can. It weighs on me, because I’m not villainizing her. I’m painting her.
I was reminded that I wrote on the blog that she lives in my ink. I was reminded of that line when I was looking around Fahrney’s, an American pen/pencil shop. The back of the store was covered in bottles of ink in every color you can imagine. It’s why she pulls me in and repels me. All the things that we’ve written to each other come up in my mind when I’m doing other things. As I understand what she’s said more, I try to guess what she’s saying more. Then that goes wrong and I’m alone again.
But not truly alone, because since she lives in my ink, it is a communion only we share. I feel her presence in the room when I’m writing, so my writing leans toward her whether she’s the intended topic or not. I would like to make friends where we could also be that close, but there’s no way to duplicate this connection and I’ve stopped trying.
She doesn’t feel creepy to me. The fact that I want to know her like every friend would know her seems creepy, because I’m not pumping her for information. I am genuinely curious because she’s unique. I don’t know what she means about her not being vulnerable means deliberately hurting my feelings does not work for her. So far, not being vulnerable has always led to hurting my feelings because she’d rather put me off than face her demons and just tell me what’s up. She says she can’t say anything without immediately being tagged as avoidant. If your whole pattern is avoidance and has been since you were a child, you cannot see how avoidance hurts other people. They also don’t change when they’re not aware of something. I feel like calling her on avoidant behavior when it happens is better than keeping it all in, because it will come up less and less frequently over time. Her patterns will change to being used to being vulnerable all the time instead of going in guns blazing.
As I told her before, it’s not that she went guns blazing on me. It’s that she has CPTSD so the guns are always already out. Taking down her walls means getting vulnerable about how she feels in reaction to what I said. She said “writing to each other, supporting each other.” I get that. I really do. But I don’t feel supported when it feels like my feelings are going into a void. Like, I’ll write an essay about X topic, and no matter what topic it is between us, that’s not a topic she’ll discuss. It’s frustrating to an enormous degree, because if I bring that up, she immediately goes to “I’m not good enough for you.” It’s not a healthy environment in which to bring up problems, and relationships always have them.
Many things about friendship aren’t the good ones, and you have to go through the bad ones to get the good. I don’t want to focus on negativity. I want to focus on where we go from here. Most notably, what have I done right? I’m not fishing for compliments. I have heard all the complaints.
I think she also just. cannot.
That this friendship was doomed long ago because there are certain topics we need to resolve that she’ll never talk about, and there are multiple issues that fall under that category. I am a lot of things she is not. She is a lot of things I am not. Bridging the gap is enormous.
Which animal would you compare yourself to and why?
I have decided that I am a moose. This is because I have spent a lot of time thinking I was a squirrel. Yes, “Rocky and Bullwinkle” has fed my love of intelligence for many, many years….. as has “Inspector Gadget,” “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (I even have a retro t-shirt), and strangely, Jeopardy!. A lot of the time, the answers will contain intelligence operations that I’m interested to look up, because those questions come in lots of areas. Geopolitical, CIA’s affect on the United States’ reputation, etc.
You could have heard a pin drop in my mind when Jonna Mendez said MK Ultra came out of her office, and she walked past those drugs every day for 30 years because the refrigerator was from the 1970s, meaning it will outlive all of us. I’m sure that eventually, the science officer was made to destroy them, or the rest of the department was able to wrestle it away from him at some point. But, it was the first time in a long time that all the blood drained out of my face.
The truth is stranger than fiction, especially when it comes across in news spin and not data.
For instance, is it fortunate timing that we are now sending Palestine more aid, or did Biden specifically keep that little chestnut for the State of the Union address? I was telling a friend the other day that I think this whole thing revolves around having not to hate what Israel has done. That we really can’t stand what they’re doing, and also can’t afford to cut off intelligence from Mossad. It’s trickier than you think. Intel from Mossad is valid. Info from Palestine may or may not be valid because they don’t have government checks and balances. They don’t have a government because they’re not a state. It doesn’t have anything to do with “we don’t like the Palestinians.” It’s that they don’t have people in the room.
The answer is getting the Palestinians in the room. Most Israelis want this, too, because the neighborhoods are so integrated. Palestine comes across as a terrorist group because “they don’t have a flag.” It’s not that it’s not there. It’s that it can’t be recognized anywhere in the world as a sovereign nation because the Israelis absolute do not want that….. coming from the top. This is not a bottom up resolution, but top down. I swear to you, Netanyahu wouldn’t think twice about killing his grandmother if she was Palestinian. He also doesn’t care how many Israelis die because they’re just collateral damage.
And people think this is about Judaism and claim anti-Semitism when I don’t give a fuck what religion you practice, and neither does he. If he’s bombing integrated neighborhoods, he doesn’t care what religion you practice, either. Notice there aren’t many surgical strikes. It’s kill everyone.
They aren’t fighting over religion like they did in ancient times, they’re fighting to keep Palestine from getting an equal shake in things like NATO, or anyone else who could help them.
If you sided with the rebellion in Star Wars and you aren’t standing up for Palestine, you are not admitting what’s really going on here. Netanyahu and Putin are both trying to keep countries from recognition by taking them over.
Except Putin doesn’t care how many people he kills, either. So, whether you’re a Ukrainian fighting for your country or on the Russian side of things, you have an equal chance of dying, because Russia will just send in more cannon fodder.
It’s not about people’s lives, it’s about winning.
And now we want that kind of totalitarianism to come to the US by electing Donald Trump again, or at least, a huge minority that’s threatening to provide undertow to the fall off Rome. A good bit of the military is conservative as shit. What happens after the next election? We all of the sudden have two armies. January 6th will look like child’s play, because apparently the right to be a bigot is a huge ass deal here. Just like it is in Ukraine, and just like it is in Israel.
The only thing is that the Russian and Ukrainian people probably got along before Putin shook them up like ants. Finland is worried now, and it’s opening a very old wound. Sweden just joined NATO, so there’s something. We at least have one country over there in the general vicinity of Finland until they join themselves.
It’s all a mess. It’s all protecting the world from fascism. I don’t think we want it here, but if the Republicans win, it will be ushered in…. ballet service for pablum. Keep us occupied and we won’t revolt.
Reminds me of the old Apple commercial for the Macintosh (clever). Something about buying the computer is not making “1984” into 1984. And then they invented the iPhone, so clearly they didn’t mean it.
How much Facebook absolute shit do you have to wade through to see the few things you actually wanted to see? Who doesn’t respond immediately to their notifications unless they can disconnect long enough to put on “Do Not Disturb?”
“You can’t do that. We live here!”
Et cetera.
Suzy Izzard has the answer to everything.
I’m sure that relationships with countries evolve like relationships between adults. After all, it’s actually individual personalities and patterns move the same way as specifics. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but as a preacher’s kid I constantly noticed little things writ large.
Again, I grew up as a preacher’s kid and I’ve had lots of pastors as an adult. I have been to many, many committee meetings as an adult, just armed with a lot of back channels to be able to understand the bullshit games running in the room. I didn’t even have to call my dad, and most of the time, didn’t. I called friends who were either theological giants in their own right, or students who’d been taken under care by our church (what it means to be in discernment/seminary because you need a home church to be able to support you in some ways….. why it’s called “being taken under care.”
The Methodists do it differently than the Congregationals. In a Congregational church, like a Presbyterian or an Episcopal church, you are called by the individual church. With the Methodists, you basically function independently from step one, which is how my dad ended up pastoring two churches (called a “Circuit Rider,” a term created where ministers traveled by horse). Here’s the rest of the story. He was 19. I am sure some days went better than others, and he’s got more class than I do, so I’m not sure that he said “fuck” every day, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
My dad could deal with enormous tragedies as he got older because he saw them all as a pastor.
My personal moment of pastoring was when we had a couple give birth to a baby who was only at 24, 25 weeks at most. She survived, and I became her babysitter. We bonded because I was eight weeks early. I was 14 or 15, and I wanted the parents to always ask me to come back because I’d imprinted on her. They called me often. I still remember her name was “Peyton.” Being up in front of people and preaching is 10% of the job at most. The rest of the time, it’s dealing with parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, spouses who have lost spouses, and all the intimate conversations you have with a pastor leading up to it. If someone was going through a thing and at our house or church a lot, I got used to seeing them and took on all their pain by osmosis, because I don’t go looking for other people’s feelings. They come to me quite naturally, as if by a magnetic pull. I can open up to people, which gives them license to open up to me.
So, I feel like I don’t have the ability to stop caring about anyone, because those feelings flow through me all the time. I remember people’s stories from 40 years ago. That’s the two things that stopped me from starting a church. The first is that I burned out on pastoral care already. The second thing is that my mother died and two things happened. The first is that I needed her as my music director and she died. I didn’t want to work with anyone else at first. We were building a church. We weren’t to the stage where we can invite major musicians to play, and I assure you, my mother has sounded amazing with the best of the best. Google “Sylvia Danburg,” my concertmaster at HSPVA. They did a duet at my church when she was 14 that still lives in my memory…. not the melody, but the way it made me feel.
Being that empathetic and that neurodivergent cost me, because I’ve always been too intense for everyone. It’s why I spend so much time alone. I don’t have to hear it. If people think I’m too much, I am not threatened. I got shit to do.
I think bigger than most people because my personality type is very rare….. and all the comorbidities with my mental health make me astoundingly curious.
It’s a lot.
For instance, now I’m thinking about looking up the history of the moose. Because I am no longer a squirrel. I admit that I still have a “deer in headlights” look on my face a lot of the time, but at least I’m not tiny. I’m taller than I thought. More muscle mass. I can protect my brain from a lot of things, even rejection, because everything comes from me. I needed to develop a thicker skin, which I have now. I didn’t so much in the early days of my relationship with Supergrover. I believe she thought that she was more hurt than I was. We both overestimated our own pain and underestimated the other’s.
So, I hope that if Supergrover knows nothing else, she knows that this is not a cat and mouse game. We have both stopped playing, and it remains to be seen whether she agrees with me that getting real was a good thing.
I found it interesting that she said I knew nothing about her life, when everything I said about her attachment style turned out to be a double bullseye. I cannot speak to how she treats her family or her friends, but our particular dynamic was toxic at times, merely inauthenic at others. We’d reached the “merely inauthentic” phase long ago, and I could feel it on my skin.
I saw the writing on that particular wall, and wrote this weird letter in which I know I invalidated her feelings and I’ve apologized for it, because that’s not what I meant to do. What I meant to do was call her out on her bullshit so we could move on. Yet again, taken as an attack and swept under the rug so that my feelings were always invalidated and she thought that me telling her once or twice was a problem? How am I supposed to react when I open up to you and you say nothing, yet you have a shit ton of feelings about me and you’re telling someone else. I have never been wrong about that, either, until I sent her an e-mail on a related topic and she finally yelled at me……. and owned her shit like a boss.
I don’t want a relationship with someone who will string me along for years at a time. I want a relationship with someone who’s fiery and not afraid to stand up to me. I had that, and over time, I didn’t.
She said something about painting things as fact that I didn’t have the right to do. Yet, I have no idea what she’s talking about. It’s confusing, and not something we should avoid. The clearest way out is through. I just couldn’t convince her of that because she thought I was playing a cat and mouse game, or she was. Unclear.
What was clear is that we have such an incredible friendship when we’re not putting up walls that it was worth fighting for, even if I lost. That’s because the message I sent her was that I needed her anger at me. That her anger is so pure because she hasn’t been telling me what she really needs from me for a long time. Now, what she needs from me is grace and peace to think. Or, at least, I hope that’s what she wants from me. However, I did ask her if there was anything she wanted from me, including talking about our real issues now that we’re on the same page. It didn’t seem like playing games anymore.
And now I’ve explained the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Palestine has an anxious attachment to the world because they’ve never been given the safety and security of a two-state solution. Israel is avoidant because Netanyahu is not going to give up anything he’s not willing to give. It’s an impasse, and one that probably won’t get solved in my lifetime just like it didn’t get done in my mother’s. The conflict is too large, and the Americans shouldn’t do anything but send humanitarian aid to both people. Food. Medicine. Blankets. Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Those are the teams we should be sending, not military aid to a leader that will certainly unleash hell on everyone if it means he’s going home with a trophy.
This has nothing to do with Judaism. I’ve been to temple on Friday nights before, and it’s always been one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had. When my grandmother died, I actually read The Kaddish through transliteration, because even though I’ve studied Hebrew, it’s in the context of dictionaries, not conversation. I’ve sung Hebrew before. Judaism is one of the cornerstones of my faite because just like “Little Mosque on the Prairie” (my favorite Canadian TV show), we had a church and a synagogue sharing space. The best part is the Episcopalian minister and the young Imam, because they do a kind of Denny Crane, Alan Shore thing by talking about their lives in pastoral care and they both have ALL the same problems. I could have walked onto the show and made people laugh just as much as they did, I assure you.
Here’s my favorite story in life. I will not tell you the name of the minister, because he has gone on to local television (and is a genuinely good guy). I don’t know if this story would make him laugh or make him mortified. My dad will know who I mean instantly, and that’s all that matters.
So, ministers, imams, and rabbis all have ways of marking someone as a child of God. For Christians, it’s baptism. In the Methodist church, this is not as extreme as a dunking in the river.
We just use a bowl of water and sprinkle it on the baby’s head…. what probably prompted me to wet all over the bishop, in retrospect. Sometimes it’s not easy to hear or feel rain when you’re about to burst. This is universal…… or at least, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
So, the senior minister asked the associate if he would go and get the Holy water in the baptismal font. He was not specific. What he meant was, “get the bowl and bring it to me.” It was in a 3,000 lb granite sacristy, and he tried to drag it across the floor. In the middle of the service. Which may or may not have been recorded.
I’ve told this story before, I think, but one time my dad did the wedding for a retired New England Patriot and his fianceé. The boys got a little too drunk the night before the wedding, and all of the sudden my dad feels who is basically Refrigerator Perry to him start leaning forward. I’m going to leave you with that image because the imagination is even better. He was woozy a long time….. but frankly, I only remember that someone ended up throwing up at at the wedding, but I’m not sure it was the groom.
Life as a minister is, as you can see, so glamorous.
The funniest stories are about the things that went wrong, not right. For instance, this little old lady we all adored because she gave absolutely no fucks stood up in the middle of worship and said, “David, have you lost your mic?” That is because it sincerely made my dad wonder how to respond and the room went still. Finally he figured it out and said, “I thought you asked if I had lost my mind.” That joke never would have been as good had it not been the “no fucks given” woman. Plus, it wouldn’t have bothered any of the four of us to be accused of losing our minds every day….. with no idea how they ever participated in the crazy because it would have been inappropriate to tell them. You’re as buttoned down as any therapist. You cannot say what you know. You cannot say at 11 years old that you know why they’re mad, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s your whatever relationship that’s getting you in trouble because my bedroom was next to my dad’s office. Yet I’m as much of a lockbox as he is, or I was until I became a blogger. Other people’s secrets were weighing me down, because I stopped putting my own opinions out there. Pleasing other people was not a choice for me, because Show Mode™ is relentless when your parent is a public figure.
You don’t have the choice whether to emote or not, because you cannot trust anyone. Is this a safe adult to talk to, or is this a way for them to get information on my dad to create a “gotcha” question in a board meeting?
My dad and John Grisham told me the most about life early on. The first, from my dad, is that people who don’t have power anywhere else will unload their frustration with this in church meetings. Their ego comes out quick, and they perhaps get more aggressive than normal. From John Grisham, “the hardest part about being a lawyer is having to convince 12 K-mart clerks you’re right.” Being a mediator becomes an impossible task at some church meetings because tempers are all flying high and you have to be the one that sits back and takes it because you’re the pastor. It’s your job to mediate them through the middle of the mess. You don’t get to have feelings, because you’re impartial- even though those decisions affect your parent the most.
It’s honestly why I believe that a church cannot be run by committee all the time, and I’m glad that even the congregational churches have denominational support. There are reinforcements to bring in so that there are more neutral parties; the pastor can have feelings, too. They don’t have to be the strong one anymore because there’s someone above them to take on the objective role and mediate.
When pastors tell you how they feel about something and try to sway a vote one way or the other, that’s picking favorites and trying to get them to vote the way you want. It’s rule 101 of being a pastor as something that will not work out well for you. The people on the outside are going to notice they’re on the outside.
You become your own nuclear bomb in which the congregation schisms because you can’t find your way to objectivity with a map and a flashlight……. which is exactly why my church fell apart and the new pastor sweated through every stitch to put us back together. I’m not sure that she knows I think that, but she’s entirely responsible for the congregation being healthy because it’s welcoming of all and not your inner circle.
This also says a lot about world politics while describing very small things. It’s applicable all over the world to different conflicts. It also depends on how you react to the pressure. Are you going to compromise or double down?
Maybe I’m a moose and a squirrel. A moose’s personality in a squirrel’s body, at least. Between Bullwinkle’s ineptitude and Rocky’s smarts, it feels a lot like the spectrum I inhabit. But part of being a moose in a squirrel’s body is learning to walk a little taller.
We may not beat Russia today, but I do hope we prevail. They need our help the most in terms of world balance, because the longer the rift goes between the US and Russia, the closer they get to China. They decide to hedge their bets and go with the other guy. Then, we keep ourselves wide open to Russia bombing the oilfields in Alaska…… because we’ve never had to face Russia and China at the same time, but I’m not thinking we’d like it. Sounds like a crazy idea, but I’m not trying to invent a conspiracy theory. I’m trying to present that the United States is up against a superpower and a former superpower banding together against us. That’s because we’re not the sun, as much as we’d like to think we are.
It takes us so much to be able to stop those kinds of things before they happen, because even if I’m not right on the money, I know I am describing a situation that could potentially happen in the wide realm of possibilities. If we got intel that Russia was about to blow up our oilfields, we’d probably burn them down before they could get to them. You don’t like us? Ok. Here goes all your oil, all the projects in Sakhalin to bring you fuel, the Alyeska pipeline, all of it. Just try us. If we can’t use it, neither can you.
But that’s why conflicts move as slow as they do. No one wants to interrupt American industry….. even in China, for the most part. Another delicate balance until China discovers they don’t need us anymore.
They’ll realize it a lot faster if we put a Russian “useful idiot” (UI) in The White House.
And then team up.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And that describes relationships between two people as well as it does war. Do you react more when you’re hurt, or whether your friend is hurt? When you hurt someone, they’re likely going to confide in someone else about it, possibly someone who didn’t like you, anyway. Then, the original person has two enemies.
Russia and China are talking behind our backs like bitchy little mean girls, while inviting Kim Jong WTF for tea. I know most Americans don’t see this, because they don’t work in systems like I do. They don’t create scenarios that are fictional, yet just real enough. I wouldn’t have included details that sounded a bit scary if I didn’t genuinely care how this election went. It is a disaster for CIA to re-elect Trump. Neither White House nor intelligence officials will be allowed to tell you anything real. We will continue living in a fractured society with two different realities for far longer than necessary.
No one needs your version of the Bible, where the line between heaven and hell is only a hair’s breadth, making your people live in fear. No one believes Jesus, that the message is power with, not power over. No one likes a God of promise at either end of the spectrum because one has poisoned the other. When atheists meet me, it’s at first like I’m some sort of mythical creature that I can interpret scriptures for them off the top of my head that doesn’t sound like an absolute lunatic story because I know everything in the Bible is figurative and not literal. It can’t be literal. It wasn’t written down until long after it happened. Mistakes were made.
Most atheists haven’t heard of feminine or queer theology, that takes the message they’ve heard their whole lives and flips it on its ear. I don’t evangelize, I just talk like I talk. I’m not trying to change them and they know it. I allow them to take off their armor because I’m a resource if they want to know something but not an entitled dickhead who thinks they ought to know it whether they want to or not.
Even Jesus didn’t evangelize that way. It was, “I have something people want. Follow me if you want it, too.” The modern interpretation of this is somewhat alarming. Basically, you just say what you want to say and if they don’t want to hear it, you move on. That’s why they traveled. They didn’t take anyone who didn’t want to hear the rest.
We of the United States have not had that policy very often. That’s due to Evangelical Republicans twisting the meaning of Christian so badly that I cannot stand saying I am one, because it instantly brings up all the wrong images. Everything I stand for is concentrated into venom towards the limitations that that sect has put on me. I am a very flawed individual. The teachings of Jesus help me deal with that. What they don’t do is tell me to bother my friends when they’ve already stated their beliefs, and the most I’ve ever said is “if you’re looking for a church, come with me.” She did come, but wasn’t ready for membership.
Now she’s the accompanist, and I told her that if I could play inside baseball, I’d tell her to do a jazz arrangement of “Joyful, Joyful” as the postlude. I once watched her play Janis Joplin on stage, and her band (Twisted Whistle) used to play at my pub all the time.
I think she can handle it.
My purpose is helping people to be stronger in themselves by laying out my fears and dreams first. It makes it easier to come clean with yourself when you’re already in a vulnerable place from reading. I lay out my fears. You lay out yours, to yourself. And we both allow ourselves to feel nourished. The writer/reader connection is as unbreakable as hearing Bullwinke say, “hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”
I love cartoons, especially when they remind me of me.
I don’t have one top favorite, so I’ll give a few of them. I’m not a huge traveler, so I would rather get an AirBnB for several weeks than try to flip body clocks twice in three or four days. Just not my style anymore. “I’m older and I have more insurance.” But if money were no object, I would love to see:
Paris
I have been to Paris once, but only for a few days. I definitely hit all the highlights with my dad, but I don’t know what it is to sit at a cafe and people watch. I don’t know what it’s like to go to Paris and do nothing, and that’s why it’s valuable. You don’t go there to find things to do. You go there to walk around in its culture and see what sticks. Then, you either commit yourself to finding out what coffee shop David Sedaris frequents- or perhaps going to Pere Lachaisse for inspiration. Oscar Wilde and I had a marvelous time. Just because I am living and he is not doesn’t mean we weren’t both entertained. I told him that Stephen Fry played him in a movie once. He said it was perfect casting.
New York
I have never spent more than 24 hours in New York, so it’s the same idea there as in Paris. I’d like to go there for a little bit and then get back out. There’s a rhythm, and it’s intimidating to me. It’s sort of like Las Vegas in that the culture is different but the level of sensory input you receive when you get there is just as heightened. In 2003, I wanted to retire in New York, and I have absolutely no idea what I meant by that. I do remember past trips there to be fun, but not in a way I’d like to live there- except maybe someone I liked wanted to live there, so I did, too. Now, I just want to find hidden treasures on out of the way side streets.
Ho Chi Minh City
I have to do a lot of research on the Vietnam War, rightfully called “The American War” there. I’m writing a novel about it, and I don’t think I could do setting justice if I just made it up. I mean, I can and I will,if I have to, but there’s a lot to be said about putting effort into understanding something fully. I have studied political science since I got to college- the news junkie in me drove me to poli sci and it hasn’t given up. With political science comes lots and lots on international relations as well. So, I know the story from the American side fairly well, but I don’t like to write from the perspective of only trumpeting American interests. The military and C/DIA had many faults and failures during this time, and since most things more recent than Vietnam are still classified, I don’t know that either organization has really wrestled with our actions in that theater in a way that processes out institutional pain. Vietnam was the first war in which it was clear that we might not lose, but we don’t have enough money or resources to outright win, either. The Vietnamese have the right to call us out on that, because American soldiers were responsible for a lot of atrocities. We have the reputation of being feared, and not in a healthy way. It’s why we’ll never win a land war in Asia……. and death is on the line.
Seoul
Before I started watching both Josh & Olly, I’d never wanted to visit Korea before. They’re responsible for making a lot of people feel that way on their YouTube channel, Jolly. Josh met Olly in college (I think- British system), then went to university in Seoul. I think. I haven’t done all the math. Anyway, when Josh and Olly were both done with uni, they decided to start making videos about what Koreans think of English people. Hilarity ensues. I’m not sure how often Josh and Olly get back to Korea, but one of the fun things they do is “red carpet” style interviews while they entice celebrities to talk using Korean food. It worked very well on Ryan Reynolds. 🙂
Enseñada, Mexico
I have been to Enseñada once. It’s a small enough city that I could picture myself living there. I don’t speak much Spanish, but I took two years in school and have spent time in both Texas and Mexico speaking Spanish. My language skills aren’t as good now as they were in high school, because I was going to Mexico regularly (Reynosa and Progreso, both on mission trips). I could not land in San Diego and drive across the border without incident, but within a month or so I’d be all right. Within three or four years, I’d be fluent. It’s amazing what you can do when you have no choice. The water is gorgeous. La Buffadora (Buffalo Snort) is magnificent, a geyser that makes me feel the power of nature unlike anything else. I’m sure Papas & Beer is still there, it’s an institution. I don’t know about Habana Banana, which used to be my favorite Mexican clothing brand. I bought a ton while I was there, and at the time, they didn’t offer online ordering or international shipping. So, part of it is to find another clothing brand I like just as much…….. the rest of it is to sit outside with a Coke (we’re in Mexico, after all) and see what nature is saying around me. I live my life like the sound track is 4’33. I think it would kick things up a notch to perform it outside. My past performances have all gone very well. No one even knew I was “conducting it all while I sleep…. to light up my yard.”
Vancouver
I didn’t live in DC very long before I went to visit Meagan in Ottawa. However, I lived in Portland for 12 years and never made it to British Columbia. I have heard I would love it, now I need to go see it for myself. I will admit, though, that there is some truth to only the Canadian provinces with her in them being interesting. It wasn’t a draw while I lived there, but now I’m just curious. I sort of know what life is like on the East Coast of Canada because Meag has lived in Alberta, Ontario, and New Brunswick….. maybe more, but I’ve slept since then. But West Coast Canada is completely different, it seems. They don’t have bagged milk there. 🙄 Now that I’ve had time to reflect, I regret not going when it was only a five hour car ride. It would be a much bigger deal now.
Washington, DC
I live in Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s a suburb that has everything I could possibly want within walking distance. As a result, I can go as long as a year without needing anything from downtown…… and most of it is that the bands I like don’t play in Silver Spring- some of them do, though. If I want to see something relatively big, it’s at The Kennedy Center, not The Fillmore. I also haven’t been to Wolf Trap in 20-odd years, mostly because it’s such a hassle that I think about going to Wolf Trap and back out. I feel about Wolf Trap the same way people feel about Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion. It’s going to be a long concert, there’s no easy way in or out, and there’s a thousand people all screaming at once. I much prefer smaller venues, and wish Indigo Girls would play The Fillmore once in a while. 😛
Helsinki
My love of Finnish Independence Day led me to believe that one day I’d make it to watch the celebrations live- I watch them every year on YouTube from here. It’s not just that, though. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again that the palate for that part of the world is completely different- they don’t even have the same flora. Learning to cook there would be a whole new experience, and Anthony Bourdain introduced them to me through the magic of television. Why yes, I do want a large reindeer pizza. I also want to fly into HEL and drive up to Kilpisjaarvi so I can sleep under the aurora borealis in a clear-top tent. I also want to dress up really warm and sleep outside, just to see if I could do it. 😛
If you had a million dollars to give away, who would you give it to?
I don’t know how to quantify giving a million dollars to a mysteriously labeled “crazy people,” but I do know that according to an Apple commercial from the 80s, people who think they’re crazy enough to change the world are the only ones who do.
That Chiat/Day commercial runs through my head all the time, because it lends an authority to something I know, but don’t. In some ways, I am smarter than everyone else. This is not said with a hint of megalomania, because neurotypical people try to prove to me why they’re smarter than me all day long and twice on Sundays. It’s not a case of smart or less smart. It’s a case of “I see it and you don’t.” That works in both directions, it’s just that neurotypical people are taught that autism, ADHD, and retardation are all the same thing. Autism and/or ADHD change how information is processed, but doesn’t limit the amount I’m capable of knowing. Right now I’m sitting in my bed with a Bluetooth keyboard and tablet. It’s 0524, but my scope isn’t limited here. My mind is in the Middle East……… again.
Mossad got caught with their pants down on a fight some say has been going on since the 50s. Some say the fighting after Abraham’s death never really stopped. Either way, a massive intelligence failure. Doesn’t mean that Mossad is stupid. It means that there was a missing link in the system, just like there was when President George W. Bush took office and failed to pay attention to an upstart little shit named Osama bin Laden. Clinton left plenty of clues, and the W. administration can look as dumb about it as they want. Doesn’t take the stink off ’em.
Because this is the problem weighing on my mind this morning, it doesn’t seem like a million dollars will do anything for it. A million dollars wouldn’t even buy blankets for all the people who needed them after an attack when you start thinking of shipping them from here. A million dollars also won’t bring Israel its safety and security back, and that’s dangerous. The United States has already decided that Muslims aren’t people and they need to stop that shit immediately. Obviously, CIA doesn’t think that way because we have to have Muslim friendlies in the Middle East to be able to get our jobs done. But an EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN CONGRESS is not going to get off their asses to bail out Muslims from Jewish oppression. So, even the do-gooders we hire to work in that part of the world don’t have the million dollars they need to hand out blankets.
A million dollars would be a nice amount of money to get started in a country like Palestine if you were going to start a humanitarian organization. I’d love to be able to help as long as this is just a thought exercise. Things are heating up because Palestine is trying to show Israel it has bought its big boy pants and I don’t think they care if they’ve bitten off more than they can chew at this point. I am pro-Palestinian because they do not have an established government or military. I believe in a two-state solution. I do not believe that killing children is the way to get there, and the issue only gets more complicated as each side makes themselves less redeemable.
Maybe the million dollars I have is greasing wheels to get information and goods where it needs to go. I don’t know who needs what right now, but I know it’s enormous. I know everyone is shitting on Palestine right now, but they’re only the current aggressor. It turns over and it soon will.
They need a two state solution and keep bombing any chance they have at it whether other countries step in to help Palestine or not, because everyone seems to think “poor Israel.”
Especially the Evangelicals in Congress, who love Isaac more than Ishmael.
I do not have a dog in the fight except for keeping Americans safe, and there are Americans all over Israel and Palestine. What Americans do not have is a US embassy in Palestine. The US embassy for Palestinians is in Jerusalem, which as you can see is not problematic at all. Thankfully, we do have a US Office of Palestinian Affairs, so we are recognizing Palestine to the point we’re able, but we could do so much more.
I feel like I understand countries fighting because I understand individuals fighting. Who you support depends on when you entered the war. For instance, if you only read about me and my friend “Supergrover” yesterday, you’d probably think I was absolutely insane. But I’m going to bet that you wouldn’t feel that way if you’d been in my head for the last 10 years, not the last 10 days. I am still laughing over the “spinster in the attic” joke because what I know that she doesn’t is that lesbians are very concerned for my well being and are trying to Mary the hell out of me and can’t understand why I don’t want someone who’s not Claire. I waited for the right person with Sam, even though she was the wrong person in the end. I wanted something that was better than having Supergroer to myself, which I only mean in terms of the amount I can pay attention without guilt, as her issues aren’t piddly shit. All of the sudden, I didn’t really care about my problems when the seemed so incredibly small.
It’s not that I couldn’t move on. I just wanted signal without noise, and I waited until I found it. Someone I could lose myself in to the appropriate amount. She just lied. Full stop. Here I’m talking about both women, slamming neither. Neither one of them knew themselves well enough to tell me the truth. They both thought they were so cool.
Supergrover told me that she wanted to be my fan quite clearly, and wanted to be my friend in a smaller voice so it has never been clear what her boundaries actually are. I feel like her lie to herself was centered on the fact that she could be friends with someone who used to be into her. That she could trust me afterwards and feel secure in our attachment. She didn’t know how and she didn’t ask. She tried to run everything from her own mind and it bit her in the ass because I got tired of having to read her mind all the time because when I got it wrong, her dragon fire was immediate and harsh. I would say the same thing about me, because I felt like her heat was oppressive due to the nature of our power imbalance.
Supergrover has a military, and I don’t even live in an organized state.
For Sam, her lie to herself was that she was a successful business owner who didn’t have time for a girlfriend, so let’s not be exclusive until I really have time to think about it. We talked about it for weeks, and she lied to herself all the way through them. She lied to me all the way up until I was at Zac’s house, after talking to me on the train while I was going there. What she really wanted was monogamy from minute one, to be absolutely obsessed with each other. She could have had that if she’d asked for it. I refused to read her mind, and I gave up a relationship that was a huge deal for me. But I also won, because I wasn’t stuck with a girlfriend who wouldn’t tell me the truth and expected me to read her mind at all times. That’s been a disaster in my other relationships and a red flag for which I’ll always have a hard out.
I am “AuDHD.” I have two modes. Complete buy-in with the rules or “this is stupid and God themselves wouldn’t move me.”
Palestinians can’t read minds and are also tired. Palestinians are tired of oppressive heat because it makes you feel defensive all the time. Palestine throws rocks to make sure they’re heard. Israel throws rocks to make sure they’re the only ones that are heard.
Meanwhile, and this is true of both sides, the call is coming from inside the house.
If you understand conflict, you understand conflict. So, $250,000 to Palestine, Israel, Supergrover, and Sam to figure out what it is they actually want. Sam can just go tell someone else, because she’s the outlier who completely walked away without putting any negotiation on the table. You can’t have a hard line and expect buy-in, and you won’t get buy-in if you’re going to constantly treat me like a liar afterwards. Sam was never going to get what she wanted from me because she decided not to trust me before she even knew me.
Meanwhile, if you take the names out, you really can’t tell whether I’m talking about the global or the personal……. and it’s worth a million dollars to figure it all out. We spent more than that trying to figure it out yesterday. I just hate that Evangelical Christians are the ones treating Palestinians as lesser than because they don’t fit their narrative of child of God, as if there is one.
There’s a wholly different problem at stake here. In believing the Christian right, you believe statistically in people who haven’t been anywhere. Haven’t been to the Middle East except as white saviors from these great United States from whom all blessings flow. It’s trusting Y’all Queda to figure this out instead of CIA, who isn’t even charted to work in the United States, so everyone in that organization knows what they’re talking about and I cannot say that about Baptists at gunpoint. I may be a Southern, polite preacher’s kid but never underestimate how ready and willing I am to call out anything that feels unfair. Biblical literalism is killing this country one bass ackwards Bible college at a time. If you want to be a minister, go to Harvard, Oxford, or Yale colleges of divinity with the rest of the real grown-ups.
Here’s my pitch for being crazy. Giving my whole ass million to the United States government to help provide infrastructure for moving the US embassy out of Jerusalem. They knew they were mixing church and state unnecessarily and they did it anyway. What in the actual fuck were they thinking? In terms of US interests, we are sitting ducks going down on the wrong side of history. I’d give anything to be able to do something.
I want to change the world as much as Richard Dreyfus told me I would.
Bold of you to assume that I would have the life I have without music at all. I accidentally got an arranged marriage out of it because we told each other we loved, admired, and trusted each other to a level that it’s been a disaster every time we’ve tried to separate. I got this “job,” not unwanted, just problematic and have had it for 10 years. Being together and separate creates a different set of consequences, so the music I listen to varies by what I have to say and how I know it’s going to affect me. For this entry, it will be “Nobody Knows,” by The Tony Rich Project. It expresses our problems greatly, and also explains why she’s the woman I think of when I hear “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” and “Love You Madly,” and that last one is to reclaim it from another face due to pain. She’s a 3D character. 😉
Additionally, I’m sure Mel is upset that I haven’t finished my food entries, because they cut deep (due to tapping into my work history) and I want her to think they’re good. It would help if she heard Beethoven’s ninth symphony instead of the blues (not that there’s anything wrong with the blues, but if you hear it after you cook, you’ve probably fucked up).
If I can impress both of us, then I’ve impressed the rest of our clan because I’m American and she’s Indonesian (living in the UK).
However, I need to process and I’ll tell you the music I listened to at the end and how it inspired this. I’ll say it first and then I’ll say it again. Sometimes you accidentally create a right-hand ring and resent it. I want to be her Lord John Grey and I’m totally her Frank. I want to describe what that’s like in detail for myself in another 10 years. I don’t write about what I do know, I write about what it’s like for me not to get it.
My food entries get more attention than everything else because it’s more universal, but everything else explains a relationship between adults where both are traumatized in different ways and how they act toward each other as adults- when the abuse happened in childhood. My friend Donna wrote a book called “Never the Same,” about kids who lose parents and siblings. It could be a title for abused kids as well. These pages are more important than anyone will ever know, because if I could be more specific, I could reach even more people in the shit with this kind of bond in a more specialized way. It’s a different thing to love someone with a power imbalance this big, because priorities are ironclad out of necessity. You will never be number one on the call sheet, and if you have different romantic partners, you won’t be number two, either.
Even more when the person who is more powerful pretends the imbalance isn’t there until she just can’t anymore because she can’t plan a future, either. Isn’t mindful that though she has a partner, kids, parents, and siblings, our situation is unique to theirs by a wide margin except her partner. Dana and I weren’t a team on this, and neither were they when I actually needed Michael more than her, because only he would know what was up. She has entrusted me and hung me out to dry. I deserved it, and we still can’t get around the facts. The only one that can help me is the one who least wants to do it, and not even because I was an asshole. She doesn’t make me a priority because she can’t.
She’s not a fixer/pleaser in her work life, but she is at home because she feels guilty and no one can lift it. Her power imbalance with herself is the same one she has with me, so when she digs deep, there’s no one to tell her to release them and find more small joys. I need her to have solid memories of everything good about her life so that when she gets hard on herself, she can see how much people love her.
Even me, the one that gets passed over. In part I think that’s because she can’t, because I’m not part of her inner circle and she’d have to figure out a reason she’d need to be in Washington at hours she doesn’t need to be there, because she’s not very good at it…. and now she can’t joke with her husband that she has to go see her sidepiece because she wouldn’t think that was funny, because it’s been long enough for me to resolve those issues and apparently not enough for her. I used to joke that we were having an affair under everyone’s noses, because you can’t imagine how much truth there is to that.
To Michael:
I was only using a euphemism for the adrenaline and dopamine rush and I have been the whole time.
She never did anything inappropriate in case you haven’t been reading over her shoulder. If you had been, I still would have been an absolute jackass because my brain chemicals still would have been turned up to 11, but when I came down you would have realized immediately that I was no threat. I was just high, like other people in your lives except the drugs were street legal. If it didn’t happen to you, too, I can’t imagine why. Seriously. We could write a book together that we couldn’t publish. I asked her if she needed a book like it, but didn’t take in that my part’s done. If you divorce her, no you didn’t and make that clear.
Don’t ever make anything blow up in her face and let her believe that you mean it, the lecture you would have given me that I should have thought of on day one. I said it in the heat of the moment. I never want either of you to think that because I’m a blogger, that means I’m a threat. And even then, I threatened to call for help. I am not trying to be threatened or threatening, I am trying to handle/fix it in myself without hurting her, and I don’t know when I’m leaving breadcrumbs, because I only need 15 minutes to establish what’s okay and what’s not; I’ve realized that my promises to her are bigger than yours by nature of what we do, not who we are to each other. I will promise to keep her even if she doesn’t promise to keep me.
God help your soul no matter how she and I play out, because if we stay apart and I find out you guys divorce, there will be dragon fire because mine is getting stronger every day. If we reconcile and you guys support me the way I support you, then you’re really fucked because then you have to deal with both of us simultaneously. I already know we’re a handful jointly and severally. But, according to the prevailing wisdom, she’s a handful on her own and you’re capable. Good luck and God bless. But know that I’ll love you in a very concrete way until I die, because she’ll let you know what her emotional needs are when she can’t let me for reasons.
The “honeymoon phase” doesn’t last long in most relationships, and we accidentally created a habit where we needed to lean on each other like we were using each other as furniture and both felt threatened enough to run at every chance it was available. I threatened to blow up her life because she blew mine to hell and wouldn’t deal with the fact that she affected my life’s course without accepting that it had played out with an anxious attachment style trauma bonded to an avoidant attachment style. It’s how most people who are abused cope. They don’t know their own attachment styles and love languages because to dive into that means you realize that you’ve been protecting yourself by dealing with everyone else’s bullshit while ignoring your own. It’s too hard and it hurts too much.
When you completely lose who you are, your reality break will dictate how you sway. When your reality breaks as a child because you’ve been sexually or emotionally abused, the abuser and the child form an anxious/avoidant attachment style because the power imbalance is absolute. You’ll search for it all the time, wanting the push pull of being abused and not learning to accept more. I had higher emotional standards for friendship, but not time together. Quality over quantity. When Supergrover got my letters, she read them as “you’re a bad person and that’s why I don’t like you.” I wasn’t judging her, I was making a case. I felt like I had to keep making it over and over because I saw our pattern for what it was and knew it would never break on its own. If you doo what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve allready got.
She couldn’t answer without anger because forgiveness was the story she was telling me while also holding in a lot of anger because she thought she couldn’t trust me anymore & I proved to her beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most important person in my life because of what I do, and it didn’t help because her presence doesn’t help her, because she doesn’t think I think she’s wonderful despite all her flaws and failures. The failures are just where we need to resolve conflict, not where we need to beat up on each other.
I opened up about her so we could resolve everything and move on. She thought I was lecturing her on what a bad person she was. Who would want to get close to someone like that? Love has to be built when you’ve both been thoughtless.
She doesn’t take in that my anxious attachment is causing me pain, I get angry at being ignored for years on end.
Because she can’t take in that I’m a Christian and she’s not, she doesn’t take in that I’m trying to be the peace that calms her by praying for her and she thinks I’m trying to make her life hell.
She ignores the fact that I use her face when I’m praying just to put a personal spin on what God is, the place in me where I can talk about my most epic fails and rise from the ash. Therefore, I am trying to find the place where the peace inside her is also her. I dig into myself to teach her how to love me, trying to lead from the back by laying out all my worst flaws first. One of my valleys of vulnerability is where she’s the choice woven into me like the Impossible Girl on Doctor Who, while also feeding The Master.
I sent her a whole ass essay on why this was, and she thought I was saying she was a bad person. That was the day I listened to Bolero on repeat to slow my heartbeat to a manageable level. I know without a shadow of a a doubt I am more important than her family in some ways, and I’m not knocking any of them. I’m playing on a unique field, and I feel like a goalie who doesn’t know which team she’s playing this week.
I saw a meme that made me laugh for this very reason….. a little kid who was jealous of the other team getting to change colors every week and his mom had to explain to him that they were, in fact, different teams.
(If you can’t handle me at my Supergrover, you don’t deserve me at my Bourdain. I am laughing uproariously. I don’t care what stuff of mine you read, it’s just funny because I hold myself to the same standard. Unfortunately, I’m not that great a writer and I still have to read it.)
It happens more often than any other pattern. The person who holds everything back is attracted to the one who can emote, and the dance of intimacy is fighting with someone you’re completely addicted to in a literal sense. You can’t separate because the brain chemicals when you’re together. It’s not a sweet waltz. It’s the Habanera with emotional guns blazing because the swings are extreme. Those extremes don’t settle any if the relationship is platonic. You can fight with your siblings this way, too, because generally you shut down after abuse and your reactions are that way with everyone no matter how close you are.
I have broken my streak of 60-odd days just to listen to music, sleep, and relax. My body can’t lean towards insomnia forever, so I caught up. My body has a binge/purge relationship with sleeping, so I use music to help me stay awake AND asleep. They’re just different moods.
The alarms on my phone are NI**as in Paris (Kanye and Jay-Z) and Rap God (Eminem). I love both those songs, but the rhythm gets into my head and I can’t go back to sleep, especially when Em gets into 32nd and 64th note patterns while still being able to make out what he’s saying. It’s incredible. I couldn’t do it at gunpoint. I can’t do 64th note melismas while I’m singing without oxygen in the middle, and he did so well he published it and that song is famous across the world. Eminem is the modern-day Bach in that one album, because you cannot tell me that word-based melismas are easier than the ones in Mass in B Minor. Not possible.
If you have gotten to this point, thank you for reading. Each paragraph flowed into another as I was processing out loud the enormous difference between my ideal future and the one I’ve created. INFJs always search for the ideal and generally want relationships where the other person is also interested in it………….. yet will settle for being unhappy because so few people are like us and we don’t know enough to find them. I’m an INFJ. Daniel is an INTJ. Both our realities are broken for different reasons, neither more important than the other.
Daniel said that he had been in love with me for 36 years. I know why, but this is conjecture. He knew to want love from someone who’d give it to him in the way he could hear it, even when Supergrover has needs that trump his, because he knows what it’s like to desperately need help with stories you have to hold inside you while also popping smoke. He would understand when I joked that I was having an affair with Michael’s wife. That she and I share a more important bond so it is what it is whether he likes it or not.
We’re a handful, and he’s capable.
Editor’s Note:
This entry was inspired by Jason Moran’s complicated rhythms on “Ten,” because it helps me make connections faster than Tony Rich. I also listened to Wynton Marsalis’ “From the Plantation to the Penetentiary” and “Let the Bright Seraphim” with Kathleen Battle. It was like listening to a symphony in terms of odd numbers in movements vs. even. I enjoy making the playlist, and she enjoys running to Eminem and blasting Cake. Waking up to Rap God isn’t an accident, and I’ve set it for every morning.
Michael and I are toast (in a very funny way). We know it like the backs of our hands, because one of us forgot our real books because of ADHD and his is coded because he’s a normal person….. and even if I could read from it, I’d have to transpose.
What daily habit do you do that improves your quality of life?
What really helps me is a place of my own. I think about it all day, every day. About how in this house I have one. It is my space and no one is allowed in without permission. There is no social expectation on me to share my bed with anyone.
When Dana and I moved to Houston, not long after I realized that our house was huge enough for Dana and me each to have our own rooms, and I set it up that way. It didn’t have anything to do with my relationship with Dana. It had to do with the fact that we seemed to be exceptional at everything except sleeping next to each other. When I moved into my own room, I slept deeper than I had in years, and it made me a convert. One of the things you can do to make your relationship better is to sleep in separate beds as long as neither one of you are taking it personally. Dana definitely did take it more personally than I did, but also rolled with it, so at this point, I don’t know if my needing space was good for both of us or not. If It was too selfish, I apologize. Cosleeping is just not going to be a part of my life going forward. I have to take care of me in this way or I do not function well.
If Zac and I were on a relationship escalator, the thing that would work in his favor is that he has a huge house with many bedrooms and absolutely no expectation for me to be in his. I am betting that neither one would turn down the other’s invitation, however…….
That’s the difference. Right there. Even in a couple, you need to carve out room to still be the two individuals you used to be.When I could sleep better, I could handle having the rest of my identity being leslieanddana. It wasn’t the relationship I objected to. It was the cultural norm, thinking that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t want to sleep next to her every single night. So, I looked it up. Lots of couples suck at sleeping together, and sleep is too precious to waste.
Not cosleeping is dating energy. It’s as fresh and as hot as you want it to be… But that is my answer. It is not everyone’s. I’m not saying it’s the right way, just my way. At this point in time. I am both too young and too old not to know what’s coming down the pike. If I say never again, the next person I date is going to have a toddler that likes to sleep with his ass glued to my face. Never say never.
It has nothing to do with the way I feel about my current life… and everything to do with the way I sleep. I get night terrors, and I’d rather be alone. They don’t happen often, short and intense. I don’t think I’ve been with Zac long enough for him to see one, because if he did, he would have said something. That’s because I see him so rarely that sleeping next to him is a treat, not an obligation. If we were closer, the novelty would wear off. I can make it work for a night here and there, but in negotiating living with another partner, I need to know it is not demanded of me unless there are extenuating circumstances like a toddler sleeping with his ass glued to my face.
Although now I’m getting old enough that my partner’s kids would be teens/20s or there would be an age gap between us. Not that I am complaining about either thing. It’s just reality. The only thing of which I am certain is that if I do have children, I will not birth them. I know I am physically capable of carrying a child at 45 or 46, but I have no desire at all. Just put it in the negative numbers.
Thinking about the one thing I do every day- being safe in a space of my own- lets me branch out to an enormous degree. My thoughts can run wild because there’s no one to interrupt them (although interruption can be a good thing when I’m going down the wrong road). Being alone allows me to be a better writer because I am living in shifts. I am reacting and reflecting. To take away a space of my own limits rumination, certainly, but it also curbs creativity. I don’t just bitch in these sessions. I’m trying to figure out what’s signal and what’s noise.
For instance, I got a Facebook meme THIS MORNING bitching about the U2 album Apple put on their phones once. That was in 2013. As if that is the worst problem in your world….. to get FREE MUSIC (and if you didn’t want it, you could just delete it).
When I listened to that album, I found one of my favorite songs, “Every Breaking Wave.” Of course my favorite song of 2013 came from that album, but knowing why is above your pay grade. That’s an inside joke, and I know who will laugh when they get here. People who have real problems just roll their eyes at stuff like this, and that’s a large part of the joke.
I remember the conversation surrounding it- not funny until we ran the conversation into the ground a hundred times. Basically it was all about perspective. There’s conflict all over the globe, as well as hunger and a thousand other problems, but you’re cranked up because you lost maybe 150 MB on a 16 GB phone. What the fuck ever.
I have two paths of thought regarding this. The first is that there are so many problems in the world. Why is this something they remember over 10 years later? Alternatively, most people don’t like to get vulnerable. Bitching about U2 is infinitely easier than walking into your own valleys of vulnerability. Even then, I said something along the lines of “honey, I get it. The world is fucked up. But more today than yesterday?” Said person was also using the surface level to express fear and doubt about much bigger problems.
At the time, I was sort of going through a thing vicariously through someone else. A friend of a friend had been murdered. So, of course the U2 album was going to set them off. It was the right thing at the right time to blow off some steam.
It wasn’t that the world had become worse. Ours had.
I think about those kinds of memories all the time in the name of putting them down. I wake up every morning and reassess the day before, and it has been habit for 20 years. Although I haven’t always posted daily. I’m on my 61st or 62nd day of that, trying to get it ingrained as a habit. I was going to talk about writing every day vs. cosleeping, but two things about that. The first is sleeping alone informs everything else. I could not do what I do without rolling over and accessing my tablet first thing. The second is that I already have an entry called “This,” It asked about my collections, and these entries are it for me.
They don’t take up space. In my room.
And now, without further ado, the best thing that came out of the worst thing that Apple has ever done, apparently:
I am going to be writing about very real experiences that ended tragically in suicide in many, not all, but many cases. Don’t read this if that is going to trigger the darkness to rise within you. We don’t need to lose anyone else.
I listen to Iron Maiden A LOT. Almost obsessively, some would argue. And much of that has to do with a quote I heard a long time ago about how music has the ability to take simple words to places that mere words cant go. When you record a song, it’s chordal movement, melody, inflection, tonality, and most importantly the emotion evoked by going from E minor to C to A minor to D minor. God’s saddest chord progression, I always call it. Obviously I learned it from an Iron Maiden song. And so many of their songs, somehow, capture the aesthetic, the horror and the harsh realities of the things we’re asked to do. Take this verse from “Afraid to Shoot Strangers:”
Trying to justify to ourselves the reasons to go should we live and let live forget or forgive But how can we let them go on this way? A reign of terror, corruption must end And we know deep down there’s no other way No trust, no reasoning no more to say.” It’s a total “what the fuck are we even doing here anyway?”
From “These Colours Don’t Run:”
Far away from the land of our birth we fly our flag in some foreign earth we sailed away like our fathers before These colours don’t run from cold bloody war.”
“I guess we’re doing it for ‘Murka but I don’t know why I’m mad at these people.”
The one that hits me the hardest goes as follows, it’s called “The Longest Day.”
In the gloom, the gathering storm abates In the ships, gimlet eyes await The call to arms to hammer at the gates To blow them wide, throw evil to its fate
All summers long, the drills to build the machine To turn men from flesh and blood to steel From paper soldiers to bodies on the beach From summer sands to Armageddon´s reach Overlord, your master, not your God The enemy coast dawning grey with scud These wretched souls, puking, shaking fear To take a bullet for those who sent them here
The world’s alight The cliffs erupt in flame No escape, remorseless shrapnel rains Drowning men, no chance for a warrior’s fate A choking death, enter Hell’s gates
Sliding we go Only fear on our side To the edge of the wire And we rush with the tide Oh, the water is red With the blood of the dead But I’m still alive Pray to God I survive
How long, on this longest day ‘Til we finally make it through?
Steve Harris, who is a trusted student of the history of war and observer of the human condition couldn’t have written it better if I was sitting there dictating to him.
The anxiety of the training “all summers long.” I can still see my dumbass Marines fucking with a western diamond back rattlesnake and letting them get bitten because I knew it would be a dry bite and I hoped they would learn to be 5% less stupid.
“From paper soldiers to bodies on the beach…” We’re a volunteer military now. The “paper soldiers” Steve is referring to is those poor sods that were drafted into the War. Our paper soldiers now are a reclamation of the phrase to mean those of us to have the guts to sign the line when we weren’t forced. All our choice. And then “Armageddon’s reach” whatever middle eastern hell fate directed us. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan. Somalia. Yemen.
I don’t have the space to do a full analysis of these lyrics and the experiences they capture here, but trust me when I say that Steve captured the raw feelings and fears and resolve that you feel.
And perhaps most poignantly, from Paschendale:
Cruelty has a human heart Every man does play his part Terror of the men we kill The human heart is hungry still
I stand my ground for the very last time Gun is ready as I stand in line Nervous wait for the whistle to blow Rush of blood and over we go
You can’t understand war unless you’ve lived it. And it isn’t your fault. We are a volunteer force. This isn’t WWII where my grandfather was drafted, and was eventually discharged for telling his higher ups at one of the prisons why he didn’t shoot someone running for freedom by saying “there’s been enough killing.”
And that was during a time when, even if its war, people were playing by the rules.
Now it’s like Fuck Yo Rules. A box of Lindt chocolates could be an IED. In my time on the ground it wasn’t the guys on fireteams that were the most exposed. It was the logistics guys in their vehicles transporting supplies and such from point A to point B. The enemy did everything it could to blow those vehicles and the brothers and sisters in them to oblivion.
We had a POA for every evolution with a dossier of who would be involved from the turret gunner on down the line. And when those guys got to our side of the world it was a party, because we had thwarted the cocksmokers one more time.
Objectively, I had it easy on the ground. I was almost always in the BAS treating nagging things like back strains and hamstring pulls and the sports medicine like injuries that come from carrying almost your own weight hour after hour. And as such, I don’t have many of the “did you see action” stories.
But you know what I did see? The payoff.
I saw what happened when we got back home and knew we were safe and had time to finally process everything that did, didn’t and almost happened.
We went to our post-deployment screenings 3, 6, and 12 months after we got home. Well that is the ones of us that were home that long. Despite rules to the contrary, a lot of guys were sent back with 9 months of coming back home. And don’t get me wrong, some of these guys didn’t want to be back home. Because the stereotype of the military wife that just waits on her husband to leave so she can cheat—that’s real and fuck those bitches in the very worst way for it. I hope they get a UTI, Herpes and bitten by a copperhead all at the same time.
The names in my phone are funny. If you’re a person I talk to often and are my closest people, the suffix -hausen is added to your name, i.e. Fuckingstirlhausen, Jennyhausen, Mistihausen, mommyhausen. Princesshausen (for my bestie heather). You get the picture. It’s added because my favorite comedy wrestler Donavan Danhausen adds it to the end of almost everything that is deemed to be cool. Also I’m told its an actual German thing.
There’s also a contingency of people in my phone with “Goddammit” in front of their names. They know precisely who they are. Because for a while it was just constant bad news of our guys winning the fight over there only to come back here and lose the war in the most heart breaking way. It got to a point where my lady at the time wanted my buddies to stop calling me because she knew I was going to be crushed to find out that we’d lost someone else. Because she knew I was going to feel like a steaming pile of triceratops shit because I didn’t reach out. I didn’t take that nagging clue to call them to see what was what. I didn’t call when their marriages ultimately failed.
You may say that this is borrowing grief for its own sake. And to that I humbly suggest you do the following in this order:
Leave my yard by taking a right out of the driveway.
Take the curve around to the main street, making sure to stop at said curve and pay the Molly toll by tossing a dog biscuit to an especially, erm, “hefty” Australian Cattle Dog.
When you get to the stop sign, take another right. Go down to hwy 2744 where the turn off is for that cattle sifter.
Go past that pasture about ¾ of a mile until you get to the pasture where the Santa Gertrudis bulls with their horns in tact still are.
Jump the fence.
Smack a bull on its nose.
When the bull goes to toss you, take the horns up the ass and FUCK OFF.
When someone dies in country, or on the ship or even in the hospital, there’s a suddenness that is almost easier to take, because you know their suffering was minimal. When you lose someone to suicide it is the most gut wrenching passing that can befall your brothers and sisters. Because they lost the hardest war of all: the one at home.
And here is something I haven’t told very many people.
Every single time we lose someone to suicide, I start getting the texts and phone calls that “(you’d) better not be next! And heretofore I have maintained that promise, for here I am, dear reader, laying myself bare for you on this page. It is no secret I struggle with alcoholism, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and probably some mental illnesses that don’t have names yet.
There was a time when I called the veteran’s suicide hotline, because I had tried and failed for over 3 months to find a job and just nothing good was coming of it. Because the harsh reality is that so much of what we do in the military that should 1 to 1 translate just doesn’t. Its like we’re speaking not just a foreign language but a dead language.
The biggest challenge I’ve faced since I came home is the struggle to answer the question “who am I now that I’m not HM2 (FMF) Williams the Grumpy Cat anymore?”
Identity.
HM2 Grumpy always had or could find an answer. HM2 Grumpy could anticipate his Flight Surgeons concerns before they ever happened. HM2 Grumpy made sure no one fucked with his Jr guys for things they couldn’t help. HM2 Grumpy knew that he couldn’t pay them more, give them more leave, but we he could do is give them time. So I’m not saying I ever told someone “You need to go to your squadron RIGHT (insert bug eyed meaningful look here) “Yeah Grumps, I think I need to go talk to my Sgt Major about whether I should get a boxer or a pit bull.”
“Good fuck off and don’t come back until tomorrow.”
Now I, like a lot of you reading, am just a guy trying to navigate a world that isn’t sure what to do with us. Sure there’s a fuck ton of forward facing “support for our troops,” but yo, my snake needs rats and my guitars need strings, and my car needs an oil change—help brothas and sistas out. Because that’s what ends up getting us. It’s not even the trauma endured over seas—you can anticipate that. It’s coming home to a largely insouciant audience that gives lip service to being “veteran friendly” but that doesn’t end up translating into anything tangible. And that’s when it happens. When that last vestige of hope falls away. When that guy that was a cousin of an uncle was going to be hiring preferably a veteran welder. And it just doesn’t happen for long enough that you cant take one more drink, or take one more Ambien. You take ALL of the fentanyl and dilauded and whatever else so that the embarrassment and feelings of being a burden will go quiet.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Remember my dears, These Colours Don’t Run. If you can do something for just one or two of our siblings, you will earn their love for life and then who knows how far your one act of kindness can go.
Hopefully far enough for the next graduation, prom, drivers license, one act play, football playoff, singing competition—that one more step down the hill that makes life worth living.
Cruelty has a human heart. But kindness does too.
I would love to take a lot more calls lauding the great works of our brothers and sisters than that gut wrenching call to find out we lost someone else.
Well, not every time. But almost every time. You’re at a gathering of friends and theres always at least one person that finds out you’re ex-military and you can just see the question forming on their lips but a struggle of “do I ask???” And usually they can’t help themselves and ask.
“Did you have to kill anybody.” I sigh, because I fucking hate that question. It was one of the harsh realities I had to struggle with spiritually before I joined, knowing that scenario was going to present itself. You ask yourself day in and out what you think you will do in “that” scenario.
Before you are assigned to a Marine Corps unit as a Corpsman, you go through a 9 week course called Field Medical Training Battalion. It’s essentially a crash course in being a grunt. You familiarize yourself with the M4 and 9mm and 50 cal. You go through what’s called Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. And it’s not a video game situation. Were armed up with paintball guns, and the instructors play the part of the locals/Taliban.
That’s one of the mindfucks about MOUT. Who is a civilian just trying to make schwarmas, and who wants to kill me? And heres another mind fuck—these mother fuckers don’t play fair. They will use “civilians” as explosive devices.
Especially children.
The kids will come up to the Marines on patrol asking for candy or whatnot but they’re really a lure to get you to drop your guard long enough for them to shoot you from a second story window. Look up then down then up again was the training mantra…. but MOUT was a humbling experience in just how quickly it could all be over. I remember one of my guys getting shot in the leg. I went to pull him behind a wall to kwik clot the wound and I didn’t get down low enough and took a paintball pellet to the neck. If it was real, I just died. I didn’t sleep that night.
So to truly answer your question you have to start back behind the wire.
You could be playing football and grilling hamburgers when your fire team is called to gear up. A fire team is a group of 5-7 that patrol together. It consists of either a Sgt or Corporal that’s the Fire Team leader.
You’ve got a doc, an EOD guy and the rest are gunners. So you’re playing football and talking shit about how Tony Romo would always break your heart and then the next moment you have to go put all your gear on and get ready to go complete a mission. As Doc that sucks even worse because you wear everything the Marines wear plus your med bag.
You’re responsible for making sure your whole fire team has certain things in certain places. Their tourniquet on the top right; kwik Clot in the right cargo pocket. Things like that.
Not knowing when your team is going to be called sucks, but knowing 12 hours ahead of time is worse. All that time waiting around to be under the stress of “is this the last thing Ill ever do?”
Some of my grunts thrived on the anticipation of getting to kill bad guys. That was part of the mission. And they had no moral qualms about it at all. They saw it as a very clearly black/white/them or me, no fuck that these people want to take me from my wife and kids and they can go fuck themselves. So in that aspect, the boys’ conscience is totally clear and the more people they shoot the better. I don’t think that makes us sociopaths. I think it makes us like Dexter [Dexter was a sociopath.]. Vigilante killers of people that need to die, minus the vigilante part.
I am a corpsman, so I am not wired that way. Every time we went out my prayer was 1 that I come back alive, and 2 that I bring everyone back with me, and 3 not to have to use either of my firearms.
On the shittiest day of my life we went out just like any other one. The mission was to go into town and give hep A and b, hep c , smallpox and anthrax vaccinations. My spot in line was last, giving hep a/b.
I don’t even know why there was a lull in the line. I think we had run out of smallpox spears or something, so I was looking around.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw it happening.
Dipshit wasn’t even trying to be subtle. So without thinking, safety goes off; I used my marine’s shoulder to balance my weapon on and I shot the fuck stick through his eye. Then I yelled “FIRE FIRE FIRE” which was the alarm for a bomb. EOD snatched the kid and worked their magic. My first trained response was to look for others because they are human hyenas and not averse to sacrificing one for the sake of the many.
At that point the field ex was terminated and it became about securing the town. No one was hurt, and that’s all I remember of the post action. We all came back across the wire and that was that [also terrifying that you have to feel like you’re in that much danger to feel comfortable in that much danger].
I can’t tangibly measure what my cortisol levels were. I know when I came back I was like “holyfuck holyfuck HOLYFUCK.” And I couldn’t get still. I couldn’t stop shaking.
I cried because now I knew I was capable of taking a life. Commander Baker, our on site Psychiatrist, talked to me for about two hours about innocuous stuff; the first Van Halen album; why the cowboys can’t win in December; why The White album should have only been one album of 14 songs. He gave me some Xanax, ambien and dilauded and sent me to a drug induced sleep. The next day they handed me my down chit, which meant I couldn’t go past the line for 6 days. So all I really had time to do was think.
And one of the things I thought about the most is that regardless of what we think over here, over there, we’re the heels and they’re the babyfaces. They are the heroes of their country trying to rid it of these arrogant westerners that think their culture is so superior to their own. They have families and dogs. And that family and dog hated me. I took someone’s dad, husband, favorite uncle, drinking buddy.
A day doesn’t pass where I don’t think about it at least once. And that’s part of why I drink like I do. Because when I’m sober it comes back to haunt me, and when I’m drunk I can let it go and forgive myself for doing what had to be done……………………………………
Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been here to see The Cubs win their first world series in a century; hear the first new Guns n’ Roses music in 17 years; to get to the point where I played 50 shows a year. And most importantly to be able to see my kid graduate high school, to make the very brave decision to come out as trans; to develop into this fabulous artist, to see my sister realize her dream of having a goat farm; to be able to help my mom through her post cancer recovery.
And to get to marry you.
And now im going to go cry.
Editor’s Note: I have been sitting on this for a while, because I thought I had something to say here. I don’t. It’s perfect on its own. I’m still crying.
Stories That Are All True 