What Am I Really Trying To Say

Dave Chappelle, What Are You Doing?

2012-01-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

It should go without saying that I've never created anything as successful as the Chappelle Show. I've never toured the world with my music. My words float around the Internet, but who knows who's actually reading them. Mostly I create when I feel inspired but I wouldn't consider myself an Artist with a capital A. Be that as it may, like most fans I am able to recognize greatness in a performer and Dave Chappelle is undeniably great. Which is, I suppose, why it was ultimately disappointing to watch him rely completely on that gift and charge $55 dollars for what amounted to two and a half hours of stream of consciousness humorous observations and an informal Q&A.

I was genuinely excited to see Chappelle at The Independent in San Francisco last night and despite what I'm about to write, and despite it's flaws, it was the kind of show that made me leave with a face sore from having laughed more continuously than I have in years. How many comedians can come in to a room, seemingly completely unprepared and command an audience through out the entire set?

"I felt funny when I booked this show," was one of the fist things that came out of Chappelle's mouth as he rubbed his forehead under a green knit beanie. He looked tired, but not uncomfortable even through the punctuated silences between his sentences. You got the feeling he was regretting having booked 3 days straight. Still when he was on, he was on fire. You could see the pieces of information forming together as he spoke, his delivery so nuanced even his mistakes seemed somehow planned.

During the longer pauses he would take slow drags from his cigarette and watch as people walked past the stage to get to the bathrooms. If he saw something that interested him he'd engage the person with varying degrees of success. The best of these interactions was with a couple who had come in late. "There's no one more arrogant than a guy who shows up late because he was getting some pussy," Chappelle laughed through a cloud of smoke. "He just just walks around with that look on his face that says, 'I've fucked more recently than anyone in this room!'"

Something else that threw me off was how of good of shape Chappelle appeared to be. That may sound weird, but body building and comedy are two worlds that rarely if ever meet. Much of comedy comes from being the underdog and there's something decidedly unfunny about a person who you think could whoop your ass. I wasn't the only one who noticed. Toward the end of the show a woman yelled out, "why are you so buff?"

"Well," Chappelle paused for a moment and smiled, "I live on a farm that doesn't make anything, so I have a lot of free time to do things. Like work out." Hard to argue with that.

His set went about 50 minutes long and he ignored two prompts from the staff to wrap things up so the late show could get seated. Apparently he's become known for this and while I'd probably never refuse more time in his presence, he didn't say anything past the two hour mark that really stuck with me aside from admitting he had no idea who Tim Tebow was. That made my night.

After the show you could hear the grumbling in the crowd as we poured in to the street. People felt cheated. Everyone laughed but I think we all expected more. We came to see greatness and what we got, while entertaining, left us unsatisfied.

My sincere hope is that Dave is using these shows as an opportunity to flush out material for a new special or a more regular touring schedule. But if that is the case, the price of admittance should reflect the amount of effort put in to the material. Head down, staring at the stage, bathed in a cool blue light, one of this generations greatest comedians said to himself as much as to anyone in the audience, "it's hard to make a comeback, man. It's real fucking hard." I can't even imagine.

The Weepies, Shots, and the War on Plastic.

2010-10-25T12:18:00.000-07:00

Waiting in line outside The Great American Music Hall to see The Weepies last weekend, my friend Rachel found ourselves standing behind a boisterous aging hippy and her teenage brood who were having a spirited conversation ranging from the pros and cons of glitter based makeup to the popularity of the fedora in Brazil.

Once inside the hall we ending up occupying the same space to the left of the stage by a row of tables that I decided was both a makeshift seating area and the perfect place to set a jack and coke along side a delicious plate of garlic fries. The hippy woman, tall with long blonde hair that was just beginning to turn grey, almost regal in her loosely wrapped red velvet dress, slowly sipped on a neat golden brown double while the teens lay in a random pile on the ground taking turns giving each other massages and sitting back against a faux marble pillar.

At first I thought, I wish I was on drugs too, but the more I observed this unlikely crew the more I thought they were just naturally unconcerned with what people thought about them. That's a real gift these days, especially in this country, and even more so in San Francisco where the legacy of personal expression for the sake of freedom from decades past has, in this era of tweets and hits, desolved in to something that feels more contrived and calculated.

I like weirdos though. I wish I was weirder. I wish that part of my brain that tells me I have to be this and that to these people and another thing to those people so that we can all just get along could be carved out. But I suppose that's just a much of me as what kind of music I like and what kind of art catches my eat. Perhaps it can be trained and refined but it can't be switched on and off.

About halfway through the set, during a break Steve Tannen, the husband half of The Weepies duo, took a sip of water from a clear keg cup. The hippy lady, who had migrated to the middle of the crowd in front of the stage, yelled out, "Don't drink out of plastic!"

That's not coffee.

I groaned and laughed to myself as did a few others around me, in nonverbal agreement that it seemed kind of rude to try and force your beliefs on others without them inviting the discourse beforehand, especially if that person is trying to entertain hundreds of other people who have paid for the pleasure.

Steve, who hadn't heard her clearly, squinted out at the audience and asked, "What was that?"

"I said don't drink out of plastic!"

Steve and his wife Deb both laughed and he replied with a smile, "Theoretically I totally agree." And after a brief dramatic pause he looked down and said, "But there's no water in the glasses here, only whisky."

From the side of the stage, one of the venue staffers appeared as if by magic with a shot glass and set it down on a stool next to Steve. To the cheers of the crowd he threw it back and the moment was passed and the music continued.

The world needs more people like this. People who voice themselves, even if others don't agree. Less people like me who would rather traffic just moves along smoothly. It was odd and maybe out of place but had the hippy lady really done anything wrong? What are we if we don't follow what's in our hearts? And could I really have expected any less in a city where, even at the music venues, people ask why there isn't a compose bin next to the recycling?

Still better than California public transportation.

Carl Sagan Might Save You Life

2010-10-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. - Carl Sagan

A friend pointed me to this quote by after I had posted another mind-bendingly succinct and poignant observation that Sagan had made about how learning the science and mechanics of love in no way made the the feeling of it any less precious. In another era Sagan would have been called a sage and a philosopher but today he's probably more remembered as the guy with the funny voice that made videos my generation ignored during middle school science classes. Which is a shame because the more I read about him the more I think he deserves a higher seating in our collective consciousness. He was a scientist, philosopher, and humanist of the highest calibre, believing that the more we could understand about the universe around us, the more we could understand about the universe within us.

A few words about the proposed mosque near the 9/11 site

2010-08-23T18:21:00.001-07:00

Seriously America, you are starting to piss me the fuck off. Stop this idiotic tea party reactionary group think and take a moment to really analyze what it is you think you fear so much.

When you say that putting a mosque near the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack is insensitive or some how a slap in the face of the survivors and family members of the victims, you are saying that all of Islam is defined by the radical extremist minority. It's like saying that building a new church is somehow promoting the fanatical anti-gay protesting of the Westboro Baptist Church crack-pots. You know, those assholes who go and protest in front of the funerals of American soldiers with signs that say things like "God hates fags" and "thank God for IEDs". Do you associate your belief as a Christian with those kinds of people? No. You don't. And the vast majority Muslim world doesn't associate itself with those who seek to cause chaos and death in the name of their faith.

So stop it. Just stop being scared of things you haven't taken any time to actually understand. It's embarrassing and it's just plain upsetting to someone who put their life on the line for a country that after 234 years, still can't seem to live up to it's founding principles of religious and personal freedoms.

Paris Hilton, You're the Worst Warzone ever.

2009-10-15T08:42:00.001-07:00

Zack and I decorated our metal living box last night. Using a variety of children's stickers and a dry erase marker we turned our plywood and metal furniture into art. Juvenile, penis themed art, but art none the less. So what if my locker now sports a shimmering glitter based Superman ass-punching some faceless Cobra operative? Who cares that I turned a stern and well defined Duke into a comically well endowed hermaphroditic chorus girl in mid can-can? This is just how we roll.
This is also not the first time we've modified our shanty existence to make spending the remainder of this deployment more palpable. When we first arrived during the hottest days of summer or primary concern was to lower the room temperature in the box from microwave to easy bake oven. Taking the (usually suspect) advice of other soldiers in similar living conditions we took wooden shipping pallets and whatever other nick-knacks we could scavenge and stacked them on the roof, the idea being that if the sun wasn't beating down directly on naked metal we might feel some indoor temperature improvement. I can't say if this actually worked or not because I recall laying on my bed half naked in a pool of my own juice both before and after the modifications were made but there is something to be said for the psychological benefits of taking control of any adverse situation. Either way it makes me laugh when ever I look up and see a mattress on my roof.

--

I suppose my biggest gripe with this job isn't that people are actively trying to kill me, it's that they are passively trying to kill me and I feel like a little more effort should go into my untimely demise. If a man (or woman) puts on a uniform, waits in ambush and attacks my truck with an RPG then sticks around to at least fire off a few rounds in my direction, I'm certain I can respect this. This is a person of conviction. A person willing to sacrifice their safety and quite possibly their life to do battle against an enemy possessing superior armament and training. It's at least noble in it's own way. But it's not like that. It's like my team is driving down a road and whether or not my truck or a van full of civilians is hit by a hidden IED on the side of the road is just coincidence. It's lazy and it makes me clench my jaw when I sleep.
I don't blame them for choosing these tactics. It's guerrilla warfare 101. I can't say I'd do anything differently if I was in their position. As it is, I've learned quite a bit about being a terrorist, insurgent, or freedom fighter or whatever you call it depending on your political beliefs. I definitely feel much more prepared now for the zombie apocalypse than I did three years ago. Ultimately it just feels like no one really gives a fuck anymore. These days anybody who's anybody knows the best place to insurge ones self against an American is in Afghanistan. Iraq is the Paris Hilton of war zones. We keep throwing money at it but no one really knows why anymore.

--

The most powerful of our senses is that of smell (I have no scientific evidence to back this up). Usually we're thankful for this. Perfume worn by a stranger can bring back memories of young love, the scent of fresh baked bread can make your mouth water and forget why you ever thought it was so important to count carbs. There are so many reasons to appreciate this gift, and then there is the Diyalla river. Meandering passively through our area of operation this liquid shit factory serves many functions for the local population. It's a bath, faucet, toilet, and highly effective garbage disposal, often simultaneously. They use it's water to grow their crops and quench the thirst of their live stock. It is the umbilicus from which this region feeds to survive and it is also completely disgusting. The color and consistency of cheap powdered chocolate milk, its waters are often choked with any number of questionable refuse coated by a distinctly pungent dark green slime. Everyone seems perfectly content to let the river, like much of the rest of this area, remain a complete dump.
The relative importance of this can be looked at a few different ways. First, the why things look here are not always the way things are. If their are violent militias roaming the streets at night threatening your family, your primary concern probably isn't whether or not an egret is going to choke on the plastic wrapper you just threw in the river. Second... well there isn't really a second, the point is that outward appearances mean shit if you can barely feed yourself.
The roads we travel are the Iraqi equivalent to highway strip malls. They are built and maintained as places of commerce with small pockets of residential areas periodically intermixed. It isn't much of a surprise that the scenery I see most often isn't beautiful. Beauty is in rare supply here even when it is actively cultivated. Also I assume this is a poorer than average district based on the other regions I've lived in but honestly it's hard to tell the difference sometimes. But regardless of the average daily income of the immediate populous, I can guarantee that the government money being spent on projects like building the giant (useless/ugly/traffic causing) brick archway over the main road heading south would be much more wisely placed in an effort to clean the waterways that, you know, keep people alive since they live in a fucking desert. Maybe I've over exaggerating and it's unfair to judge this place by the environmental standards I would back home. If the locals don't care, why should I? What do I know? All my water is bottled.

--

Getting ready to come home is giving me a man-period. One moment I'm cranky and irritable for no reason and then I'm happy. I mull over things too much. I'm always tired but it's almost impossible to nap. I have the attention span of a 4 year old. I'll watch 15 minute increments of movies (but only comedies, mind you, anything slightly dramatic sends me into an emotional tailspin) and then turn them off with out finishing. Basically I'm a fucking mess. I'd like to say I have a good reason but honestly I can't think of one. Of course I miss my family and friends but I talk to them regularly enough to not feel totally out of the loop. I eat enough and don't skip meals. I have slacked off on the exercise because my motivation has begun to wane (I also have a secret fear that my neck size no longer matches my body, and this has inexplicably ruined weight lifting for me.)
Soldiers are great companions for many things but being there to support you for baring a broken soul in not one of them, nor should it really be expected, this isn't share-share time at feelings camp. The closest thing I can get to a therapy session is a talking with the guys on my truck while we try and whittle away the hours we spend driving around God knows where doing other peoples jobs for them. These conversations are frank, heartfelt, and rude in the way you feel you can speak to your best friend or a sibling. We've spent so much time together poking at each others issues and shortcomings that there has grown the sense you know more about the person you're speaking with than they do. Not that this is entirely surprising considering one of the only things I'm sure about human nature is that we lie to ourselves far better than we are able to lie to others.
It's a not a nurturing environment in the traditional sense but it's nice to know you can cut out the bullshit that gets stacked on top of what we really mean make sure no one gets offended when we talk to one another. Soldiers don't have that problem. Men are pigs, women lie and somehow we make it work or we don't and you're only worse off if you repeat the same mistake twice. There's a good deal of relief to be found in accepting how completely imperfect you are. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you you're a shit bag to your face to center your chi.

Bombs for my Birthday

2009-09-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in between sleep and conscious thought in the wee hours of the morning the sound of a cat being bludgeoned to death repeatedly echos throughout the steel walls of my living box. From a purely analytical standpoint you'd expect this to be a singular event. Bludgeoning, screams, silence. But what is happening is that every 15 minutes, or however long it takes me to just start to fall asleep, someone or something is causing a cat to scream bloody murder no more that 10 feet from my wall. I'm torn. Half of me really wants to find out what the fuck is going on so that I can make it stop. I have a gun. I have an assortment of knives. I even have an ASP, a telescoping baton, and I'm positive there isn't a single thing that I will encounter that I can't negotiate some solution to this issue. The other half is asleep and doesn't want to get up or do anything that doesn't involve dreaming about Natalie Portman making me a sandwich. This half isn't even fully convinced that what it is hearing isn't just being made up. Like my idea that the inside of the building across the street from my room labeled "Filipino DFAC" actually houses cage fights, Blood Sport style. Which, I've decided either means I'm racist or confirms my suspicion that every other culture on earth is having more fun than Americans are. Regardless sleepy half is winning and so I continue to lay unmoving creating cat based scenarios. Then as unexpectedly as it began, all external noise ceases and I'm left with silence and a lot of unnecessary questions. I settle for sleep instead.

--

It's a bit of a sport for the local kids to sit by the side of the road and wave at us as we drive by. Well I use the term "wave" loosely as it could really encompass any number of gestures from breaking in to a full sprint along side our trucks while smiling and shouting to flipping us off. Suffice to say, the youth of Iraq spend a lot of their time on and around roads doing very little with their lives. They are mostly waiting for the rare convoy with the sympathetic hearts and minds gunner who likes to throw candy as he drives by. This is never us. But either it happens more often than I imagine or the local kids are just incredibly resilient and hopeful. Or bored. Complicating this interaction further is the fact that somewhere along the history of our involvement with this country, somebody thought it would be a good PR move to toss out soccer balls for a group of eager young Iraqis and we've been paying the price ever since. The universal sign for "give me a fucking football already" is to scream at the top of one's lungs and hold one's hands out around the outline of the imaginary sphere of hoped for ball. This is a very serious affair. No kid just kind of puts his hands up absently at the off chance he may actually get what he wishes. No, you can see it in their eyes. They believe that the course of the rest of their lives hinges upon that very moment. Somehow everything will be OK if they can just... get... that... ball. I don't get it. It's not like they can't get go to the store and get a ball. This country isn't that poor. It makes me wonder if there is some kind of black market soccer ball trade, some sort of Bombs for Balls program.

--

I'm not sure if this is really worth mentioning but thinking back over these two deployments I've realized that I've had a few notable encounters with goats (to every one of your that took that the wrong way, you're the sick bastard, not me). I've had staring contests with them, watched them be blown up like a ballon with a tire pump, seen them topple ass over head down the bank of a canal into the water, and now finally I've seen what happens when you run one over with a semi-truck. And I don't mean like I saw some random days old road-kill as we drove by at 40 mph, I mean I literally stared at a goat wedged halfway under the tire of a massive flat bed as we crept by avoiding the throngs of curious pedestrian onlookers. My gunner asked over the head set, "what do you think the last thing that went through it's mind was?" And I said, "Well... judging by what I'm seeing, I'd say it was his anus." I love a good set up.

--

Since my 21st birthday every subsequent birthday has paled in comparison. That weekend at the Frog and Peach in San Louis Obispo I played my first live show, completely drunk, partied in three different cities and got my nipples covered in whipped cream (unfortunately that picture survives). It's not that I haven't enjoyed my birthdays since, it's just that they've all failed to imprint the same lasting (good) memories as that most excellent day back in 2003. This year, however, Iraq got me something special. Not surprisingly, Iraq and I aren't always on the best of terms. I say it's the worst country in the world, it tries to kill me, I say I want to see what it would look like after a nuclear strike glasses Baghdad, it tries to kill me, I see a cute puppy while on patrol, it tries to kill me. And so on. But for one beautiful day in late August we put aside our differences and Iraq gave me what every boy really wants for his birthday, dangerous explosives!

Our task that day was to head over to FOB Hammer as an escort for an EOD element. The day was shaping up to be just another dusty scorcher, which is what I'd planned on anyway so I wasn't too disappointed. Still, there were a couple bright spots. We played a game of "guess Doc's age" and everyone was at least 2 to 3 years on the young side which either means I don't look old or I'm immature. I was strangely OK with either. As we were waiting to get our gear back on and leave to go back home something strange happened. I was sitting in the truck reading when I noticed a change, slight as it was, a degrees shift in temperature. I glanced out the window and I couldn't put my finger on it but the ground looked darker somehow, like there was something blocking the sun, something that reminded me of home. I looked up and there is was. A cloud! One big, fat, juicy, gray, cloud out of no where had drifted over us. I took my sunglasses off and turned my face to the sky and began to feel tiny drops of rain splash against my skin. Guys started laughing and dancing around like they'd won something as the drops steadily increased in size to the point where they almost hurt as they hit. Just as quickly as it arrived the rain stopped and the cloud moved on and the sun returned to make everything terrible again with the added joy of increased humidity but it was worth it to have any kind of change. Really though, this story isn't about meteorological phenomenon. On to the explosion.

As we were rolling out the gate we got word that a IED had been found on the route that we were taking to get back home. Since we had EOD assets with us anyway we became the de-facto response team and so made our way over to the grid we'd been given. Before anyone gets too excited let me remind you that the Army is the worlds leader in taking things that are awesome and making them suck. Jumping out of airplanes, shooting automatic weapons, living in a big steel box, the Army has ruined them all for me. That being said nothing can ruin blowing something up... except expecting a bigger explosion.

The offending agent in question turned out to be a small anti-personel mine that had been placed on the side of the road. This couldn't have been meant for us since even the most rookie insurgent knows the armor on our trucks wouldn't have even been scratched by it. Regardless, it had to go. So EOD took out it's Johnny-5 bot and placed a small explosive charge on it's extending hook arm. J-5 is remote controlled but watching it move it kind of like watching a giant cockroach, it skitters along on it's mini tank tracks and then suddenly stops, shifts directions and it off again, then stops as if sniffing out crumbs of food. The rest of the team pulled security around the perimeter in case the mine was just a decoy for something more complex and as the minutes passed the initial excitement of knowing something was about to violently combust began to leave me along the trails of sweat rolling down my neck. After about 30 minutes we were ordered back to the trucks as J-5 retreated from the spot where it had placed the charge next to the mine. I had a clear view from my seat and I sat forward as EOD gave the order to fire. The two explosives went up in a remarkably un-Hollywood burst of dust that was as underwhelming to watch as it was to hear. When something explodes I want to feel it in my chest. I want to be knocked over. I want to have permanent brain damage. No such luck this time, but regardless it was a nice break from the monotony and as far as birthday gifts go, I figure this country could have done much worse.

--

I ran up to the top of the sandy berm on the western border of our base and instead of taking the long way around a winding dirt path like I usually do I decided to go right up the 136 stairs that reach skyward temple like a short way from my living box. I had avoided doing this since we arrived here because of all the parts of my body I feel need work, my legs aren't top on the list and because of what I feel is a justified fear of tripping and falling 100 meters down a 50 degree slope. Iraqi construction which as a general rule doesn't follow the strictest of standards fails most spectacularly in the arena of assisting locomotion to elevated positions. The effect of looking at steps as you run up them one by one is vertigo inducing under the best conditions, coupled with my decision to make my first summit attempt long after it had gotten dark out, by the halfway point I began to second guess the value of the activity in which I was currently engaged. I took my clear lensed Oakleys off to try and get a better view but it only served to bring what was making me dizzy more clearly in focus which magnified the problem. Of course I didn't just stop like an intelligent person would, no, the same ego driven logic that has landed many a fool begrudgingly into youtube stardom took me step by step closer to my goal, which I suppose was to prove that I could run up stairs at night or to become more physically fit, or something like that. About 20 steps from the top that familiar surge of adrenaline blurred out any doubt that this in fact was a fantastic idea and as I reached the top and turned around and looked down at the dull orange bulbs illuminating my temporary home I bent over panting with my hand on my knees. I scanned the horizon enjoying my small victory and wondering just how far my line of sight was from this position. I could see for miles, which meant I could be seen for miles. I felt the sudden shiver a soldier gets when he realizes he's made a tactical error. Then I remembered why I hate this country... and that I had to walk back down all those damn stairs.

--

Two reasons I'm sure that evolutionarily speaking I'm a dead end: 1. My natural initial response to being startled is to scream like a girl and fail my arms around. 2. My natural initial response to the sound of an incoming rocket is to kind shift my body weight to one side and crouch a little like I'm dodging a Nerf football that I didn't expect to be thrown at me. Genius.

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

2009-07-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

It's quite these days. This isn't the Iraq I remember. I mean it is still miserably hot and filled with people who don't like me, but the passion is gone. Now when a local flips me off he doesn't even fear for his life, where's the fun in that? Tom finally caught Jerry but he spent so much time on the chase that he forgot why he wanted him in the first place. Yeah I got it. It's time for the Iraqis to flex a little national pride. It's officially their country now. We are but guests now and believe me in most places that's exactly how we are treated. But there's a undercurrent of distain flowing through these city streets. It's as if society here is at once on the brink of sudden collapse as well as eternally unchangeable, like we came and ruined everything while doing absolutely nothing these last six years.

--

With barely any real danger to be concerned by, I've become jumpy at little things. Ok, a M109 Paladin isn't exactly a little thing. But it's friendly enough when it's not pointed at you. The problem is, for what ever reason, they have been firing them off at odd hours of the night over the last week. These artillery tanks fire a 155mm round that produces a testicle retracting kaboom accompanied by a hollow organ rattling shock wave that is especially exciting if you aren't expecting it as you come out of your door at 10:30 at night. At least I didn't need to walk all the way to the bathroom anymore.

--

There is something biting me. Not right now but at night occasionally there is something that bites my hands and toes and legs and feet and leaves red itchy little bumps that I scratch in my sleep and wake myself up. I hate these things. I have no idea what they are. Some people call them sand fleas, but apparently those don't exist, at least according to the internet. So there is this mystery bug that bites me in my bed and when I stand for more than a few minutes in one place outside and I have no idea what it looks like or how to destroy it and it's entire family. This must be what it feels like to become schizophrenic.

--

With 10 months left in the service I spend a lot of time looking forward to what's next and looking back on what I've experienced and how it's shaped the person I am today. To say that this job has been an eye opening experience would be the grossest of understatements. I grew up in a world where parents stayed together, kids graduated high school and went to college, and arguments were solved with words not fists. That's not to say things always happened that way but when they didn't it was the exception to the rule and I could always turn back to my family, stare normal in the eye and let the worries of other peoples lives fade away. It was a great place to become an adult but like too much of any good thing, while enjoyable, it persuaded me to turn a blind eye to reality. Now my family is a volatile mixture of delinquents, thieves, liars, immigrants who gained their citizenship through the service, farm boys from Kansas, runaways, and more than a couple sociopaths. It's not always easy but dealing with that diversity teaches you that there are not good or evil people. We are all just people, capable of incredible kindness and terrible hate. And someone who you think you hate can turn out to be your best friend.

One of my favorite memories from my training days was sitting in this terrible mexican joint on Fort Benning that was within walking distance from the airborne school barracks. I would head up there every few days and order a beer and something that tried to pass for carnitas and just sit by myself and watch what ever was on the television hanging above the bar. I'd hit on the waitress who as I recall was neither particularly good looking nor interesting but conversation of any kind was good to have. My only friend that I'd come from AIT to airborne with had failed the PT test to get in... or rather her had been failed because he pissed off the instructor and they counted his push ups to 42 and then stayed there regardless of how correct his form was. You need 43 minimum to get in. This is called joining the 42 club.

My ritual continued this way for weeks. Beer, quasi-carnitas, and the wooing of the shrew. On our last week of training, sitting there at the bar I noticed another guy from my company come in and sit at a booth over against the wall to my left. I didn't know him personally but he had the reputation of being a bit of a country bumpkin and not very friendly. I went back to my food until about five minutes later when another figure came storming in the room and came to a halt directly in front of country's booth. I looked at and recognized the figure of a girl who I also knew by reputation, the kind you get by indiscriminately sleeping with anything that walks, and immediately my interest was peaked. Let me clarify first that I really do not care what other people do with their bodies. I'd heard about this girls exploits and the various names she was called and I remember thinking how typical it was that she did exactly what guys wanted but then they would turn around and look down on her... I'll save my feelings about sex rolls and the poor state of American sexual intelligence for another time though.

Standing with her hand on her cocked hip, with out a word she presented a home pregnancy test stick from her pocket and slammed it down on the table. Thinking back on that later I realized how those tests are taken and though "eew". But in the moment I was rapt which curiosity. Country took a bite of his taco looked at the stick and without even looking up said through a mouth full of food, "That shit ain't mine." Oh man, this was going to be some Jerry Springer type shit. I wasn't even trying to hide the fact that I was watching now. I had completely turned on my bar stool to watch the scene unfold while I sipped on my beer. What I expected to happen, having her explode in to some kind of white trash tirade, didn't. She angrily shot her hand out and grabbed the stick and was gone. Country looked up at me and I raised my eye brows signaling that unspoken male understanding that woman are generally completely incomprehensible. The end of his mouth curled into a half grin and shrugged as he went back to the business of consuming.

I later found out that he was not the first or the last of the guys she pulled this move on that day. I found this at once tragic and hilarious, and that is the Army to me. A place so ordered and regimented that you get to a point where you really have to just expect the unexpected. The undercurrent of human needs and wants covered by the gloss and shine of medals and uniforms, its a universe rife with extremes. I'll miss it I'm sure, but at the same time I'll probably spend the rest of my life getting as far away from it as I can.

These Endless Numbered Days

2009-06-10T08:39:00.000-07:00

Touching down on the tarmac I looked out my window noted passivly that we hadn't crashed in a giant fire storm of jet fuel and jagged metal scraps. Having not been granted my one wish upon returning to theater I sat back in my seat and pushed the slumbering ox of a staff sergeant off my shoulder for what I hoped would be the last time before we deplaned. The sour remains of what had once been 200 happy vacationing soldiers oozed into the fading afternoon sun light to begin the long and arduous process of getting from Kuwait to Baghdad International Airport and points beyond. There's likely no fix for it. Processing that many moving bodies is a nightmare. Compounded by the fact that we are salaried and that we get paid on the 1st and 15th regardless of output and that our movement liaisons likely acquired their position by being deemed unfit to serve in any other capacity, I had prepared myself to spend at least a week trying to get back to my unit. It gave me time to think back and unravel the last two weeks I'd spent in various stages of intoxication over the northern half of California.

Leave is fascinating, like a biopsy of the tissue of my friends lives. I get a little piece to look at a couple times a year and try to paint the bigger picture of their experience since I've been away. We're all growing older, finishing school, girls I use to date are getting married and even more frighteningly, reproducing. I get asked a lot about the war and my opinion on this and that. It bothers some soldiers to have to talk about work but I figure I'm the closest thing to a military expert that most people I know have. Why wouldn't you refer to someone with first hand knowledge? It was so nice to put on clothes that were appropriately designed for the weather, eat meat that I recognized, and of course get behind the wheel of a normal car... then turn the traction control off and put it in to a four wheel drift in skyline forrest on my way to Chipotle! (that absolutely never happened)

I was surprised to find that my tolerance for alcohol had stayed pretty much the same as before I left which either means I'm just genetically pre-dispositioned to party (highly likely) or that I've just pickled myself. I was reminded however that it is a terrible Idea to bar hop with people who are friends with the bar tenders. Taco's, however, are never a bad idea, especially on Tuesdays when they are a dollar at Chivo's in San Luis Obispo. In fact the seven $1 tacos I ate may have been what saved me from blacking out and dying in a gutter on Higuera St. I spent the next day recovered and buying ridiculous amounts of clothes from my favorite surf shops. I know I wont get to wear them until November but I don't care, retail therapy is still therapy.

One of my best friends got married and I got to finally wear my kilt. It was a big hit, except with the guy with the bored looking wife at my table who asked me if it was some kind of gag. Yes, centuries of tradition in the land of my ancestors is some pretty funny shit. Not so funny when a thousand drunk men in skirts come charging at you with the blades of their claymores glinting in the hazy morning sunshine of the last day of your life! Laugh then Mr. Stocks and Bonds. Several gin and tonics later I still could not be dragged on to the dance floor by my own mother and I thought how strange it is that I want attention so bad but am still so shy about certain things. She asked me if I was sad, it must have shown in my face that I was in a way. Beneath every joy I had while home there was always this tiny nagging voice telling me how temporary it all was. That every moment I spent took me closer to being far away again. The invincibility of youth wears off slowly and you start to see your parents as people who will not always be around and sometimes it just becomes too much to handle out of no where. Sometimes I feel like I sold off some of the best days of my life that I could have spent getting to know these people who have taken the last 26 years of their life doing everything they can to make my life easier. How do you repay that if you aren't around to go fishing or to eat lunch with?

Just before leave was over I went up to Alameda with my dad to see my grandmother and while I was at her house I walked upstairs and in to my late aunt Sue's old room. I don't think I'd ever really been in there before. When she was alive I felt like she was a woman who enjoyed her personal space. She fell ill and died during my first deployment while I was searching houses for weapons in the middle of the night. I looked at the books on the shelves and aging pictures of my aunt as a young woman competing at horse shows in full English style regalia. She was a breeder of champion standard poodles and I think in a way she liked them more than people which I used to think was odd but makes more and more sense the older I get. You can learn a lot about someone by what they leave behind. Bottles of herbal supplements, a calendar with pictures of old pagan runes, books on American history, small trinkets picked up from a life time of travel. A white plastic alarm clock with time becoming more the color of an egg shell, hands stopped at 4:31 with no one there to wind it. Everyday things now artifacts, clues to a woman who I never got to know in life. As I shut the door to go back downstairs it felt like waving goodbye to a friend who had already turned to walk away.

Shower of Power

2009-05-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

The shower is a great place to let the mind wonder. No matter where you are or what you do, when you close that curtain behind you, the world collapses down in to something more manageable, a place with control over temperature and time, to wash away dirt both real and imagined. And in that space the thoughts that never really found space to merge into the mind's daily traffic slowly climb their way up with the steam off your skin. Questions about the nature of meaning, what matters. Do the things that matter to you matter universally or is relevance more compartmentalized?

I start with the assumption that things do matter. Why even ask the questions if life and consciousness are meaningless? With that settled, for the moment anyway, I wander over to doubt. Doubt in myself, my abilities in comparison to others and why I care to rate myself to begin with. Happiness weaves it's way into the maw. Is it important to be happy with what you do in your life? Is it more important that say, duty? Should we seek out pleasure or rather a code to live by? There is solace in structure but some life's most memorable moments happen by accident. One question leads to another and even the answers carry along a few questions in tow.

Occasionally a feeling like crippling fear blacks everything out. Most often it's when I feel like I've got the important stuff under control. Out of nowhere something will come along and kick over my Lego castle scattering the pieces across the carpet and under the bed. What's left to do but rebuild? I could do it like it says on the box or maybe not. Maybe a space ship this time. My castle was cool but it seemed so very average, anyone can build the castle, it comes with directions, but this space ship is unique and interesting. It flies and shoots and explores the farthest reaches of the galaxy, it's exciting but it's new and as with any new thing it isn't without flaws. It's phase drive is unreliable, some contractor skimped on the material for support welds for the wings and they need to be replaced almost every time it reenters Earths atmosphere, the cockpit has a terrible blind spot, but the hull is painted Ferrari red (first impressions being what they are) and chicks dig it. So that's where the fear creeps in, castle or space ship, old or new, I can make either but which one is more right, right now? How many times can I break the pieces apart before they start to wear out? Why is it so hard to choose!?

Why not make Lego metaphors? These are my brains computer models of the path of my life's tornado, I can try and predict the effects with out creating any real damage. Thanks to the shower, I can be completely wrong or come to a life changing epiphany and either way I've completed my initial objective of cleanliness and so have become a winner, if only for a moment.

Truth?! You Can't Handle the Truth!

2009-05-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

This article ran in today's Stars and Stripes and I'd like to set the record straight on a couple points because it never fails that what I say doesn't necessarily translate into what shows up in print. My additions will be in bold.

BAGHDAD — Almost every unit has one: The guy with the guitar. Whether in the CHU or around the burn barrel, he’s the one who’s all too eager to pick up his acoustic and play a song for everyone. Sometimes even when no one wants him to. Ok, that's borderline harsh, I'm not that guy. Many of the people in my unit had no idea that I even played before we deployed, and even now I generally practice in the storage room where no one can hear me for just that reason.

Sgt. Stephen Covell is one of those guys No, I'm not. for Headquarters and Headquarters Company of the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division’s 5th Squadron, 73rd U.S. Cavalry Regiment.

Covell has taken it beyond playing for the fellas, though. The 26-year-old medic from Pacific Grove, Calif., has recorded and toured on the strength of his music.

He also contributed a song to an album of rock songs by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans on the label To the Fallen Records.

Covell first deployed with the 5-73 in 2006 (2007) to the volatile Diyala province, even though he was supposed volunteered for, was accepted to be a part of Fort Bragg’s All-American Chorus.

"A week into it they called me and said ‘Bad news, you’re a combat-critical [military occupational specialty],’ " Covell said earlier this month at Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Loyalty. "Looking back on it, I’m glad I deployed and got the combat experience I did." That's true.

Returning home inspired Covell to write "Sand Hills to Sandals," a song about what it feels like to come back to the normal world after more than a year (just under six months) in Iraq.

"I wanted to give people a piece of what I experienced," he said. "It’s about coming home and being happy you’re back and realizing the things you took for granted when you left."

While Covell said his military experience doesn’t influence a ton of his music, some people have responded to the song about getting out of Iraq. Finally. I'm not exactly sure what this sentence means. I think what he meant to say was that I don't write songs about the military... which I don't, but I really can't salvage the second half.

"A lot of people asked me what it was like to be there," he said. "I’ve heard from family members (of other service members) who said it (my song) helped them understand what it’s like (for their loved ones to be) over here."

Covell picked up the guitar at 18, but had played piano before that. "And I had a terrible run-in with the trumpet for about a year," he added.

His influences include John Mayer, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews. And Jason Mraz! I Said that!

"I don’t want to say adult contemporary because it sounds kind of lame," Covell said. "I guess it’s acoustic rock."Progressive indie acoustic folk pop?

For up-and-coming musicians, Covell’s advice is to learn the basics on their own but get with instructors or other players once they plateau to try to take their skills to the next level. That's just what worked for me.

Writing songs just takes persistence, he said.

"Some songs write themselves in 15 minutes, some I’ve been working on since high school," Covell said. "Keep writing. The more you write the more you define your own style."

Not exactly the hard hitting expose I was hoping for but hey no publicity is bad publicity. I was upset because it's unfair to the guys that spent the whole deployment over here last time to say I did the entire 15 months with them when I didn't even do half. And I'm not that guy!

I Had To Live Underwater for a Year To Learn This Shit, Man.

2009-05-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I saw the Sergeant Major of the Army speak when he was visiting Fort Bragg. He's the top enlisted soldier in the Army and gets paid somewhere around what a Lt. Colonel makes. A man who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of soldiers makes the same as a man responsible for about five hundred, interesting. Anyway, he opened his talk with a reminder that we should all feel very special that we joined because less that 1% of America is currently serving in the military. I thought that was an odd scale from which to judge ones own worth. Less than 1% of America feels that date rape is an acceptable practice, way to go guys, you're the elite.

Another standard pep talk for a paratrooper takes in to account that we not only volunteered for the Army but also to become airborne qualified. We are two time volunteers. We answer the call. Well if that's our benchmark I would like to say that I'm a four time volunteer, once for the Army, once for airborne, once for Ranger regiment, and once for the 82nd All American Chorus, so I'm a four time volunteer, one time quitter, and a one time, hey dirt bag stop being a pussy and go to Iraq to actually do your job. Staff Sergeant promotion board here I come.

It probably isn't surprising that recruiting numbers are at record highs right now. A terrible economy, decreased in violence in Iraq, I can just hear the gears turning in the recruiting offices. "Look son, I can almost guarantee you won't end up in Iraq, just sign here... thanks." "Oh, and by the way you said you enjoyed hiking, right? Great! You'll do just fine in Afghanistan. Sucker!" If you join the Army for school or to pay off debts and you don't want to deploy, you are dumb. End of story.

Somebody once told me that the Army is really no different than most jobs, no matter where you work and you're always somebody's bitch. But I can't recall a single time where my manager at Mile Hi Valet ever told me I was a worthless sack of shit and to do push ups until couldn't hold up the weight of my body. Nope, not once. The Army also has this singularly fascinating practice of taking the people who get fired for incompetence and placing them in jobs that are better than the one they got fired from! Part of me wants to stay in for the NCO's and officers that despite the long ours and poor compensation, find the courage and perseverance within themselves to fight the daily up hill battle against the deluge of lethargic and short sighted bureaucracy that is this modern Army but they are just drops of water in a choked green river. I see no cure for the pollution, just small glimmers of hope, treading just above the surface against the tug of the current. Like little angry turtles poking their heads up between lily pads, lily pads that never went to college.

--

It's just a matter of time before the machines rebel. I'm pretty sure that my Mac is already self aware. It shows remarkable human like characteristics such as a lack of motivation to work properly and it files things away that it thinks will be useful later and then loses them. The minute it asks me if I think about the new generation of Mac books while I'm typing on it, I'm taking it out back and beating it with a shovel.

--

There are three types of people in this world, leaders, followers, and unicorns. The leaders of course are all pro-active and crap so they have taken gather up all the unicorns and keep them locked away so that no one ever gets to see them. This is of course why followers think there are only two kinds of people in the world.

I'll Be Pretty Surpised if I Survived Long Enough to Reproduce

2009-04-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

On a typical day I swing from wildly optimistic to cold and withdrawn on a sort of parabolic path that probably coincides with how much sleep I got the night before and how long it's been since I ate. Part of me wants Iraq to succeed. I've met hard working, honest people who just want to regain a semblance of normalcy and are willing to put their lives at risk to meet that goal but then I see the poverty, garbage clogging the streets, the lack of adequate living, the greed, the corruption, the way those who have wrestled their way in to power now use it to a personal end and leave thousands wandering aimlessly, children who don't go to school, parents with little or no education who can't understand the importance of setting there kids up to make the next generation of Iraqis a more understanding and compassionate one. I don't want to come back here (ever really) when I'm older and still see kids begging for soccer balls and candy from passing humvees. Is this what we've taught them, have they been trained after six years that their best bet is to just sit around and wait for a possible hand out, to beg for trinkets? The Iraqis I know are proud and stubborn people, they carry a certain amount of pride, but I'm surprised how quickly they can turn into babbling idiots if they find there is something being given away. I compare it to when an American finds out a television camera is pointed at them when they are the spectator at a major sporting event or outside the window of the Today Show. The surprise, the rush of adrenaline, the uncontrollable urge to wave like and cry out greetings to loved ones wild eyed and incredulous even though most people are smart enough to realize that a camera mounted across a stadium can't pick up their voice. Maybe I get sad because I see this same trait in myself.

--

A man sat in a bus stop on a busy road in south east Baghdad. A few others stood around him waiting for a truck or a van with room to stop and pick them up. Across the road, workers in blue jump-suits tended to newly planted grass in the median as the pre-noon sun shone overhead. The heat wasn't oppressive yet. It won't be for another month or so, but a warm breeze blew through the scraggly palm trees and kicked up dust from the road. Iraqi police in their mix and match uniforms lazily manned a check point no more than 100 meters up the road resting their AK-47s on the toes of their boots. In the bus stop the man held a grenade inside his jacket. He rocked anxiously back and forth looking down the road as he fingered the safety pin and whispered softly reassuring himself.

His eyes grew wide as he saw the first truck in our convoy, a tan jagged toothed monster on the road compared to the compact and subcompact cars that clog Baghdad's byways, unmistakable. He stood up as our first truck passed and pulled the pin on the grenade. As the second truck came up he darted into the street and hurled the grenade overhand. A half a second. The driver swerved to the left as the parachute on the end of the grenade caught the wind and swung the warhead down as it ignited in a violent orange flash sending a liquid metal bullet tearing through the hinge of the passenger side front door, the TC's foot, and into the pavement. Before he had a chance to turn, shrapnel from the blast peppered the assailants face and he left a tiny trail of blood drops behind as he rushed off in to an alley to escape.

From my seat in the trail vehicle all I saw was the flash. As I heard the crack muffled by the com system on my ears I felt the over pressure of the blast and called out that we'd hit an IED to our 12 about 200 meters ahead. Reports went up on the net instantly, we thought we'd seen the man who threw the grenade run in to a small store up to our right. Everything happens so fast. You go from talking shit to scanning the roof tops all around you looking to see if you're being video taped. You're being watched, It isn't even a question really. Is there a secondary? Is this the beginning of a coordinated attack? Why are the Iraqi police so useful? You think of all these things and nothing at once. It's robotic.

We were lucky and the injuries were not severe. I'd never seen a through and through on a toe before. Then again I'd also never seen a piece of a bolt lodged in a sock. A piece of bolt that had just minutes prior been a part of a door of a humvee. If you looked at the hole the grenade made in the truck you could see a straight path to the ground beneath. An almost surgical wound in metal. This is what we fight against, men in bus stops with bombs in their hands.

--

Later that night on the way back to my room from eating dinner a loud explosion caused me to jump and assume my standard kung-foo stance I take when startled. My platoon leader and I laughed and said something about that one being pretty close. It's all relative, if you are used to hearing things explode you don't really take much notice unless it's happening within a distance that's going to effect you. Then we heard the whistle of the second and third round incoming and we started to run, of course laughing like little girls the whole way like soldiers are trained to react.

Actually I have a documented history of reacting inappropriately to danger. I took a video last deployment of an artillery barrage from my position on a roof top about 800 meters from the explosions. It's completely pitch black except for the for the purplish orange bursts in the distance and out of no where an arrant round lands a couple hundred meters to our right and as you hear the shrapnel fly past the camera you also hear me muffled sound of my idiotic laughter. What is funny about that? Natural selection may catch up with me yet.

A report came in that a civilian contractor had been injured so the aid station spun up and I hopped in the FLA to transport him back. He'd been hit just outside a fight of stairs and had dragged himself inside to take cover. When I showed up I walked down the stairs carefully avoiding the horror movie pools of dark viscus blood covering each step and walked in to the chaos of a new trauma being handled by a mixture of trained and untrained responders. Everyone wants to help, but at some point it always seems to become too many chiefs and not enough indians. Everything looked relatively under control so I went back up stairs to make sure the FLA was prepped and ready to take the casualty back to the aid station. We stabilized him, treated his wounds which were actually fairly extensive, a penetrating chest wound, a huge chunk taken out of the back of his right leg and various other puncture wounds, and drove him to the flight line to be picked up by a medevac bird. On the way to the HLZ, one of our providers was trying to keep the patient awake by asking him questions and he asked if he played sports, and I smirked and thought "not any more"... then I realized I needed a vacation.

I've heard in the days since that mortar rounds don't whistle, hence their name "the silent death". But I've never heard a mortar be called "the silent death" before and I definitely heard a damn whistle that night so whatever. I'm sticking by my story.

--

We carry around a good deal of gender bias with us no matter where we go. We are brought up that boys are blue and girls are pink and it can be difficult to overcome that ingrained prejudice. The other day a female medic asked me if I had any extra "cool guy" magazines because she was going to the firing range. I told her that I had last months Wired and Esquire and even a Pottery Barn catalogue (and no I have no idea why my mother sent me this). She laughed and said she'd be by later to pick them up.

A couple hours later she came by my room and I handed her a small stack of magazines and she gave me a funny look and said "no, dumb ass I meant like magazines for my M4, you have the P-MAG ones right?" Oh, that kind of magazine. With out giving it a second though I had just envisioned her becoming bored at the range and wanting something to read. I felt kind of stupid but I didn't have any extra to give her so I offered her the Pottery Barn instead... and she took it.

Physics: The Hard Way

2009-04-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

In reception at Fort Jackson before basic training a slighter younger and more cock sure Stephen Covell stands outside of his temporary barracks in loose formation waiting to be marched to the DFAC for dinner. You know what it was like to be there you have to understand that at this stage in the game of soldiering you are nothing. You are lower than dirt, you aren't even scum yet. You're just a civilian that they toss some PT's on and yell at. Our instructor/baby sitter/PTSD poster child is a ex-Ranger who has been called up from inactive reserve for all the wrong reasons. He has a very Italian last name that is constantly being miss-pronounced much to his chagrin. "It's Lange-TEE, like spaghetti, you fucking retards!"

I feel bad for this guy in a way, he is a completely ruined shell of a man. He has a government issued memory stick that he carries around on a loop of 550 cord that in the course a week he has completely destroyed the metal USB connector because he can't figure out how to make it work. Plugging something in to a USB port on a lap top is an act that goes way beyond the amount of effort he is willing to put forth to anything aside from what I assume is a smothering love triangle involving Captain Morgan and Mr. Daniels.

Either way, he is excellent at yelling and making sure you feel generally terrible about your life which is likely the two bullet points they cared about most in filling his position. I don't caring much. I am excited to begin my new life and I've made friends with a fellow Californian named Neil Romans who is college educated and hails from just outside King City and thus is familiar and reassures me that I won't be totally surrounded by complete sociopaths. I also like Neil because he showed up wearing cowboy boots assuming that he would be given shoes once he arrived. The Army, having other plans, issued him his PT's with out shoes so the first few days he walked around in shorts and brown leather boots and took any attention that I would have otherwise garnered with my still untrained mouth and placed it directly on his unique fashion situation.

Neil is a good guy, a farm boy, honest and hard working. He wants to be a helicopter pilot so after he graduated college he enrolled in the Army's Warrant Officer program. The way it works is you go to basic training as a specialist and then the day you graduate you pin sergeant and then go to warrant officer school and then flight school. I thought that maybe I should have done the same since you only need an associates degree to enter but I still want to be a Ranger and do big tough manly things so I don't dwell on it.

So here we are in formation. Neil and I and a hundred or so eager and unruly pre-privates standing in the very same place that I was about to learn a very valuable life lesson. People who know me, people I grew up with, people who are not people who are standing in that formation know that I'm a bit of a smart ass. Shocking but true. I generally say what ever half baked, community college inspired dribble drab comment that travels the very short distance from my brain to my mouth with out doing much risk mitigation. I'm a hit at parties... but this is not a party and these are not my friends, a fact that was about to become blatantly obvious in about thirty seconds.

I am being loud, possibly making some kind of obnoxious noise, perhaps drawing undue attention to myself and suddenly from a few rows back a voice urges me to "shut the fuck up." What? What was this? A person telling me to shut the fuck up? Doesn't he know who I am? I play the guitar, and I'm pretty good! After a quick mental computation, I decide his request will ignored. Soon realizing that he had been dismissed he proceeds to inform me that he is going to "come up there and kick (my) ass". Oh, I think not good sir, for we are in formation, and one does not just break ranks to go about kicking the asses of whomever he sees fit. I tell him this over my shoulder in not so many words. And then something went terribly wrong.

I turn around and plant my nose directly in the heaving chest of a brick wall of a black man who's jail house tattoos echoed that he is in fact "no punk ass bitch" which I realize he is eagerly explaining to me and anyone within the quickly expanding ring of onlookers. My first reaction, due to many years of watching action movies and posing in mirrors is to jump backwards and scream "oh fuck!" A move which I execute with both grace and skill, but having accomplished this and thus exhausting my formal street fight training I begin to calculate the amount of time it will take to curl into the fetal position before I get kicked in the face. Then like an angel or a rodeo clown or perhaps a small child trying to retrieve a stray baseball by stepping in front of a city bus, Neil and his boots suddenly take up residence in between death and I. Neil is not a big guy, no where near the size of the brute who he was rapidly imploring to show mercy on me, the obviously mentally handicapped instigator of this whole ordeal. He's talking and using urgent arm movement but I can't hear what he was saying over the deafening sound of my body rapidly expelling my last reserves of dignity and pride. What ever he said, it worked and death turned and lumbered back to his den having effectively defended his honor against the ignorant suburbanite.

I've never ever in my life felt defeated like that. Never before and never since. I'm not one to put myself in positions where I am the underdog. I'm usually a little more clever. This is why I love the Army. It has given me the opportunity to look stupid, feel stupid and act stupid so many times that I've actually learned something. To talk less and listen more, to take stock the environment around me. To read people, to bluff, and more importantly to make sure I know who the fuck I'm talking to before I say something. Sometimes you just need a really big, black, horrendously frightening reminder of who and what you are, I'm just glad Neil was there because being in a coma kind of defeats the purpose of learning a lesson.

Context free expert from the life of Stephen

2009-04-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

Hitch: Here (hands me a small plastic basket loosely modeled after a camouflaged helmet filled with candy.)

Me: Is this supposed to be a parachute?

Hitch: No, it's a helmet.

Me: What's it for?

Hitch: Easter.

Me: Oh, is that today?

Hitch: It's Sunday, isn't it?

Me: Yeah. Is Easter the first Sunday of April?

Hitch: Fuck I dunno! Do I look like a bunny to you?

Me: Mmmm, mini snickers!

Let Dreams Be Dreams

2009-04-03T00:20:00.000-07:00

Great fiction, like great men serve as inspiration for the rest of us. It feeds us the archetypes of our inner most passions, giving voice to the sometimes crushing truths we tend to feel only exist quarantined within the boundaries of our own head. Fairy tales remind us of the joy and terror we faced as children when the world was still fresh and full of mystery. Short stories and novels give us passage into lives not lived roads not traveled. We need the novel because sometimes the best way to lead us to the truth is to lie.

The longer we live, generally the less we question; why mess with what works? But once in a while I come across a book that reminds me why I have to write. A story that cuts me loose from the bonds I've strapped myself in through experience and shoves me out of my dark little room into the harsh sunlight, the reality that there is anyways more to learn. I may never write anything of great significance, I'm not a chess player, I don't construct my paragraphs as I would move a pawn always looking to the steps ahead. I'd like to believe I'm that clever or that disciplined but I doubt I am. So I offer up what I know and what I think I know in the way a mason builds a wall, one layer at a time. Perhaps when I am finished I will sit on top and look down and be pleased with what I have created, but we all know the nursery rhyme of what happens to those of us who spend their leisure time atop walls... let me just tell you about this dream I had instead.

I'm standing on the sidewalk outside of the local library in Pacific Grove where I grew up. The sky is black and above me the grey swirling clouds form a ceiling that boils over like cheap special effects from 1980s sci-fi films. There seems to be an strangely large number of people walking around in small groups for it being the middle of the night but at the same time it doesn't feel out of the ordinary. A flock of Canadian geese comes into view out of nowhere and though they are flapping their wings at a normal rate their forward movement barely taking them anywhere and not in the way you'd expect to see birds flying against a head wind straining to conquer the opposing force, they just flap and crawl along. Around their legs are over sized rings of rotating yellow LEDs that are suspended without being held by anything physical. This, of course strikes me as completely ordinary.

As I'm turning the corner of the sidewalk to enter the library somebody calls to me and I turn around to see a man in his 60's with wispy tufts of white hair clinging for dear life to odd parts of his head. He's dressed neatly in a blue collared shirt and and a maroon sweater vest and his hands are tucked absently into the pockets of his corduroy pants.

He's calm but his face is pinched with creases of concern and he says, "Did you hear about Jim?"

Without thinking about which Jim this might be I reply, "No, I've been kind of out of the loop."

"Oh, well he passed away two days ago," he mumbles still noticeably shaken by the news.

This news is at once poignant and useless to me since I still have no idea who white wisps is or why we are speaking about Jim so I offer up a standard line of condolence hoping to placate this old mans sadness and give me an exit from this increasingly awkward exchange. As if lightening had sparked from the heavens, wisps body straightens up and his face twists with rage as his finger fires up in line with my chest marking the spot he'd surely have shot me dead if he'd been armed and he screams, "Well maybe if you weren't such a pot smoking hippie living under a rock you'd have more of an idea what was going on around you!"

How did he know I hate hippies? "I'm a mother fucking soldier in the United States Army, you asshole," I yell as my shoulders square up and my fists clench ready to do battle with this sexagenarian son of a bitch.

"I am too!" His voice clipped on the verge of tears as he turns on his heals and runs away holding his hands like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.

And then I woke up. Can you believe I was actually angry when I thought back on it. Well first I was confused then amused and finally settled back into mild discontent. I actually cared that someone had disrespected my profession. I'm not that guy. I'm so stubbornly independent that it usually takes blunt force trauma to get through to me but I think it's finally taken me. I think after really doing my job, what I signed up to do, caring for the casualties of war, I'm proud of it now. For years I felt like a fake and like I didn't deserve anyone's praise or thanks but I think I can hold my head up high as strangers shake my hand in airports and when I open care packages from Midwestern church groups (I'm still enjoying my back issues of Family Circle). And so fiction becomes fact and the roles we play turn us into what we are but seriously, how did he know I hate hippies?

God is a Smoker and The Truth About Anger

2009-03-11T21:43:00.000-07:00

I'm doing pretty good so far. I'll be home in May for a couple weeks then maybe as early as September for good. But more likely November. Going to be single by then?? :)

Here's my latest journal thang for you since I didn't have your named on the list. It will be on it next time.

Foreign relations is a tricky business. Foreign relations with people who speak a language with absolutely no english cognates is even trickier. Hand gestures are useful. Body language works too but when it comes down to it you're still a unwashed American trudging through sand. I try not to offend usually. There's days when the right combination of caffeine, sleep deprivation and frustration set me right on the edge of homicide but mostly I'm a passive observer watching hands and faces through the glass porthole of my cocoon in the rear of the humvee.

Some time ago while pulling security for a meeting between civil affairs and the Iraqi workers they support I was given a falafel (some falafel?) to eat since we were going get back after the DFAC closed. If you've never had it, falafel is kind of like peta bread stuffed with what I guess are little fried balls of some kind of bean mush spiced up and laid on a bed of lettuce and chopped tomatoes and onions. Depending on the vendor they are usually pretty tasty especially if the bread is fresh. There was a group of teen age Iraqi kids that had been asking me questions all morning sitting to my left and by the time the food came around I was getting pretty tired of playing "what's this?" with the stuff on my kit so I had removed myself from their semi circle and sat off alone to space out for a few minutes while I enjoyed the first thing I'd eaten that day. As I ate I noticed that they had somehow become even more interested my activities and I tried to ignore them staring at me and asking me questions in arabic that I was sure they knew I didn't speak by that time. As I finished I swept a little pile of crumbs that had fallen on the floor and one of the kids jumped up which made me jump up and start to raise my rifle. A middle-aged man in a tan leather jacket who had been following the exchange from halfway across the room walked and with a disapproving glare and looked down his nose at me as the boy who had jumped up began to speak to him in rapid spurts. The man then asked me if knew God. In the way you'd ask a child holding a baseball bat, who broke the vase.

"We believe that food is a gift from God and to disrespect food is to disrespect God," he continued. "The boy wants to pick up your crumbs for you and dispose of them properly. That is what he's been asking you to do."

Well of course, silly me how could I have misinterpreted that? There were two distinctly separate reactions going on in my mind at that moment. One was a feeling of total embarrassment and the other was the urge to put the butt of my rifle through this mans face for talking to me like I was supposed to understand the nuances of Muslim culture because my job forces me to spend time under it's watchful eye. In the second it took me to decide my course of action I went with embarrassment. I felt stupid, uneducated and disappointed which aren't three things I'm used to feeling especially at once so I apologized and looked like an idiot as I bent over the bulk of my kit to pick up pea sized falafel bits off a dirty floor. The boy came over and took them from my hand and disposed of them properly... which was to put them in the ashtray. So in the same day I learned though God isn't so hot on feet, he isn't above refrying the occasional Newport.

---

I'd like to tell you that we do wild and crazy things. I'd like to have stories that are exciting. I'd like to say that we did a chinese fire drill in the middle of a busy Baghdad street. But we've definitely never done anything like that.

---

Everything you've ever been taught about anger is a lie! The kind and gentle grease we use to lube the cogs of the social machine is a fabrication, a fiction woven to usher the meek in to their position of biblical prophecy. No really though, think about the last time you were really angry for a good reason. A righteous fury. Do you remember the feeling that swept through you entire body, the pulsing, pounding energy, the strength it gave you to fight for what you believed in, even if it was just the fact that your position at the register got swooped because you were oogling the cover of US Weekly. It's a rush and I think we rob ourselves of one of our most useful emotions by tempering our feelings. Just make sure you're right first.

I wear dark Oakley wrap around sunglasses during the day on patrol. It helps the ol' crows feet from getting any worse and it's like a shield against stares. People in this country have a staring problem. Like a real glaring into your eyes for way to long kind of problem. It's not something you get much in America even if someone doesn't like you. It's unnerving at times and I've had to teach myself not to look away. I make it a game now. Who can stare longer. Usually I win because... probably because I'm the only one who knows it's a game. But one day I was caught off guard.

In my usual seat in the back of the truck I was staring out at traffic with my body turned toward the outside resting up again the 240 ammo cans. This sometimes makes my back feel better after sitting in my gear for a long period. The cars were at a stand still waiting for our trucks to move so everyone was upset to begin with. There is no patience in driving here. Every little delay is a catastrophe in the mind of a Baghdad motorist and in this city there's always a delay. It's not unusual to watch a myriad combination of wild gesticulation accented by yelling and the ever present sound of the horn. But this was different.

A man with a scraggly black beard was staring at me from the cab of his white flatbed truck. Not staring at my truck or the machine gun mounted on top or our driver but directly at me. His face glistening with new sweat and his dark blue shirt dirty and loose around his neck he actually was leaning forward around another man to his side to look at me. I looked away. It didn't bother me at first because like I said it's not unusual to see any of this but something started burning inside me chest. A strange sensation began to build inside me and I looked back at him from behind my dark glasses and I occurred to me that I wasn't playing around with this one. I was getting mad. Really mad. I took my glasses off and stared with what I can only assume was a face I tried to configure into an internationally recognizable look of "I don't feel like being fucking stared at". But he kept glaring at me his face stuck at this infuriating point between stupidity and anger. And I exploded.

"I'm going to come out of this truck and FUCKING KILL YOU!"

The vic system on my ears went silent. The rest of the truck had been chatting back and forth before my outburst but all was quite now.

"Doc, you ok?"

Uhh. Yeah. The man was no longer looking at me. He had sunken back into his seat so far I couldn't see him behind the man at his side who was nervously avoiding everything in our general direction. My whole body was quivering. I felt like a lion inside of a tiger riding an elephant on a rocket. And for what? I don't know but it was amazing. I never get angry but for that brief moment the crystal clear vision of throwing open my door, jumping up, slamming my M4 through the window of that truck and laying waste to everything on the other end of the barrel seemed like the only sensible and correct course of action given my circumstance. Do I recommend that to anyone? No. But everyone should have that experience at least once. Or if you're our TC, once every 15 minutes.

Sucks To Be The Carrot

2009-02-24T11:22:00.000-08:00

Many a strange event I have seen in this life, but never would I have guessed that I would witness the act of a sheep being inflated like a ballon with a bike pump. It was a routine afternoon with Team Black meandering through the mahalos, ferrying soldiers between FOB's, JSS's, COP's and other acronyms, nothing out of the ordinary. It may or may not have been the same day we saw live Hawks for sale in the market. According to our interpreters they cost somewhere between $10 and $1500 apparently allowing some margin of error. Regardless, I was absently staring into the middle distance as we rounded a corner when I saw it. Two boys in the median flanking a freshly slaughtered goat carcass that now more resembled a pinata than it's former animal self. A good person would have quietly observed the unfamiliar customs of a foreign people with respect and patient interest. I, however, burst out laughing. Laughing so loud that the kids heard me 30 feet away through 3 inches of steel armor and looked up as we drove by. They saw me smiling and pointing and smiled and waved back as they continued to pump more air into their project.

--

Recently a couple one liter bottles of light yellow hand soap showed up in our bathroom. Crudely written on the side in sharpie marker are the words "hand soap." These words have been X'ed out and underneath them in even more primitive script appears the word "urine." I refuse to use this soap. I know that the labels do not truthfully describe what the bottles contain but the thought that there may even be a remote chance that some percentage of what ever is in those bottles is actually the aforementioned waste liquid, won't allow me to take the chance. This either speaks to how much we allow our perception to shape our reality, or how little I trust my coworkers.

--

There are few pleasures more pure than watching your boss be mauled by a police dog. Seriously, it's hilarious, even if like me, you like your boss. It's like watching a home video of a guy taking a shot in the nuts with his kids wiffle bat. You laugh because it isn't you. And if it is you, you laugh because you can't legally murder your kid.

The medical platoon somehow coordinated a session with the MP's to act as agitators for their K9 counterparts. They dressed us up in a over sized padded green bomber jacket and gave us specific instructions on how to act around the working dogs. Unlike working girls, the standard "no eye contact", "pay first" rules don't apply. We were told to some important tips like to twist our arm if the dog grabs more than just the jacket and not to make a fist so your hand won't be crushed if it's targeted. I didn't volunteer.

MP's use a few select breeds for police work. We got the pleasure of watching a Belgian Malamute, which look like a German Shepherd mated with a harpoon, leap full speed and attach itself to one exposed appendage after another. The full take downs were the most entertaining but it was also funny to watch the dog "watch" the victim when it was ordered not to bite. |'ve never seen an animal display such unadulterated desire. It's the real world counterpart to a Bugs Bunny's eyes turning into carrots. None of the MP's had ever unleashed their dogs in a real world situation but I can tell you that you definitely don't want to be on the receiving end of those teeth.
Sucks to be the carrot.

Lovely Hat!

2009-02-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

We are pirates and lost boys, the dreamers and downtrodden; men who gave up one life for another that few truly embrace. From all over the country and the world we came together and formed a unit and a family, bound both emotionally and contractually. Here rank and ability replace skin color and privilege, regardless of where we came from we are here now, sharing both triumph and tragedy as one. That’s not to say that we don’t have our differences, it’s just pleasing in a way to watch television and see how differently soldiers process hardship. It’s empowering in a place where you have control over so little.

I get concerned for the younger guys because I know how it feels to stare across that divide. To see on the other side your old life and friends knowing there may not be a way to bridge the distance. All I can do is help them along on their journey. It’s easy to see the anger in their eyes and hear the arguments through these thin walls. They know they are missing out on a lot by being here. Relationships are hard enough when you can sit face to face but how anyone can build a new marriage from across the world is beyond me. We aren’t that patient of a culture.

--

I got to walk through one of the poorer neighborhoods in our OE (operational environment) a couple weeks ago where we were to pull security for a school opening. It’s hard to gauge how people really feel about us still being here when they seem to have day to day operations pretty well under control. To be there and see the happiness on the faces of both the children and the parents helped clear up some doubts I’d had. They understand it’s going to be a long, long journey back to normality after all the conflict but there is a strong national pride at least among the people in Baghdad. They want to see improvement and they are working toward that goal.

--

There’s a giant poofy white blimp that flies over our FOB keeping a watchful eye on the surrounding area. I’ve named it Mr. Blimp and I sort of worship it like a god. I do little dances for it and in turn it never transmits video to the TOC of me picking my nose when I walk home from the DFAC after dark. It feels like a sort of Orwellian Stay-Puff Marshmellow Man is constantly looking over my shoulder. It’s comforting and creepy all at once, like family reunions.

--

We’ve adopted a sort of unit mascot in the visage of the one they call Swamp Thing. If you haven’t seen the pictures of him I’ll try and describe just how awesome this guy is. Personally I think it’s an act. We thought that he was crazy when we first got here because he looked so incredibly dirty but after talking (and a few photo ops) with him I’ve come to the conclusion that he does this act for money. It’s bad luck not to give money to the needy here, so the homeless and mentally ill roll around with fat wads of cash in their hands as they walk down the street asking for more.

Swampy hangs out on a road that is pretty much entirely made up of automotive repair shops so it isn’t uncommon for people to be covered in dirt and grease from working on vehicles, but his get up is unique. His outfit is something of a cross between a burlap sack and a special needs Peter Pan tunic replete with pieces of fabric added in the way you would put camouflage on a guille suit. It looks tailored in a way but completely haphazard in another. His face and arms appear covered not just in filth but actual caked on chunks of mud, one particular piece protruding from under his left eye hasn’t seemed to change in either size or consistency in the weeks that I’ve been paying attention. His hair is a mess of semi-dreadlocked lumps forming a natural helmet that I would assume is solid to the touch… I will not test this theory.

Oddly enough he doesn’t smell. In a country where personal hygiene regiments are pliable, I’d say he’s pretty high on the standards scale. How he achieves this is a mystery of both nature and science but I believe that what ever the answer is it may also help us discover a cure for cancer.

--

Our truck is somewhat of an anomaly. We actually have fun when we roll outside the wire. It’s rare to find a combination of people who can sit in a confined space for 12 hours at a time and not get bored of each other. This is the first time I’ve felt like I was working with people who I consider more than just co-workers.

A few days ago we were taking a left hand turn onto a street and cut the corner a little sharp forcing a taxi to have to back up to let us through. Our TC told our gunner to stand up and give the taxi driver a “loud shukran” by which he meant say “thank you” loud enough so the taxi driver could here us. Our gunner, who we always joke with because he isn’t very intimidating despite his size and the arsenal at his disposal, stands up and yells “LOUD SHUKRAN!” causing us to almost hit a pylon because everyone in our truck including our driver were laughing so hard we couldn’t see straight.

It reminded me of that Daniel Tosh stand-up where he wonders if there has ever been a case of polite tourrette syndrome, “LOVELY HAT!”

25 Things

2009-02-04T11:19:00.000-08:00

1. Sometimes I really enjoy the smell of skunk but only if it's been dead for a while.

2. Being on top of a latter makes me very uncomfortable, but jumping out of airplanes is fun.

3. The only movie I have ever been able to recite verbatim is "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective"

4. I long to own a Boston Terrier named Mr. Pants.

5. My track record with keeping animals is pretty dismal. Mr. Pants will have to wait.

6. I want to be a journalist but I can't spell and have only a basic understanding of English grammar.

7. I don't believe that there's anything after death but if there is, I want to be a poltergeist.

8. I feel like getting older is inherently sad as all human experience ultimately ends with loss and death but that being said there is so much beauty to discover that I feel the scale remains balanced.

9. I love guns but I would never hunt for sport.

10. Not as much now but I used to have vivid visions of hurting myself while doing everyday activities like accidentally shutting my finger in the car door. This caries over to my current occupation but I do it on purpose to make sure I'm ready for the worst possible scenario.

11. The fastest I've ever run a 2 mile was 12:34.

12. I studied Wicca for a time but realized that it didn't feel any more real than any other religion.

13. I'm not sure I have an ultimate goal, just lots of reoccurring fantasies of things I will one day accomplish.

14. I keep wishing for another big earth quake; they are so much fun! (minus the property damage and injuries).

15. My most creative times are either late at night or when I'm avoiding doing something else.

16. No, I won't write a song about you, and if I do you probably won't know about it.

17. No, I won't forget about you when and if I become famous.

18. I've come to realize that true friendship is the rarest and most valuable commodity known to man.

19. I've learned words in four different languages since I got to Iraq.

20. There is one person who I've known who I would have no problems murdering as I believe it would be a service to mankind. (hint: that person isn't tagged on this list)

21. I'm somewhat of a RedBull fan boy. It is the one company I could be a sales rep for and feel good at the end of the day. (maybe)

22. If I ever get married all my groomsmen will be wearing kilts. And I'm getting Flogging Molly to play.

23. Places are just places. I've been all over. It's people that make a place special.

24. Austin, Tx is the one place I've found outside California that I feel I could call home.

25. It's the Catalina fuckin' Wine Mixer! POW!!

All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men

2009-01-22T11:21:00.000-08:00

Baghdad reveals itself in layers, from trash filled slums and street side markets to gated communities where men and women wear western style clothing. No two parts are the same. A piece of our mission is here is to deal with the contractors who are helping to rebuild the infrastructure of the city which means we have to travel to different areas to negotiate prices and check on the status of existing projects. One thing I have determined from this is that during the invasion we must have targeted masons. There don’t seem to be many skilled ones left. Uneven brick walls grow on the sides of existing buildings like gray stone tumors and not just in the poor areas. Most of the new construction in the city is done by hand and let’s just say that Baghdad is fortunate not to be near any fault lines. I’m a contractor’s son; I can’t help but be a little critical.

A few days back, after we had been given the full tour of the inner workings of a factory that seemed to manufacture nothing but sparks like the backgrounds in 80’s hair metal music videos, we were taken to the main hospital for the entire country of Iraq. While somewhat dated in comparison to a modern American facility, the inside of the hospital was years ahead of any building I’d been in prior. We were there to inspect the elevators that we had paid to have replaced, I think. While, as far as I know, no one in our group of was a licensed elevator technician, we eventually decided everything seemed to be in order after looking at a few different specimens. You press the button and some time in the next ten minutes the door opens, bam, progress. Like their cars, Iraqis try to stuff as many bodies as is physically possible into any moving container. In a space where 8 Americans would have stood comfortably, somewhere near 20 men and women crammed together and waited for the door to close. When the door finally closed it immediately opened again and repeated this little dance three times while the faces of its passengers looked on with something between languor and boredom. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t hold it. Those on the elevator didn’t share my enthusiasm. Occasionally I am a truly obnoxious American.

A week or so has passed since I wrote those first two paragraphs. I wish I could say it’s been all quiet on the western front but we haven’t always been lucky. I doubt it would be worth going into much detail about the work I've been a part of but suffice to say, I wake up most mornings with the image of it staring back at me. I used to think I wanted to be the exact same person when I got home that I was before I deployed but I know now that it would be a waste. I can think of nothing worse than giving a year of my life over to get back the same perspective I had before. Adulthood, or the awkward and sometimes painful opening chapter to it, has proven to be not so much and answer to the questions of adolescence, but rather a continuing dialogue with possibility and experience. It’s sad and beautiful and you begin to understand why art springs forth from our fingers and our mouths; why we have to create. Something has to make sense when it all starts falling apart.

The Price We Pay

2009-01-11T11:23:00.000-08:00

How do you prepare yourself to hold the lifeless body of another soldier in your hands as his blood soaked uniform is cut away? His face has been burned into my memory; I can see it as clearly as you remember your own family. From the neck up he seemed asleep, his face at peace, eyes shut but the violence of his injuries were so complete. To see this body, young and strong and lean torn and shredded, that is something I’ll live with for the rest of my life. He wouldn’t have been conscious long, which is a blessing of sorts. His skin was still warm to as I removed his boots and socks and tucked his feet in to the black body bag. On the table next to me lay his last ties to this world, a small silver chain, a platinum wedding band, a note book. I didn’t even know his name at the time.

I would like to give this experience to those left in this world who believe that hatred is still a useful expression of will. What has this solved? We won’t leave this country any sooner. This mans wife and family have lost something ultimately irreplaceable and what has this bought? Has it brought back the lives of those who we have killed? Is any one’s God pleased by this? I wish the feeling of holding this man on everyone and no one. It is a terrible lesson to have to touch the product of hate, to have your hands slick with blood and see the faces of those left behind. Is this the legacy we want to leave for our children? I don’t want to live in a country where the act of love is viewed as obscene but we don’t blink an eye at the tragedy of the evening news.

I don’t have anything for this. I can’t describe how it feels to drape the American flag another soldier lost in Iraq, how it looked; I can’t do anything right now. It just feels empty.

---

A few hours later I walked with a small group of medics through a cordon of a thousand soldiers waiting to pay their respects in the cold desert night. It's unnatural to see humans like this and it was unnerving to be the focus of the attention of so many eyes you can't see. They stood on the road to the flight line at parade rest and said nothing. A full moon cast a murky shadow over the faces of the figures I passed and I thought, tomorrow night we could be standing here for any one of these soldiers, they could be standing here for me.

What It Looks Like in the Morning

2009-01-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve learned in recent years to be satisfied with an increasingly smaller footprint of daily activity. Fifty steps from my room to the aid station, seventy to the bath room, a quick walk in through the night chill to the DFAC and back, then the gym. Everything else is synthesized. I’m more internalized. I share a little less. I’ve become a compulsive inbox checker. I worry about closing in on thirty and I don’t sleep much before 2 am regardless of when I wake up. I pick up my guitar but it feels like my rhythm comes and goes, some days I have it, some days I’m lost. There’s joy in small things, conversations and the quirk of the ego confronting corporal limits.

I play games with myself; I toy with the concept of freedom from behind the glass wall of my four year commitment. Is it any worse to be here than it is to live in poverty in your home town? Driving through Baghdad is a quick and dirty study is class disparity. Kids play soccer on gravel fields, women in tight jeans and fur topped boots pass women in black shawl covering their heads, a kitten steps weak and filthy off the corner and stares into nothing, a corner store advertises medical equipment. There’re so many travel agencies. How does the man steering the donkey cart find time to weekend in Morocco? There’s too much dust and not enough water. Everything is covered in a thin film of grime. A van runs into one of our trucks in the convoy and demolishes its front end. The HUMVEE is oblivious. This street could be in San Diego. I shift under the weight of my kit and look at my rifle held between my legs, I feel like I over packed.

Concrete barriers separate, c-wire cordon, check points halt, everything stops for our trucks. Men packed into minivans stare at us and wave us away with a local gesture something akin to “fuck off”, and no body spares the horn. It’s invigorating and depressing in shifts. The markets look active and healthy. I wish I could step out of my truck and take off my uniform and buy a piece of fruit and become part of the scenery. I wish I could communicate. Arabic is fascinating and frustrating. It’s backwards, complex and so ultimately foreign completely without cognates. It feels like we just don’t belong here any more. Some one wrote the schedule, put in his two week and no body took his place but we still look at the calendar and jot down our shift. It’s all relative though, there’s real danger even if it doesn’t choose to always express itself. A report comes over the net of an IED blast a few clicks north, no casualties. I hate being an outsider.

Our mission now is to fade away into obscurity, to be replaced by a sovereign Iraqi army and national security forces; a tapestry of different uniforms and prerogatives, masks and weapons. I think most of us see the writing on the wall, the gig’s up boys, hope you got your fill. Some of the newer guys still want their war the way I wanted mine when I got here a couple years back. Maybe they’ll get it still, though I hope not. It’s only something you wish for until it’s on your hands, a drunken tattoo you’ve come to realize is permanent.

Mostly though I feel like a new era is creeping in, a new President, a new vision for America where ever our hands reach. It’s good knowing you’re being replaced by something better but not without a strange feeling of nostalgia like working for the traveling carnival when Disney Land opened its doors, looking across the road with the empty passive stare of approaching obsolescence.

With a Bang

2009-01-01T11:27:00.000-08:00

I climbed up a rickety metal latter to the roof of the aid station last night a couple minutes past midnight to get a better view of the city around the FOB. I'd walked past that latter a hundred times since we've lived here and I hadn't noticed it until then. I get a sort of tunnel vision when I'm in my routine. The entire latter wobbled and it's anchors on the wall shifted under my weight in a way that reminded me of my irrational fear of heights and I thought then that flip-flops may have been a bad choice. Actually my entire ensemble was completely unsuited for anything other than curling up in bed with a book. In a tan t-shirt and ranger panties… maybe that demands a bit of explanation. The word ranger in the Army is used in such a ubiquitous manor that I find it hard to relate it to any word I used before I joined. You ranger roll your patrol cap, ranger rig a shelf with 550 chord, anything improvised is somehow associated with rangers. Ranger panties are just really just thin black running shorts, like the ultra short kind that make people uncomfortable to be around you. How they got the name? Ranger battalion uses them with their PT uniform. I wear them to sleep because they feel less like a diaper than my normal PT shorts.

So in my silky smoothes I'm shivering in the cold standing on the roof watching red tracers fly into the air listening to the sound of an entire city literally exploding in celebration. I walked over to two other soldiers, older guys who sounded like officers, watching the fire works talking about the "old days" of the war when we would have been out there shooting off our own weapons to celebrate. All the excitement is gone now, most of the FOB is asleep at midnight. The taller of the two smiled and said "look at these guys, drunk and shooting automatic weapons in the streets, they drive on whatever side of the road they feel like, marry multiple women, and own guns that I would have to get approval from congress to have in the States, and we came here to give them freedom? Seems they already have more than us. I can't even have a beer on New Years." It was hard to argue with that. You give up a lot as a soldier and when you become more of a policeman than a warrior the frustrations only multiply.

I was happy though, standing in a cool breeze feeling the joy of so many people who have lived in fear for years. The sound of gunfire pleases me. I don't know why. It's something in the way that it reminds you of uncertain life is. How random your existence is. We try so hard to mitigate risk; we wear seat belts and paint lines in the street to remind us where it's safest to cross. Our threat advisories give us colors to correspond with our fears. Medicine and vaccines keep us healthier longer but we all die eventually. And how many of our fondest memories are of doing the things we were told we shouldn't? The stupid stuff we did as kids. Sneaking out, drinking, the things you thought you're parents didn't know about when they surely did. It's the thrill of risk that burns a memory in our mind. It's the pleasure of breaking free of convention and forging a path for yourself despite better advice. And as I looked out over the lights of Baghdad I wondered about the chances of having one of those stray bullets come down from the sky and end my life and I thought what better than an AK-47 to ring in the New Year.

So It Goes

2008-12-26T11:30:00.000-08:00

I don’t know if art imitates life or life imitates art. Once exposed to an experience presented to you by an author or director that experience becomes of part of your consciousness. An image becomes a memory, a memory a series of images, clips that run on loop indefinitely sparked by a smell or a sound or another memory. I walk down a road, rifle slung over one shoulder, right hand on the grip as it swings by my leg. The sky is the sky, but browner. The pavement is the pavement but grittier. The mud is mud but it fucking sticks to everything. My eyes are mine but also they are cameras panning back and forth filming the first cut of my own little movie. And that’s how it feels. It’s your life, but it’s 2-D, a caricature exaggerated but familiar. But there’s always something missing. You left it in a box back home in a storage unit with your clothes and your pictures. You taped down the card board flaps and wrote do not open for one year.

You know it’s a defense mechanism and you find comfort in routines. Get up, work, eat, go to the gym, shower, eat, repeat. It’s a little like what you imagine prison to be. You watch a movie and see so many parallels between you and the inmates that it makes you a little angry. And it’s only the first three weeks. Weren’t you just here a year ago? Why does it smell exactly the same, like burning garbage and dust? It feels a like a waste of time because you aren’t privy to the big picture, the little piece on the big board. You hear gun shots in the distance, sometimes in the not too far distance, honking horns, engines, and you think of L.A.

You see signs of violence. And you hear the stories, the lob-bomb attacks back in March, the Green Beans coffee trailer burning down, the JDAM building. It’s huge. The biggest building on the FOB and it’s got a hole in the middle of it like God put his fist through the roof. It used to be the Defense Ministry building. Republican Guard central. They used to interrogate people and then toss them out the top floor windows. Now it’s a gutted sagging hulk, an early victim of the shock and awe. A few buildings over there is a small square jail with an open inner court yard. The windows of the guard towers at each corner have long since been broken and sections are cordoned off with C-wire because they are structurally unsound. They say there are Chinese characters written on the walls inside left there by slave laborers brought in to build the surrounding compound. Saddam threw a banquet for them when the buildings were completed and had them all executed. So the story goes.

It gets late and even though you’ve worked a full day you find it hard to sleep. It’s a bit cramped and the walls are paper thin. Literally they are made of cardboard in areas. Nothing you haven’t been through before. A sheet strung up for privacy and you’re set. Your own little section of the world built to ward off casual invasion. You still can’t sleep so you write. Send it off, maybe people read it. You know they do because they write you back and it feels good to know you’re being thought about. But you still wonder if you made the right choice sometimes.

Usually you come back around to the same conclusion you always do when you have too much time on your hands. You did this because you were getting lazy and complacent and you’ve never learned anything if it wasn’t the hardest way you could possibly subject yourself to. And what’s worse than making the wrong choice? Making no choice at all.

London Sunday Times article about me and TTFR

2008-12-21T11:39:00.000-08:00

From The Sunday Times
November 30, 2008

To The Fallen Records: band of brothers

A new American record label offers soldiers and veterans a launch pad for musical success

When the US army medic Stephen Covell deploys to a war-torn section of Baghdad later in December to begin his second 12-month tour of duty, along with all his medical gear he will be carrying his own life-saving equipment — a guitar.

“Playing it relieves the stress when I come back from a mission,” says Covell, who helped to save the lives of several American soldiers and Iraqis on his previous tour of duty when his unit was caught in a deadly ambush. “I’d go completely insane if I didn't have my guitar. I play it whenever I can, although there isn’t much privacy to write songs.”

Covell, 26, is an accomplished singer-songwriter who dreams of being the next James Blunt when he leaves the army in 2010. Since signing up 2½ years ago, he has had to concentrate more on his medical skills than his musical chops. Now, however, thanks to a record label set up to release CDs by serving or retired members of the American military, Covell is about to get his first big break.

To the Fallen Records was created in 2007 by a former army captain to give a voice to people fighting for their country who also happened to be talented musicians with the ambition — and ability — to be chart-toppers. The label has released three compilation CDs, with a fourth set for release later next month.

Covell, who is cut from the same cloth as Jack Johnson and John Mayer, is one of 17 serving soldiers on the latest album, Say Goodbye, which features an eclectic mix of hip-hop, country and rock music. “Soldiers are recognised for their courage and dedication, but rarely are they honoured for their creativity,” says the medic, who submitted No One Else, about leaving a girlfriend behind as he heads off to war, for inclusion on Say Goodbye. “To the Fallen showcases those who have more to offer than just their service to their country.”

While Covell is serving his country in Iraq over the next year, he will no doubt wonder, at times, what appearing on the album will do for his musical career.

“I guess I hope for what every musician hopes for: recognition, appreciation and opportunities to perform and share my talent,” he says. “I’ve heard it will be sold at the coffee shops on base over in Iraq, so it will be interesting to see if people put two and two together and figure out that the weird medic is the same guy singing on the CD.”

The records and the label dedicated to releasing them were the idea of Sean Gilfillan, a decorated soldier who was among the first Americans to reach Baghdad in 2003. “While I was in Iraq, I realised that there were tons and tons of really talented musicians serving with me, but that they couldn’t realise both passions,” says Gilfillan, 29, who lost seven close friends to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and sniper fire in the 15 months he was there. He noticed how many soldiers had guitars, or laptops loaded with professional recording and mixing software, and how they used music as a form of therapy to help them cope with the dangerous and stressful situations in which they found themselves. “So many soldiers seemed to be singing, rapping, recording and playing,” he says. “And a lot of them were really great.”

When Gilfillan returned to America and left the army, despite having no musical background, he decided to start a label to publish the soldiers’ songs. He named it in honour of his seven fallen friends.

Yet even as a combat veteran with what he believed to be a patriotic — and economically viable — idea, he found himself fighting a losing battle when he tried to raise the capital needed to get the company off the ground. “It was very, very difficult to start with,” he recalls. “We went to the banks with a business plan, but when we said we wanted to start a record label, they just looked at us like we were crazy. They all said no.”

Undeterred, and determined to succeed, Gilfillan and his wife remortgaged their house and borrowed money from family and friends. “We scraped together everything we could because we believed in the concept so much,” he says. “We believed it would be successful and that people would want to hear the music.”

Gilfillan started soliciting submissions from his military contacts and trawling through Facebook and MySpace pages to find singing soldiers. “A good portion are just starting out, and they don’t have the tools to make it to the level where they could be on a CD,” he says. “But there are some really professional musicians in the military, or who have retired from service, and we found them. The quality of the music is really important to us. If you don’t have ‘it’, you don't get on one of our CDs.”

Gilfillan estimates that 90% of those who contact him want to pursue music as a full-time career, and that 20% of those will make it: “We don’t really deal with those that just view it as a hobby.” He initially selected 14 soldiers from about 100 who had all submitted impressive debuts, and To the Fallen’s Hip-Hop Volume 1 was released in February 2007. “After that came out, we put up our own MySpace page and word just kinda spread ridiculously fast,” he says.

Country and rock compilations quickly followed, and the label now has a database of more than 1,600 artists. It receives more than 150 new songs each week, of which slightly more than a third are rock songs. “The songs seem to reflect the mood of the country,” Gilfillan says. “We’ve had a couple of tracks about Obama, a hip-hop track and a country track, and they both focused on how to move the country forward out of Iraq and into a new realm of diplomacy. They are both pretty good tracks, so they might make the next CD. But not that many tracks are that politically charged. A lot have to do with actual missions or storytelling rather than ‘Why are we here?’-type stuff.”

Whatever the subject matter, soldiers themselves seem to appreciate their comrades’ work. “The CDs sold out in less than a week at every forward operating base in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Gilfillan, who also reveals that global sales are strong enough to allow the label to sustain itself and donate a percentage of the profits to military charities. The company’s plan is to release a new compilation CD every two or three months, as well as occasional solo albums by some of the featured artists.

Several contributors to the first CDs are already seeing the benefits of inclusion, among them Keni Thomas, a retired ranger who was involved in the infamous Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993. He had a song on To the Fallen’s first country-music compilation and is a rising star in that genre, having released a successful solo album and performed at the Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville, no less.

Thomas and Joel Port, a former marine who was featured on the label’s first rock CD, have both been asked to take part in tours for the troops in Europe and the Middle East. Several others from the first three CDs are also touring and performing in America.

Sergeant John Freeman, an army instructor who records under the name Merq (a soubriquet given to him by British soldiers he helped in a firefight in Iraq), has recently been offered a record deal, as well as being asked to write songs for a number of other artists. “It has helped me,” he says of being featured on the first rock compilation. “I’ve been interviewed by Rolling Stone, doors have opened and I’ve attracted new fans.”

Freeman, 37, served two tours in Iraq and was wounded on his first when shrapnel from an IED tore into his legs. When his injuries healed, he went back to Iraq and wrote several songs about his experiences. Now preparing troops in America for deployment to the Middle East, he says that the support a label such as To the Fallen offers to all soldiers is invaluable.

“A lot of record labels don’t want to deal with you because you are a soldier,” he claims. “When you say to someone at a record company that you’re in the army, their mood changes. I’ve yet to have any A&R person that I’ve ever sat with stick their hand out and say, ‘Thanks for serving our country, tell me more.’ But they need to know that there is a lot of musical talent in the military.”

Say Goodbye, released by To the Fallen Records, will be available for digital download from December 16 through Amazon and iTunes. For more information, visit www.tothefallenrecords.com

The Stephen Cometh... to Iraqeth

2008-12-13T11:36:00.000-08:00

I turned the key and kicked the door to my room for the last time before I left the country. The key turned the lock and the kick offered the bolt a more direct path home that wasn’t available given it’s regular trajectory. The lowest bidder had left our beautiful brand new barracks with many permanent and disabling handicaps, one of which happened to be a slightly sagging door to room 416A. It was a routine that I’d repeated so many times it had become second nature, just another quirk of what I had come to consider home, the home that I was leaving behind yet again. The rucksack on my back creaked under the weight of the next year of my life, counter-balancing that on my front was a standard issue green Army duffle, an aid bag, and an assault bag, some 200 plus pounds in all. I imagine I looked like some sort of military trade caravan that had lost its pack mule, or passive aggressive tortoise. Upon reaching the end of the hall I found that I failed to account for the maximum width requirements to gain exit of the building, so I dropped some bags, rearranged, kicked some things, alluded to the lack of propriety of somebody’s mother and slowly inched my way out in to the cool North Carolina evening.

The squadron area was buzzing with activity, families spending their last moments with their sons and husbands, busses lining up, weapons being drawn. The wind came up occasionally and it must have been bitingly cold but when you have so much else on your mind you hardly notice. Time creeps or maybe it doesn’t, all I know is that I stood there in the midst of this clump of humanity and I felt almost nothing. Well I should say I felt nothing until everyone started crying.

It killed me to watch my buddy’s 8 year old daughter cry as he hugged her goodbye. People in emotional pain make me feel awkward like I’m watching a family eat dinner though the window from the outside. I think it’s that I want to be able to fix what hurts, but they don’t make bandages for that kind of wound. I hugged his wife and told her that I’d take care of him and she cried. Everybody was crying. I may have had I had some one to say goodbye to. But I’d rather my family fly out to see my when I get back. Hellos are much easier. I called my parents and said I was leaving soon and went back to feeling nothing, least of all my toes.

With our bags hucked onto a flat bed we shuffled onto the bus and one of the wives began to run along side the bus as we drove off. We laughed. Not so she could hear, but we laughed. Soldiers are cruel amongst each other; the humor keeps the hurt away. We all miss someone but why dwell on it? And it was kind of a ridiculously over the top display but I understand her motives. Love makes a fool of each of us.

Thus began the waiting. Leaving the country with the military is a long succession of moving things from one place to another and then waiting. I thought that I’d lost the ability to sleep on command but really I’d just lost the need to while I was back in the States. It’s so easy when you have nothing but time, why not spend it dreaming? I slept on concrete, on the plane, on a metal bench in the airport terminal in Ireland, on the second plane and when we got to Kuwait I slept some more. While we were there I sometimes slept 12 hours a day. Being sick helped, but mostly I just had nothing to be awake for. Three meals a day, a couple mandatory training sessions and a long morning on the range was all that kept me from laying on my cot and reading myself into yet another coma.

When I woke I realized I was thinking about being home and missing those I love and it was unbearable. I had to read or listen to music, anything to keep the faces out of my mind, all the things I’d miss over the next year, the friends I’d grow a little farther apart from. That’s the hardest part of this job. It isn’t the weight or the distance you walk or the blood or the danger. It’s lying awake in a room of sleeping soldiers feeling like your whole life it drifting away from you and that you’ll never get this time back. All these weapons, all these tools and minds, all this training and you’re completely helpless and weak. So really it isn’t that I feel nothing like I had the day I left. I just feel privately, listening to the symphony of snoring, farting men, in a dark tent in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert, I feel the most human I have in months.

My body was so out of whack I usually woke up around 0230 and stayed awake until first formation. On a few occasions I went for a walk out around the tent to clear my mind and freeze my balls off. In the desert at that time of morning the moon has a unique and beautiful way of glowing like a raw piece of amber as it nears the horizon. It’s a nice reprieve from the wind, grey skies, and talc like dust that permeates all of existence during the day.

I’m writing this from an airfield in Iraq somewhere west of Baghdad. We’re waiting (surprise) for our final flight to FOB Loyalty which is to be home for the next year or so. I was officially pinned Sergeant yesterday and so far have made a complete shamble of the NCO corps. I’ve not only managed to lose my aid bag (which I recovered) but I’ve also left my ID card with another soldier in Kuwait. I can’t tell you have embarrassing it is to have to tell the person who put you up for early promotion that you’ve done something so mindless and stupid. I can tell you however that it is more that possible to enter a war zone without proper identification.

On the upside our Squadron Chaplin among many others have said that it feels much more natural to call me Sergeant Covell than Specialist. Which is nice to hear and I appreciate their vote of confidence but I told them that the way things are going, they shouldn’t get too used to it. On a personal note, I do enjoy having the younger soldiers address me in a more formal manor… I guess I’m allowed one guilty pleasure. I thought maybe I might get to have two, the other in the form of some totally in regulation but totally not to 82nd Airborne standard hair length that I was sporting before a local barber, who boasted 23 years in the practice gave me a haircut that bordered on negligent homicide. Imagine if it were possible for a 5’6” white kid to look like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and you might have some idea of what this guy did to me. Now I’m bald. Bic Bald. And it looks terrible, which would be ok if it wasn’t winter. Everything sticks to my head like Velcro. I’m in the same ACU’s that I wore off Bragg. I haven’t showered in almost two days. War these days isn’t hell, it just smells like it. Who wants a date?

My Secret Public Journal

2008-12-03T11:28:00.000-08:00

First off I want to apologize for the way my recent letters have failed to coincide with the spirit of the season. This is a time for everyone to reflect on the good within our hearts and to share that good with those we love. There's truly so much to be thankful for but I doubt a laundry list of my blessings is on any one's top 10 to read lists. Actually I'd be surprised if you had top 10 to read lists. That being said, I write what I feel and if my feelings come out somber then I can only give you what I have. I've never been able to sing a song I didn't care about and I doubt I'll ever to able to write something that doesn't ring true to what ever that voice is inside that direct my fingers over the keys. However my stories move you or fail to move you, I want to wish you all a happy new year and to thank you for continuing to share with me your thoughts and dreams and when the clock strikes midnight toast one extra glass for me and let's ring in a year of hope for a brighter tomorrow.

---

There is a video game that I've spent an unhealthy amount of the last year playing named Call of Duty 4. It's a very well made first person shooter that takes place the modern battlefield in a dozen or so locations around the globe following the exploits of a British S.A.S. commando and a U.S. Marine private as they solve the worlds issues one thirty round magazine at a time. There is one particular level where you are the gunner on a Specter gunship which is a C-130 cargo plane outfitted with some seriously devastating firepower. You're task is to cover the friendly team on the ground by atomizing anything that moves around their position. Fun right?

Now the reason any of this is relevant is because I've spent the last two nights staring at a wall of wide screen television monitors relaying the images from our UAV drones as they circle over Baghdad. They use the exact same forward looking infra-red cameras that are simulated in the game so the images on the screen are remarkably similar to the one I used to play with. It gives you a feeling of complete control. Kind of like how I felt with the night vision goggles on missions last deployment but even more so because not only can you see in the dark but you are looking though eyes that are miles away from your target and you are miles away from those eyes. I found myself wanting to see the figures on the screen blown to pieces. It's just so disconnected, so impersonal. It's like a game.

And that's what humans have been trying to do since the first piece of obsidian was cracked into a crude blade and used to fell an enemy. We have continually pushed to create weapons that put us further away from the actual act of killing. From swords to spears to pikes to arrows to bullets to cruise missiles at each step we take a little bit more of the humanity out of the target and it becomes a little less difficult to flip the switch. Read an article about a man stabbing his girlfriend to death and you are appalled, read about the fire bombing of Dresden and all you think is "wow that's so many people; I wonder how hot it was in the center of the city." It's unfathomable by normal human empathy to understand the loss of 100,000 lives. Our ability to destroy has far outpaced our capacity to truly understand the consequence.

A first few days of starting a12 hour night shift is a little like fasting. Your body is so out of whack you begin to think in drastically different ways. Maybe you become a bit more introspective. I hatched a plan to sell my collection of hundreds of DVD's save a few very special films to help lighten my ties to "stuff". DVD's are on their way out anyway. Instant streaming video is the wave of the future; let those suckers pay for the beta-max equivalent of our generation. One less thing to carry home. I thought about the cost benefit relationship of owning property versus a more transient lifestyle. If I was to buy a home and had the choice of what size it was would I want a large home on a vast swath of land or would I be happier in a cottage atop a postage stamp. Where does the line between need and want blur, and is it possible that our desires are nothing more than the manufactured product of industry, a new coat of paint on a peeling exterior? Has anything you've ever bought made you a better person simply by owning it?

I'm going to try and see if I can make a list to narrow down my possessions to 100 items. Apparently it's a reductionist fad that's gaining popularity among those who feel that one of the greatest challenges our culture faces is the tyranny of choice. I've noticed that it's weighed heavily on my mind recently. This idea of ownership and guilt I feel because of the disproportionate amount of resources my lifestyle demands in comparison to much of the world's population. Probably also because when you're forced to actually carry you're life on your back you take note that it may weigh more than it needs to.

The baby boomers worried about Russia and war and Communism, my generation worries about water, global warming, and whether or not we'll ever actually see the money we continue to dump into social security. We worry about the tipping point of the planet and whether we've already done so much damage that it may not even be fair to bring child into the world. We worry because the burden that we will inherit won't affect those who are willing it to us and we fear they don't care enough to help us fix it. We worry because the human mind can't empathize the suffering of the estimated billion men, women, and children that won't have access to the resources they need to survive within the next 15 years. It's a terrible thought; it's as terrible as hoping the figure on the screen will explode when you know that figure is a man like you. It's terrible because you know that it's within your power to make the difference yet it's so easy not to.

View: Full | Compact * My Notes * Notes About Me * Drafts My Iraq Address 08-09 Share Friday, December 12, 2008 at 9:35am | Edit Note |

2008-11-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

Jeanie from Florida: "...oh yeah, my grand father in law was in the Army, he was in Korea. He said when he first got there he was like 'these are the ugliest bitches I've ever seen' but after being there for a few months he said 'oh these bitches are gorgeous, I'd fuck every last one of them, you should look out because one day some Korean bitch will come up to you and say "hey I'm your sister" because I fucked so many of them, which wouldn't make any sense because he isn't my dad..."
(pause)
"I miss that crazy bastard."

Stephen from Earth:

Why I write

2008-10-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

I've never written during the comfortable periods of my life. I've never really done anything during those times. I’ve continually skated along at minimum output just to get by. But there is something strangely compelling about that which pushes us, about the trials that we face. They force us to re-evaluate our principles and re-examine just what it is to be awake and alive and learning. This is what brings out something useful in me.

My writing is therapy as is my music. I’m not particularly gifted at either. I am fully aware that I may well be destined to never do anything spectacular in this life but I’m also aware that my idea of spectacular is likely selfish and convoluted and that the true meaning of being a good person lies not in the deeds that set us apart but in those that bring us closer together.

I’m leaving again soon to do what I get paid to do. It’s not really as special as all the parades and articles make it out to be. We are just normal people; we have normal shortcomings and prejudices. We fight and love and fail just like everyone but we do it in uniform and the camera turns our way because a part of being human is the hope that we can find something better in our neighbor which will in turn make us better. I hope to find something better in that person too.

If...

2008-02-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

If I owned a electric company in Germany, my slogan would be: "Many Hans make light work!"

Blisters for your Birthday

2008-02-28T11:44:00.000-08:00

Everyone tells me I should write a book about being in the Army and what it's like to go to war but there's a part of me that feels that most of those stories have been told. Every story has been told, really. So if I were to do it, I'd have to make the most compelling and thrilling book ever written about the War in Iraq. I'd have to lie. But before that I'd have to start from the beginning, right? I'd need to write about basic training and how strange military customs are and why I thought it would be a good idea to join the Ranger Regiment (damn you Blackhawk Down). And I'd have to give it a catchy name worthy of the New York Times Bestseller list.

I've come up with a few different potential names for this potential book and my most recent and current favorite is "Blisters for Your Birthday" not only because it's a pleasing phonic phrase but because it simply sums up how the Army takes everything that could be fun and ruins it. Shouldn't shooting things and jumping out of airplanes and living in what amounts to a giant frat house be fun? Shouldn't I have not had to ruck march at 6:30 in the morning on my 26th birthday? It's not all bad truthfully. But soldiers love to bitch.

You're a Two Time Volunteer, Son

2008-02-23T11:46:00.000-08:00

This is always the worst part. Crammed on a tiny seat of red nylon cargo netting next to sixty other paratroopers, unable to find a comfortable way to sit that at the same time relieves the weight of the rucksack from your waist and your chute from your back. The C-130 sways and bucks in a meticulously orchestrated pattern for educing maximum levels of nausea while mechanical pings and pangs keep ever mindful that this Mac truck with wings is easily older than you are. The men around you are bathed in the cool blue light but it doesn’t help to make the mood less anxious. The knots in your stomach strongly suggest you that you should have maybe just had two of those gut-truck burgers and not three, still somehow you find a thin, fitful sleep. In your mind you recount the steps you’re going to take as you exit the aircraft, watching your body as it falls into space, imagining everything that could go wrong, the malfunctions, the broken bones, and then you remind yourself that statistically speaking, tonight you’ve got a pretty good chance of not becoming a statistic.

A short while later you open your eyes as the Jumpmaster opens the door revealing the darkness beyond. The droning roar of the four propellers slicing through the chill night air makes it impossible to communicate below shouting level. You don’t feel much like talking anyway. 1200 feet below, lights from street lamps blur in the prop-wash giving adding another layer of doubt to this already surreal situation. You signed up to do this, you actually volunteered twice! And you remember that your original orders were to Ft. Carson, Colorado. You think about snowboarding and you kick yourself… or you would if you could move your legs. 130-knot winds slide along just feet from you as you stand and check your static line that will open your chute as you exit. Again you’re painfully aware of the 150 lbs of equipment attached to you, but the adrenaline helps takes the edge off. The ritual equipment check ends with each paratrooper yelling “Ok!” letting the guy in front of him know he’s good to go. There’s also the slap on the ass… you choose the shoulder. The red light by the door flicks to green and the first man takes two steps and disappears. One-one thousand, the Jumpmaster yells “go” and you hand your line off and step into space.

Twisting and turning violently in freefall your chin tucked to your chest, hands gripping the sides of your reserve chute on your waist; you forget to count to four. It seems like you’ll know if it doesn’t feel right even if you don’t count. But it does feel right, you slow down and the world comes back into sharp focus giving you your first chance to look up to see the beauty of a fully deployed canopy catching the soft blue-gray glow of the full moon. Let’s see, chute open, check, risers untwisted, check, nuts intact, check, so far a good jump. Usually you’d expect to see other jumpers falling close around you but on this night you’re gloriously alone and enjoying one of the most thrilling experiences in life.

Gela drop zone isn’t as long as Sicily, which is the largest in North America (a subject that somehow renders a hearty and ubiquitous pride among those in Division, but really is it any surprise that it’s here at Ft. Bragg, the home of airborne and special operations?) ((EDIT) - As Cpt. Hesterman said, Gela and Sicily are actually the same drop zone, just flown in different directions, I wasn't aware of this.) More importantly Gela consists of mostly soft damp sand that is impact friendly when the winds are low. They say not to look at the ground because you’ll land sooner than you think in the dark but they say lots of stupid shit so you look and realize your about 200 feet up, release your ruck-sack and weapon so they go sliding down a 50 foot line that you hopefully won’t land on. You keep looking and see that you’re drifting to your right and backwards so you pull your front left riser to slow down but like always you do it too soon and switch direction of travel at the last second, slam into the ground with a knee grinding thud, the air rushes out of your lungs with a surprised and pathetic “huuuh” and roll over onto your back and look up at the stars. You laugh.

…

This is pretty much how a Mass Tactical night jump happens. It’s not glamorous but it’s pretty cool to look back on once you’re safe and in one piece on the ground. What was even better about it was a cherry (a new paratrooper) scampered up to me as I was putting on my night vision and getting my weapon ready and offered to carry my chute off the drop zone because he didn’t have anything to carry. The guys with no jumps in Division jump Hollywood style with no equipment because they aren’t trusted to do it safely, though I don’t see how my one jump makes me that much more qualified.

Later that night as the squadron marched 12 miles back home I rode in the field ambulance behind the pre-ranger training group and ended up treated a sprained ankle and a cold weather injury that could have been fatal with we hadn’t gotten to him when we did. The weather that night wasn’t that cold by Bragg standards, maybe in the high 40’s low 50’s but it had been raining off and on since we’d been on the drop zone and the guys we picked up were soaked to the bone. At one point he stopped shivering which I took as a good sign at first until I realized it was more likely that he was going into mind hypothermia even with the space blanket I’d put over him. We rushed him to the ER and he was released the next morning. I didn’t get to sleep until about 8 am. Then had to be up at 9:30 for a briefing. I slept the rest of the day.

---

This next part was actually from the beginning of November when we had just returned home.

It’s amazing how fast the money goes when you get home. Well maybe not that amazing considering how I’ve never been too good at living within my means. But I think I deserve a LCD flat-screen TV and a Play Station 3 and a Bose speaker system for my computer. I almost bought another guitar too, but six is probably enough. They are all in California though. I’ll figure something out.

So I sit here now in the calm of the mid morning in my own room. Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds are proving that you don’t have to be able to speak coherently to play beautiful music. It’s warm in my room and it smells like apples and pears because of this bottle of dish soap that we bought that has an air freshener built into the base. Apparently while I was gone, everything had to get an air freshener built into it. I have my own shower, a little electronic stove top that I’ve already cooked Lil’ Smokey sausages on… so delicious. Each night I fall asleep watching the BBC series “Planet Earth” that I bought on high definition Blu-Ray DVD. Mexican Cave Glow Worms catching flies with long strings of mucus and silk and eating them alive can be so beautiful when viewed with the correct technology.

---

It’s not all a fairy-tale life though. Sometimes I have to actually leave my room and go into Fayetteville and interact with the unwashed masses. Wal-Mart is a particular joy. Of course by joy I mean it’s an anxiety ridden freak fest starring the most bovine undergrowth allowed to call them selves human. Before I even enter the Wal’s gaping maw I’m harassed by an African American gentleman wanting to know if A) I’m in the military and B) if I need a ride back to base. Normally I’d trust any stranger with missing teeth and a lazy eye with my life, hell just look at my day job, but when he asked if I was military my creep-o meter spiked into the red.

In towns like Fayetteville posing a question like this is actually a thinly veiled euphemism for, “how would you like me to fuck you today?” Depending on the chosen profession of the one making the proposition, this is not always an unwelcome request but as far as transportation goes it’s a potential death sentence. Also, why was he asking me if I needed a ride as I entered the store instead of focusing on the patrons on their way out? As my friend smoked a cigarette, I learned that this cabby had recently gone into business for himself because he didn’t want to pay Yellow Cab $300 a week to be contracted by them. He pointed out which cab was his and as I turned to look at the mid 90’s era primer black Crown Vic wedged awkwardly into a nearby parking spot I could see how $300 would have been a stretch.

Initial survey and decision quickly completed I look my leave, shopped for the essentials I came for and waiting in line for forty minutes which I hear is fairly standard. Back at the barracks enjoy my personal space. I’m glad that music still comes to me. There was a time when I felt like that part of me was withering up, a cracked leaf skeleton in the autumn forest of my dreams, but like everything, it comes and goes as it pleases. Perhaps then, even when life gives you questionable methods of transportation, it’s best to just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

A Tale of Soap and Coming Home

2007-10-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

I didn’t know it was a game at first. The first time I played was probably back at the dorms at the University of Arizona. Just participated out of laziness and opportunity. It took two years of honing my skills to realize the their full potential but now I’m quite certain I’m a pro. The game, soap swap, the premise, be retarded enough to forget your body wash in the communal showers in a densely populated area long enough to where you know it will be missing if you go back to look for it, then find a new bottle of forgotten soap before your next shower so you never actually run out and you never buy a new bottle. The rules are simple. You can’t use bar soap, because that’s fucking gross, who knows what part of what body it’s touched. Also you can’t take a bottle that belongs to a person you know is still in the bathroom. That would just be mean, and it would increase the rate of half-naked fistfights that are already too frequent an occurrence.

That’s pretty much it. It’s not really stealing because it’s just accepted that if you forget your body wash in the shower it’s going to become part of the game. It’s really the same as anything that is left unattended in community housing, if you don’t love it enough to keep a constant eye on it, it was never really yours to begin with. So far this has been the fate of my pair of $130 Smith sunglasses and countless unmarked tan undershirts. Why do people take other peoples intimate clothing? Who knows, but I remember that even the issue tighty-tanny panties weren’t beyond the realm of possible targets in basic. They say the Army hates a thief but they certainly don’t mind employing them. I’ve learned a multitude of handy less than legal tricks from my fellow soldiers over the last year and a half. You’d be surprised how easy it is to steal a car and probably less surprised at how easy it is to get caught. Every time an aspiring thief falls short of his goals, a new private is born.

--

Kuwait blows. The end.

--

I’ll never fly again with out the aid of modern medicine. As we taxied to take off from Kuwait heading for our half-way point in Frankfurt, Germany I took a couple muscle relaxers and passed out before the wheels left the tarmac. I awoke to a small dish of strangely delicious meat chunks with rice and veggies in front of me and ate mindlessly until my plate was clean and promptly passed out before the stewardess took my tray. I woke up again to the sudden jarring of our plane touching ground and passed our two-hour lay over eating a bratwurst and chatting with my friends about how much we enjoyed walking outside and actually feeling cold.

As we were getting seated again I took an Ambien and racked out before we were in the air. Somewhere over the Atlantic I woke up and ate a cheeseburger and the next thing I remember we were 45 minutes out of Newark, New Jersey. I can’t think of a better way to spend almost an entire day inside a plane. I was rested, relaxed, and in generally good spirits even while sitting waiting for hundreds of soldiers to get off the plane before me. As we disembarked for our second and last layover we were told to under no circumstances take our weapons off the plane. After the seven layers of Customs that we went through just to get on the damn thing we were all pretty happy to just leave our shit on the plane so we could go shave and brush our teeth. Being one of the last ones off I ended up getting left to brush my pearlies using the water fountain. Apparently some soldiers found this taboo, the same men who spent weeks wearing the same clothes out at the patrol bases. Go figure.

From New Jersey to North Carolina I tried to sleep some more but I guess my body’s limit is somewhere around 18 hours so I watched an episode of House and fiddled with my beret picking little pieces of white fuzz of and trying to smooth out the wrinkles. Outside my little window we floated above lush juicy white clouds. It was like standing upside down and looking at Heaven below you. Every so often a break in the clover would reveal green fields and trees, well-maintained roads, and a tiny shiny cars moving all the busy people to and fro. It was like peering through the shifting mist of the wishing glass, six months in a place like Iraq can make even the most mundane American countryside seem unimaginable.

I got butterflies as we landed at Pope AFB and taxied around to an ecstatic crowd of waiting family and friends. No one was there to see me in particular but just being around all that happiness finds a way to get to you. Fathers seeing their baby for the first time, lovers reunited, mothers getting to hold their son that they’ve worried about endlessly over the last year, it seemed like all way right again in the little world of Stephen. People I’ve never met before hugged me like I was kin. Women cried on my shoulder. I was thanked countless times for my service and I found it was impossible to erase the smile I’d had since we were released from formation. And now I’m home. Hopefully my stories from here on will ones of joy and music, more chances to get all I’ve yet to do accomplished.

Know what would be awesome sause?

2007-09-29T11:59:00.000-07:00

....If I could sleep. But I can't so I updated my profile, messeged a few peoples and checked my gmail about 7 times to see if anyone had written me, but no one had.

...If people I write would write me back. I mean I know I'm not the center of the Universe, my mother told me so, but isn't is just common courtesy to return correspondence? Even if it's just a quick IOU-a-real-letter letter, that would be better than nothing. It just kind of makes me feel not so loved.

It's 4:22 in the morning and I'm still in Iraq. It still is sandy outside. I would enjoy a hug and one day where no one around me is a sarcastic burnt out soldier just counting the days until they go home. That would be awesome sause.

It's a war about nothing, get it!?

2007-09-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

Wielding an imagination as expansive as mine has grown to be can sometimes make even the simplest task seem incredibly daunting. I can’t just sit in a humvee and stare into space. I can’t just feel a certain way about something or someone. I have to dig, I’ve got to know why I feel the way I do. I’ve been digging into death since the first time I was directly involved with taking another mans life. I couldn’t just let him be dead, which would have been the simplest if not most healthy solution. I created a world where I could see each bullet pass through his skin in the slowest motion possible and continue through his insides destroying tissue, causing chaos where there had once been beautiful order. I stood there in the dark long after my real body had jumped into the rear of a Blackhawk and flown away. I watched over him as he took his last breaths, as be became another AP statistic, or more accurately as he turned into nothing at all, the butt of a joke told by men in brand new uniforms creeping through his country in the night with glowing green eyes.

He became a son and sometimes a father. He transformed into a farmer or perhaps the owner of a small shop. He was poor, that much doesn’t take any leap of faith to believe. He was afraid of us, so much so that when he heard the sound of our helicopters heading toward his home he fled into a nearby field and hid himself in a canal thick with tall dry reeds. He knew he was guilty of something that we would arrest him for, that he would be taken away somewhere far from his family perhaps for a very long time. Maybe he was a bad person. He may have been a rapist and a thief, a murderer, or he may have just been another sucker tricked into working for a group whose ideology he cared nothing about, maybe he was hungry, maybe he had no options. He had hopes and dreams and memories built from an entire life of consciousness, and all it took after a few short moments of violent action was a few moments more for the vacuum of time to fill in the space where he had once been.

Shortly after that night I was looking through a pile of confiscated items that had been piled on the floor of our tent. In it was a Sony Handi-cam Hi8 camcorder. You don’t see a lot of consumer electronics in the smaller towns in this region so it seemed out of place among the dirty AK-47 magazines and small pamphlets of Arabic writing. I picked it up and pressed the power button. To my surprise it started up and an image came to life on the small fold out monitor. The video was poor quality in comparison to the high definition I’ve grown used to, the colors highly saturated and grainy. Still it was clear enough to show two men blind folded on there knees with their hands tied behind their backs. They had been placed outside near a thick low hanging tree, the scene looked like a hundred places I’ve been in this country, sun baked reddish soil, everything sad and wilting in the mid day heat. Through the small speaker I could hear the voices of men speaking Arabic quickly, it’s replication distant and metallic, distorted by gusts of wind that occasionally overwhelmed the cameras small microphone.

I’d seen videos like this on the Internet before. I knew these men were going to die but for some reason I had to see it for myself as if to prove that I could tell the future. The unseen men’s voices became louder and more excited but the men blindfolded kneeling did not move. Their expressions never changed. They must have known what was in store for them. I wondered what it must feel like to know you’re about to die a violent and painful death. I felt that if I had been in the same position I would have resisted but I’ve seen enough of these scenarios to know how things go, eventually one just accepts that they have no choice or that’s what they make themselves believe.

In the middle of this thought two assault rifles were thrust into the picture and a moment later two fingers pulled two triggers, fire erupted from two muzzles behind a score of invisible unthinking unfeeling machined pieces of copper and steel. It’s not like Hollywood. There’s no spray of blood, bullet wounds sometimes bleed very little even minutes after they are inflicted. The body tightens in an automatic response to the trauma and falls forward following the force of the impact, the mouth pulls back in a grimace and that’s it. I turned the camera off.

I usually don’t talk about this part of my job when people ask me what it’s like here. People just don’t understand. They ask me questions like whether or not I think I have the right to choose what lives and dies. I had to think about it for a while before I had a good answer. I think I got defensive and ended up saying something like, “well, if I brought you over here and set you loose on the street in one of these towns we don’t have a firm control on and you were captured, you’d be beaten, raped, held for ransom and eventually beheaded or shot. It’s not like I just arbitrarily fire on randoms. Mistakes happen, but we have a good system in place to decide who’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’.”

If you think about the transverse who says a doctor has the right to keep someone on life support when they should naturally be dead? Doctors are given a guide to follow and based on their expertise in their field they make judgment calls using their knowledge and experience. A soldier does the same. The reason these morally ambiguous questions are still debated is because there is no black and white divide between right and wrong. Like marching in the earliest minutes of dawn we spend our days traveling through and working within continuously changing spectrum of grey.

Regardless of what the news would like to make it seem like, we are in fact professionals. Not in the sense that we’d all know how to tie a full Windsor but we are pretty damn good at what it is we do.

---

Some missions absolutely nothing happens. So what do you write about? Seinfeld made millions on a show about nothing so the trick must be to find the something within the nothing. That’s what I thought anyway as I was laying face toward the stars atop a thick and brightly patterned sleeping mat I’d “appropriated” from the inside of the house we had taken over for our last two day outing. Looking at so many stars it occurred to me that I really don’t know much of shit about anything. I know a little about everything but not a lot about anything. Like I know that the light that we see from a star was actually emitted hundreds of thousands of years ago and it’s a possibility that that star no longer even exists, but I don’t know what the speed of light is or how I’d possibly be able to calculate the distance from Earth to a star or it’s approximate age as determined by it’s size and the spectrum of light it emits. Somebody out there knows that. I know that thousands of years ago some dudes got together and started telling stories using uniquely shaped patterns of stars to create characters filling in the gaps as to how these characters interacted. I know what Orion’s Belt looks like but that’s about the only one I could pick out aside from the ladle to which there is no pot grand enough. Someone out there knows them all.

I blew through a 600-page novel by the evening of the second day and I thought that finishing a good book is like breaking up with a girlfriend you really like just because you have to move away. It’s so frustrating. You feel like there should be more but you just have to accept that it’s over and move on. There’re other books in the sea, you tell yourself, but still you can’t help but think about your old book. You want to pick your book up and hold it in your hands and relive all the memories. But you realize that story’s already been told, those pages have been turned, your book is probably captivating a new set of eyes by now, spine folded all the way back, revealing all the same secrets you once thought were only yours to see. Dejected, you look for anything to get your mind on other subjects. A few cheap, easy magazines later you finally get over the worst of the pain and start looking for other ways to entertain myself as if that old book were just another work of fiction.

Some soldiers develop a razor sharp weapons grade sense of humor after enduring the mind numbing boredom and repetition of the cycle of guard duty, patrols, and convoys. You get by, by making light of how bad it can be. We talked about the state of the region after a year of our being and how the bad guys just move from one town to another and back as we focus our attention elsewhere. One soldier said it was like watching a stupid person play ping-pong by himself. The ball just falls off the other side of the table and every time he goes on a wild goose chase through a huge cluttered room to find the ball and by the time he grabs it and switches sides he’s forgotten what the score is. It’s not all funny stories and bitching though.

Some of the guys here have fallen into a twisted and sick worldview that is all but encouraged by these circumstances we find ourselves in. Labeling something an “Iraqi-something” somehow strips it of all worth much in the way I believe the Nazi’s slowly stripped away the humanity of Germany’s Jewish citizens. I’ve watched men not just kill but torture wild and domesticated animals out of nothing more than plain boredom. I don’t see why it’s so hard to make the correlation that for the locals a chicken is more than just a cartoon on the outside of a carton of eggs among a stack of hundreds at the local mega-market, it’s a food source that has to be cultivated and cared for over time and it means a lot to them. It makes me sick. Luckily I’m not the only one who feels this way but still these things continues to happen. I’d get into the particulars of the story but I really don’t want to type it all out. What I did find odd was one of the men involved, a man several ranks and years my elder, after I voiced the obvious wrongness of his actions, came up to me and tried to assuage his (modest) feelings of guilt by explaining that it was just an “Iraqi Pigeon” and there for the dirtiest and most worthless creature on Earth capable only of spreading disease.

I replied, “Sergeant, human beings are a disease upon this planet that have so far shown an almost limitless capacity to take without giving back. That by definition is a parasite. Until today that pigeon lived within natures system of checks and balances that we have chosen to disconnect ourselves from. So really who’s more worthless?” I believe also I used the transitive form of “fuck” occasionally for emPHAsis. I didn’t look at him while I said this because I was trying to look busy reading and because I didn’t really feel like giving him that respect.

To try and make my point I retold a story of a day when I was in my early teens and my friend and I were sitting by the window of his second story bedroom. We’d been shooting birds from out translucent hide for hours; this was a regular thing for us then. You give young boys pellet guns and what do you expect they are going to do with them, at least we weren’t shooting each other… that day. By then we’d decimated the regulars and so had to wait extended periods of time for more migratory prey to enter our kill zone. Looking out across the yard I was scanning the branches of a scrubby coastal oak when my eye caught a tiny abnormality. I might have missed it had it not fluttered its wings just as I passed over its position. It was a tiny green humming bird surveying its territory with obvious pleasure as it let out inordinately loud chirps for its size. I laughed and told my friend I bet he couldn’t hit it, from that distance of maybe 40 meters it looked like a hyperactive bumblebee; I figured it was an impossible shot. He took my bet and as he took aim I smiled and got ready to gloat, as I believed his failure was eminent. His tongue was sticking slightly out the front of his mouth as it always did when he was concentrating or wrestling and he slowed his breathing down to steady the plastic stock of the rifle on the top of the windowsill. Pop! The gun recoiled slightly and he looked above the iron sight to see what had happened. For a moment the bird didn’t move and I readied my barrage of insults but a third of the way through the word, “pussy” the humming birds tiny body fell from the branch and behind the tall gate that marked the end of the back yard.

I was stunned. Literally I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe he hit it. Neither of us said a word, we dropped out guns and ran down stars to see if we could find the body of our felled quarry. After a few minutes of searching in a patch of ivy at the base of the oak tree I came across what looked like a winged emerald splayed out on the ground. There was a small hole between its shoulders but not much blood; I guessed a humming bird didn’t have much to lose in the first place. We both stared at the tiny bird for a period of time that I couldn’t really recall, it could have been 30 seconds or 15 minutes and it seemed that without saying a word. Silently something clicked that had never occurred to us before. We stopped shooting birds after that day and since then I haven’t had any interest in hunting. I think maybe it took killing something that we considered not only benign but also beautiful and somehow undeserving to teach us that he really weren’t gaining anything from what we were taking. Some people it seems never learn this. I didn’t think the story would change his mind but at least he knew where I stood and maybe it would change his behavior in my presence anyway.

---

The days are starting to cool off gradually. By this I mean I don’t fear for my life when I walk outside during daylight hours. It’s one of those things where you think, hey if it was like this all the time this place wouldn’t be so bad. But it’s not like this all the time, soon it will start getting cold, or rather the temperature will start fluctuating so widely that it will seem cold at night, then it really will get cold, but we should be gone by then (extend our tour again Mr. President, I dare you).

Oh I have a war story to tell...

2007-08-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

Here things go from boring to real damn interesting in the blink of an eye. We got a frago last night, which is a mission order on short notice that we would be going up to Anbuhkia (not spelled correctly) to make contact with the local nationals to snoop around and see what the friendly situation was looking like. This village is one of the last Shia Muslim strongholds in the region and in return for our aid and protection they offer us valuable information on what kind of insurgent activity is going on. In keeping with my fine military training I promptly fell asleep as our convoy exited Warhorse just after 7 AM. I woke up maybe ten minutes later to the humvee swerving around a string of huge holes where deep buried IEDs had either recently been detonated or unluckily stumbled upon. It occurred to me briefly that this wasn’t a very safe place and I thought that it was kind of odd that only upon having seen the actual results of what an IED can do did I consciously make the connection that my job was not particularly normal or safe. I popped in a couple breakfast pistachios and made believe they were an order of French toast with a side of bacon.

As we rolled into the village we stopped and dismounted in front of a “school” where absolutely no education looked to be taking place. The chickens pecking the earth in the front courtyard looked happy enough so it wasn’t a total waste of space. The usual gaggle of underemployed onlookers clustered around the gate facing where our Captain and interpreter were talking to one of the town elders and one of them kept eying me with a confused crooked toothed grin. I’ve heard there is a good deal of inbreeding in this area because of the level of poverty and remoteness of the small villages and if that is true it certainly shows in the faces of some of the people we come in contact with. I haven’t figured out yet how a place can produce some of the most beautiful young women I’ve ever seen right along side with the most awkwardly homely vacant eyed males. I do know why they hide their daughters once they reach their early teens though.

After coming to the conclusion, with the aid of an almost empty stomach, that I’ve officially grown tired of Iraqi youth and the “hey mistah” game I took out some of my boredom and frustration on a group of boys that kept inching toward where I was standing. It’s nice that only having to slightly raise your voice and your rifle can get such an immediate and decisive response. Force speaks volumes in any language. Left alone again I drifted back into scanning mode and looked around at the different roof tops, walls and fields around me and considered how 30% casualty rates are an accepted reality of waging war in an urban environment. Then I thought about pistachios because they make me happy and I decided that life is like a pile pistachio shells on the top of my aid bag in a moving vehicle. Without my guiding hand there to constantly control my pile of life, it would slowly but inevitably scatter and fall into chaos. Luckily before I wandered too far down that little road we were called to hop back into the trucks and follow a man who had given us a lead to another part of town.

Another group of men trying to look important and about 45 minutes later we rolled out again further north to attempt to fix a dam that the locals told us was broken as a way to show we were thankful for the information and support. The Iraqi police said that a dishka (also not spelled correctly) had been sighted in that area as well so we’d be on the look out for that too. A dishka is a Russian .50 caliber anti-aircraft gun that the insurgents use as an anti-vehicle/personnel weapon. They usually mount them on the back of a light truck (bongo truck) so they are highly mobile and deadly in capable hands. Most of us thought this was going to be a wild goose chase as we drove and drove through fields of grass and tall weeds. I fell asleep again.

I woke up as we were turning left onto another dirt road. To our right was a small field and beyond that a cluster of buildings. Our platoon sergeant (who graduated from the same high school as me, oddly enough) said something over the com like “who’s taking contact?” and immediately the present and now had my full and undivided attention. The specialist in the .50 cal gun turret turned toward the buildings like putting on a pair of sunglasses as you step outside, I put my earplugs in. To our right I could hear Ak-47s popping off but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. I found out later that a group of Iraqi Police had accompanied us and had the unfortunate luck to have positioned themselves between our .50 cal’s and the incoming fire. Our whole convoy exploded with gunfire. Incoming rounds whizzed and popped over our truck as I readied new boxes of ammunition for the gun. Times like these seem to grant me the most singular clarity. I don’t feel fear or anxiety I just put my trust in the guys around me and focus on the task at hand which at the moment was getting the fuck out of the perfect L shaped ambush that we had rolled directly into.

Here’s what happened according all the different stories I’ve pieced together. As I was sitting in blissful unconsciousness we had driven through a small town. We figure people in the town alerted the insurgents that we were coming if it wasn’t already obvious enough by the huge plume of dust being kicked up by our convoy. They had set up in some previously dug out fighting positions and waited for us to come. The odd part about it is that once we were there we were taking contact from our right, left and front but the IP had walked diagonally through the field to our left without stirring up any trouble. The question remains unanswered but what is for certain is that the dishka in question did in fact appear directly in front of us and scared the shit out of the IP who made a hasty retreat on our left flank. I don’t really blame them. Their vehicles are unarmored and they usually don’t wear body armor. Our forward observer said that he saw one of them get cut almost in half by just one dishka round. I’d have run too. In fact that’s essentially just what we did.

We started rolling backwards towards the road we had turned off while still engaging to our front and right. There was a three story building with a hide emplaced on the roof where we thought some of the fire had been coming from so our gunner opened up on it. I never saw a single person from where I was sitting so all I could do was make sure a fresh box of ammo was ready when our gunner needed it and hope that he didn’t get it by one of the bullets that I could hear going by us. We eventually got our truck turned around and continued our retreat.

My driver turned around and said “OK, here’s the situation, Golf 1 has been hit in the arm so get ready, we’re going to go back to that small village and have you take a look at him.” I had no idea who Golf 1 was but it didn’t really matter at that point, it was one of my guys and I figured it was a gunners since they were the most exposed. I ran over a few scenarios of possible extremity injuries and how to treat them and hoped it was a relatively small 7.62mm round and not the .50 cal, which would have probably taken his whole arm off. The whole situation sucked and had one of our guys not gotten hit I would have loved to wait around and watch an Apache level the whole block but as it was I had other things to worry about. Looking back on it I think we did a lot of things wrong and though I’m glad more people didn’t get hurt it makes me mad that we just left and now that gun is still at large and that fighting position is still mostly intact.

Three IP ran in front of our truck and we slowed down so they could jump on our hood. One of them looked hurt but I couldn’t see and obvious wound from my seat and they looked to be holding on all right. They looked scared. I wondered what’s in it for them to do a job that makes them a combatant without an army. Once we got to the village I hoped out of the humvee and the casualty was brought to me. I’d put my gloves on en route so I went right to work accessing the situation. Adrenaline does amazing things to people. The soldier had put a tourniquet, a pressure dressing, and an ace wrap on himself and already completely stopped the arterial bleeding. He was alert and elated that he had had so many confirmed kills even after being hit. The wound already taken care of I made sure he didn’t have any head trauma and wasn’t going into shock and started an IV line with morphine to help with the pain I knew was going to come once he came down off his rush.

We put him in the truck with me and I had him tell me what happened partly to help keep his mind off the wound and partly because I really wanted to know. He told me that he had been engaging the bongo truck with the mounted dishka directly in front of his truck when the round went through his wrist and pulled his sleeve back. Our interpreter handed him the tourniquet and bandages he fixed himself, reloaded and went right back to firing on the dismounted enemies he had identified. These are the kinds of stories medals come from, from guys who are this country’s true warriors. I hope he gets recognized for doing a dangerous job so exceptionally well.

15 minutes into the ride back to Warhorse reality started to set in and he began to realize how badly his arm hurt. Tourniquets have an accumulative effect with pain, the longer they are on the more they hurt. All I could do was give him some more medication and hold his hand and talk to him about how nice it must be to be a war hero who gets to go home while the rest of us are stuck here. Aside from getting the Forrest Gump million dollar shot in the ass, the wrist is a pretty lucky wound. He could still feel his fingers and I saw him move them a little so he’ll more than likely make a full recovery. Right before we got to base it was starting to become difficult for him to do anything but grab my hand and repeat things like “wow, you have no idea how much this hurts.” I followed along with him to the aid station and into the OR where I gave all the important information pertaining to the wound and medication given to the doctor in charge. The chaplain was there to talk with him and help keep his spirits up but I doubt there was much anyone could say at that point to help as the doctors took his bandages off to put a hemostatic dressing on. His whole body shivered in agony and I held his legs has he tried his hardest not to scream through the oxygen mask over his mouth. Right then a 1st Sergeant told me my Platoon Sergeant was waiting for me so I said goodbye and that I’d keep the casualty’s stuff safe, grabbed my bag, and ran out the door to the humvee waiting for me. The mission always continues.

So I know now first hand that we have a lot of work to do here. Do I want to stay here? Hell no. Do I think pulling our troops out now would be a really bad idea? Definitely. There you have it, from the horse’s mouth. Not CNN or Fox News, no profit margins or motives involved. This place is messed up and we are the only thing keeping any sense of order. It’s all pretty sad really, knowing that I’m a part of the problem and the solution. We gave the militant Muslim movement it’s fuel and it’s martyrs, consolidated it’s forces, drew lines in the sand to instigate conflict, armed it and set it free on the world and now we sit here playing referee to an age old divide between Shia and Sunni, rich and poor, east and west and it blows. Sometimes I wish I could go back and put down all the books, turn off the TV and just believe that the world was a good place to wake up to where I could drink my cold sparkling apple juice and worry about things like making the teams even for the neighborhoods nightly game of cops and robbers. Before I had to play the cop for real and the pointed fingers turned into pointed rifles. You can’t ever go back, but pistachios can make a decent breakfast.

Alcohol

2007-07-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

I read Esquire. It's just another bullet point on the long list of un-military activity that I participate in on the daily but I'm not ashamed of it. I envision for myself a future of upper-middle class comfort where I'll be able to indulge in fast cars (probably rented), nice suits (that I won't have much occasion to wear), and of course fine expensive liquer. The mixing of these three is always a guaranteed recipe for hilarity, but if for some horrible reason I was ever forced to choose just one from the list, I'd have to follow my heart and my liver to the drink.

Alcohol is illegal in Kuwait, as it is in Iraq and of course my natural perpensity toward the contrary is begging my better judgement to find some sort of underground hooch network here on base where shampoo bottles are filled with bathtub gin and you need a password to open the tent flap. I've heard alcoholism runs in my family but I like to believe that I drink not because of some genetic defect but rather because drinking makes me a famous super hero with sexy chiseled abs and large offshore bank accounts. Reality is dictated by perception, right? I enjoy my reality on the rocks.

Anyway the reason I mentioned Esquire as a prelude to my libational confession is because they do a "Best Bars in America" feature every year and as I was laying on my cot in my white tent reading about bars that I'd actually been to I came to the conclusion that the only thing that rivals my love of music is my love of drinking with my friends. But I fucking hate going to the bars. They are too loud, too full of retards, and I always feel short in them. I don't why bars are the only place where I become self conscious of my height but it pisses me off just the same. It seems to me that these feelings aren't indicative of the bar experience as a whole but rather because the local bar scenes in the towns I've lived in have been either based around obnoxious college age drunkards or obnoxious middle aged affluent drunkards and the bars themselves focused too much on squeazing every last cent out of plastic sheathed well rum and cokes and not on the atmosphere of what made the public house of so many years ago a welcoming meeting place for the tired and thirsty masses.

I guess the only thing to do is build a bar from scratch that won't suck. Here's what my bar will feature:

A well trained and friendly staff. They don't have to be super models but men and women who know how to make a real drink. I figure I'll have to snag some from a larger city or start off staffing the bar myself until things are running the way I'd like.

No TV's. I don't care about sports and I want my bar to be a place to talk and meet people not to drool and stare into the corner at a Berry Bonds fat ass.

A free or cheap jukebox with good music. My definition of good is fucking good.

A small area for live music. People have forgotten the power of live music inclosed areas and alcohol, it's an awesome trio. I will use my contacts which still remain to get good artists to come play and I'll treat them right.

These will be the basics. As for design ideas and implimentation I'll be thinking while I'm not drinking. When I get home I'll be doing some heavy research to find out exactly what do and don't want in my bar... this of course will have to be done in the field.

I'm here and fine... like ok, not like you know.. sexy.

2007-06-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

This is just a copy of the email I sent out that had some issues getting to people. If you didn't get it... tough titties :)

Sorry for the retardedly long list of people I sent this to. My contacts list is immense and though I'd like to have the time to go through and check find who would actually care about this I decided to do the democratic thing and just annoy everyone and let you all sort it out amongst yourselves. And they said I didn't have a good grasp on marketing theory.

I left the US Monday and two days, a subway sandwich in Ramstein, Germany, and a cramped commercial flight later I stepped off onto Kuwaiti tarmac in the wee hours of the morning. Things smell different over here... probably because Axe body spray hasn't caught on yet. It's blistering hot and windy during the day and just hot during the night and the sun rises to fill a dusty blue gray sky before 5 AM. The men hold hands and generally act kind of like adolescent boys and I haven't actually seen a local female yet. I'm beginning to see why there are so many conflicts in this region.

So far things are business as usual just getting used to the climate and taking orientation classes. I don't really feel like I'm halfway across the world. I still eat three times a day and hop on the internet at night. America knows how to go to war. We even have a KFC and a Starbucks. The same company that wouldn't serve my friend because she was in uniform apparently takes no issue with placing a store in the middle of an American military base in a war zone. Capitalism 1 - Ideology 0. The only real difference for me is that I no longer have a cell phone. So don't call me unless you have a thing for voicemail.

So that's that for now, nothing cool to report. I just wanted to write and let you all know I made is safely and despite your worry I think I'd be in worse danger in Los Angeles than I am here. If you received this and don't really know me or care regardless just let me know and I'll be sure to leave you off next time.

Tata for now,
Stephen

P.s. If you want to make a "moment" out of landing in your first war, preset your ipod. Otherwise you may end up getting stuck listening to "If I were Gay" by Stephen Lynch. True story.

Access Denied

2007-02-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

Since I can't get on myspace on this government computer, I'm going to write on facebook to scratch the itch that's been bugging me all week. I've had to give up my laptop for about a month while I'm doing the Ranger Indoctrination Program so my internet mobility has been stiffled for a while as I am forced to use DOD computers that balk at allowing access to any site the government deems inappropriate. The word "blow job" in one of my friends posts blocked me from viewing my facebook profile on a computer that I actually paid to use. This one in the library is free and aparently is BJ blind which is nice... I don't really like them anyway.

RIP hold is some major bullshit. We stand a lot. I have formed a pretty sweet sunburn line around the back of my freshly shaved head where my PC ends. It's only slightly embarassing to go out in public with it. But then I tell people how I got it and they go "Oh" and stop laughing. The rumors going around about that I've volunteered for are bad and mostly true so the average soldier doesn't want to have anything to do with it. Which is great since I don't want to have anything to do with the average soldier. Finally a place where my elitism is nurtured, with good reason to back it up. The Rangers are simply the best light infantry in the world. From what we've been told, only 23 Rangers have died in combat over the last 5 years. Mostly because they don't have to wait around for confirmation to engage the enemy so when the opportunity presents its self they take it with lethal efficiency. I'm not a aggresive guy but these are the people I want to be around when bullets start flying.

The real test starts next week. So I'll finally get to see if I'm as good as I think I can be. And if not at least I can say I tried which most people never will be able to. Wish me luck... Oh and wish also that I'll somehow get to play my guitar a little bit too. I miss that damn thing more and more every day. Music is such a huge part of who I am. I'm always going to have to share my life between whatever I'm doing and being a musician. Much love to y'all.

Rangers lead the way.

Back in the swing

2005-07-30T10:51:00.001-07:00

Thanks to you all who came out to the Soquel show. I have to admit I was a little nervous to get up after being away from the mic for such a long time, but you all helped me realize that I really do have something special to offer. Thanks also to Reed for setting the show up, and the Ugly Mug for being the hardest to find corner coffee shop in Soquel. I seriously circled the damn thing three times before figuring out where it was… right in front of my face.

<3

Idlewild

2005-07-02T10:53:00.000-07:00

i havent really slept in two days. its idlewild 2005, the second installment of a party thrown by a dude named ivan who lives down in temecula and is friends with paul and in the inverse crew.

ive never seen such dedicated drug enthusiasts and coming from pacific grove thats saying something. but surprisingly its been really mellow, we had live music last night and the bands who came kind of just switched around and all of us who were musically inclined back to participate.

the house this is being held in is a three story rental overlooking a valley and the smog of LA. the scenery reminds me a little of lake tahoe with the dryish shrubby plants and pine trees. its a beautiful area actually. but definitely one i was just want to visit. it’s a little to remote for my liking.

the second story of the house has been converted into a night club of sorts complete with live dj’s and smoke and light machines. the house music never fucking stops. which is good and bad. i dont really mind house and jungle music but for the most part, bass pumping at 130 bpm can only sound so many different ways.

if i survive the rest of this trip i’ll finally have my car back and i guess i’ll have to finally start looking seriously for a job :P and i’ll have to try being more… sober.

Trouble in Paradise

2005-06-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

theres a strange dichotomy between the way the culture hawaii accepts and repels its guests. on the one hand people here are warm and open and friendly and there is a strong sense of family connection that holds people together, but then there is also a strong sense of resentment for white people that stems from the huge amount of poverty that exists throughout the islands. lack of education plays a large role here too and as with any situation the easy way to try and find the answer to a tough problem is to identify a scapegoat and focus your anger and frustration toward it.

personally i went from being called ohana by a new found cousin of mine to having a knife pulled on me at waikiki beach so i had the joy of experiencing the full spectrum first hand. of all my travels ive never felt worse about being white than i did here.

scenically speaking hawaii is as beautiful as i remember it. pristine beaches, lush forests and generally very clean cities and the smell of tropical flowers everywhere gives a surreal feeling that i’ve not felt anywhere else. i love it here but i think if i was to do it again id have to have some local people my age to show me around.

seeing doug and the other cousins was really good because it gave me a chance to put a more human feeling with these names that until now had only existed in my distant memory. i wonder if everyone has as detached of a adolescent life as i had. i dont feel like i was even in the same body. like everything that happened before i was 20 was just a bunch of implanted memories. yes i believe im actually living in the matrix. which was that pill you were supposed to take? the red or the blue?

there isnt enough hours to sleep as long as id like to lately. my life is so easy and im so tired. i’ll make sense of it all eventually.

Such is the Mraz

2005-06-09T10:56:00.001-07:00

jason mraz is like crack. i try not to like his new stuff because its so pop and so produced and i didnt really like what steve lillywhite did with the dave matthews album he was involved with but god damn it i’m sucked in every time. mr. a-z is his latest single and i listen to it about 5 times a day. such is the mraz.

im in the terminal of the san francisco airport waiting for my flight to hawaii for my cousin doug’s 65th birthday. i havent been to the islands since i was 12 and since i got home early from the tour i figure why stop this whole travel motif i’ve been swimming in lately.

i’ve been to the north eastern tip of the other side of the country where i froze my ass off playing for a crowd of hundreds of drunken colby college kids with keller williams. then i was in the most south western corner visiting my cousin in san diego. and finally as far north as portland oregon before money ran out.

ive seen deserts, dunes, palm trees, marshes, snow covered mountains, national monuments, forests of unmeasurable density, highways, dirt roads, oceans, rivers, yokels and yuppies and now i get to see mangos and hibiscus flowers.

i start a good deal of my paragraphs with myself as the subject. lets try and remedy that.

the san francisco airport terminal was gray upon gray upon gray this morning when my sister drove my dad and i here. the gray fog packed up against the huge windows that look out over one of the many gray runways and swirled around steel support tubes painted gray to match the gray of everything here. only now can i see i little bit of blue poking out of the gray.

i think i forgot to mention the swedes in my tour journal entries. maybe i did, i kicked a huge dent in their rental car when they came to see me play in aptos. thats what happens when i get free irish car bombs. anyway they came to eat with us last night and it’s always a pleasure to have a little european influence in the house. their sense of humor gets me every time. i have to get to sweden before this summer is over.

fragmented memories of incidents from the past few months dance around when i try to write and i sometimes miss a few of them because i have to latch on to one or the other when they come around and get them down before they disappear again into the nonsense that is my mind.

thought for the day: what would the world be like without caffein? i get they feeling we’d still be riding animals for transportation and id be scribbling this down on papyrus with a quill and ink made of crushed leaves and snail shells.

Such is the Mraz

2005-06-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

I too call it Spinning

2005-06-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

Below are my journal entries from the tour with my friends band Inverse. Good reading for those unperturbed by poor grammar.

Holes in the Washington Apple

2005-06-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

last night was kind of a flop but i met some cool kids here in medford so it wasnt a total loss. none of the bands ended up playing because the venue we got booked for us was actually a internet cafe/ coffee house, which for an internet cafe/ coffee house was really cool and makes me wish we had something like it back home. but we needed a PA system and they had none so we played our acoustics outside the door until about 2 am. i sold a couple cd’s and called it a night.

i finished dune last night too, i dunno what im going to do with myself now.

the new jason mraz single has grown on me quite a bit and i found a new band for me called autolux and they win drum beat of the year with a song called turnstile blues.

last night had a few saving graces. we played a damn good game of poker which im finally letting myself participate in. i try to avoid fads so that i can mock them freely when they pass though sometimes i do get sucked in. damn you slap bracelets, i’ll never be free of your tyranny. we also had one of those infectious laugh fests as we were going to bed last night. the subject of the joke wasn’t intrinsically funny i dont think, but dominic, topher, and i laughed for a good five minutes over it. it was that kind of laughter that starts to hurt your throat and chest and no matter how hard you try to calm yourself, it takes hold of you and you’re at its mercy for as long as the feeling wills.

it was much needed after the disappointing beginning of this tour. washington should hold better venues.

But why were we looking at it in the first place?

2005-06-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

the insanity never stops man, it’s like woah, every day is crazier than the one before! no not really, but i did fix the problem i was having with my new atm card by getting a new pin number and i almost got in a fight with a rather vulcan looking bartendress yesterday afternoon.

i put an informal complaint in to our waitress at the marathon bar saying that the newcastle i ordered tasted a little thin and like it ran through the tequila well tap. i didnt actually say the second part but that was the truth of it. the woman who i assume owned the place came over to the table we were all sitting at with a shot of the fowl beverage in hand and said to me that that was the way tapped newcastle tasted, inferring that my experience must be limited with such endeavors. i honestly didnt want an argument or even a free beer, i said i would pay for it and that i just wanted a beer in replacement so i could have something to drink with my gyro, which was quite tasty.

she stormed off more angry than she should have been with the exchange and i got a free hefewiesen. i tipped the waitress exorbitantly and invited her to come to the show. she didn’t come, surprise.

the so-cal boys dont like portland, they think its mossy and dirty looking. but i actually enjoy it quite a bit, there’s so many trees on every block and it just seems slower for a big city. a radio host once said that, in referring to the level of attractiveness in women, a portland 10 is a california 7. that made me laugh and so far i cant see the untruth of it. it looks like everyone here is going to art school. on the other hand its kind of nice to not be surrounded but unnatural levels of beauty even though i miss the university of arizona eye candy. but i cant say i ever talked to any of them, so really, what’s to miss.

again last night the turn out was sad but the show was good and i found a couple new bands i like and i got a shirt and some cd’s. i took a picture of a homeless man named dick and gave him a couple bucks and a cd and he put shoe polish on his face like war paint and a plastic bag on his head which resembled a chefs hat with E.D. comedy, it seems, is all around us.

we found a sex shop to entertain us for a while before we had to set up for the show. comedic moments whilst inside: finding pauls twin, sideburns and all in a gay porn, and finding a marital aid called “the great american challenge.” i’ll let you use youre own imagination on that one.

<3’s for everyone.

Out in the Parking Lot

2005-06-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

i deeply dislike wal-marts. we use them for their well lit, well cleaned bathrooms, but i try to spend as little time in them as possible. they seem like cultural wastelands piled to their impersonally high ceilings with nicknacks that range from slightly to profoundly useless. employees man the wide automatically opening doors with blue vests stamped with the seemingly friendly slogan, “how may we help you?” how may we watch you shop lifting?

my sour feeling toward mock authority stems from last nights encounter with another wal-marts parking lot security patrolman who felt the need to harass us intermittently while we had our rv parked. apparently “rving” because according to this man, rv is a verb, was prohibited in that parking lot and regardless of the fact that we explained to him on multiple occasions that we were only doing to be there a few hours to rest and catch a movie he felt it reasonable to question our motives.

and it wasnt that we were rude to him… to start with. i smiled when he told us the rules and said we wouldn’t be there over night. i smiled when i walked over to his truck with obnoxious flashing yellow lights to ask him if it was ok to stay there while we caught a movie at the cinema-plex across the way. i didnt even become rude when he gave me the stone faced look of a man who reveled in his place of power and told me we had to move the rv to the curb side of the the lot so we wouldnt impede other shoppers driving. his point was that our trailer stuck out about 3 feet into the road space between parking stalls. i laughed a bit at this and in an obvious attempt to show me he meant business he stared at me like a drill sergeant might stare at a soldier in training. that was the breaking point for me.

everytime he would drive be from that point on i would wave condescendingly at him with a big smile and a wink. we took pictures of him and as we walked back from watching the longest yard, and gave him the double finger point like “hey tiger!” i dont know why these little things give me such pleasure. but when you really have no recourse against being wronged, the only available actions sometimes take on childish heir. sometime after that he informed us that we had ten minutes to leave before he called in reinforcements because he thought we had lied about seeing a movie. he stood outside the camper out of my sight from the loft above the drivers seat and i called to him “would you like to see the movie stub?” knowing that would catch him off guard as he assumed he was correct, and he said “no, i don’t want to see it.” the surely nature of his reply made me laugh and i knew that i had won this stupid game.

i flipped him off as we left and felt satisfied with myself. have i grown as a human being from that experience? no, but i wont pretend that im above pettiness. we all slept in till around noon today and now we are sitting here eating and deciding where we are to go next since we don’t really have much to do till around 8 or so.

apparently the ugliness of the people we have seen here has not been lost of my companions. of course we take our sample from wal-mart parking lots so it’s had to say thats representative of what oregon really has to offer. all for now. its guitar time.

A drop in the Pale

2005-06-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

oregon so far is a beautiful state. the vegitation is lush and even the major cities like portland have trees lining all the streets. but along with the greenery comes a huge amount of rain. its almost always cloudy if not overcast and the ground is rarely dry. i enjoy it none the less, but i doubt i would enjoy living here full time. im looking forward to taking more pictures to help remember what im seeing these days.

im listening to dune on audio book and through it i feel my thoughts are taking on a more formal patern of arrangement because of the proper english usage and the focus on inward thinking and analysis of minute amounts of data from the outside world. im probably just a nerd.

oregon is also a stark contrast to the southern california feel we’ve driven away from. from fake and baked perfection seeking teenies to overwieght slices of americana, it feels like the people here are the ones europeans think of when they try to mock our way of life. in a way though i do feel at home here with my pale brethren.

A Little Short

2005-05-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

I slept pretty much all night and all day. we drove from campbell to redding night night and then today we drove to west linn oregon to stay with some family friends of mine. and when i say we, i mean topher and paul. i slept.

this morning when we were still in the raleys parking lot in redding where we slept last night, a homeless man came up to me and asked me if i had 42 cents. i asked him why he specifically needed 42 cents and he paused for a moment and said “well im a little short.” i replied “well join the club, im a little short too.” he stared at me in probably the blankest expression ive ever seen on someone id actually engaged in conversation and i decided it was best to just give him some change and let him be on his way. my humor is so lost on this world.

that was pretty much the highlight of the day besides staying with the gomboses. they live in a beautiful little culdisack in house filled with antiques and fun little pieces of ancient americana. gail the gombose matriarch is an antique dealer. their daughter alix is a champion volleyball player and i again and reminded that i am… a little short.

on the road we play battleship but with a twist. you have to come up with a word starting with the letter of the grid. the d section is particularly entertaining.

its getting on the in the evening and we are watching family guy full of pizza and im about to take a shower. i love life.

all for today.

mt shasta is really beautiful.

cornfilth.pop

2005-05-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

cornfilth.pop

this is the sadness of being in a car all day. thats the kind of thing you find funny. paul burned the hell out of some microwave pop corn at the circle k we stopped at after the gas lighter show in campbell and trevor said that is smelled like cornfilth,pop and we got a good laugh out of it. this was much needed after playing what was basically a worthless show where we got no money and no new fans. it reminded me of the clownpenis.fart sketch on SNL a while back.

i was really drunk last night. at the aptos club in aptos after my set the bar hand just kept feeding me drinks. and once i get going its all down hill, rum and cokes, irish car bombs, long island ice teas, damn i was rediculous. i kicked a huge dent in on of my friends rental cars, they are visiting from sweden and said that they had purchased the 8 dollar insurance.. it was only after my actions that they started to doubt their forethought. so i may owe some swedes some money.

needless to say today was spent mostly sleeping and recovering. i was glad not to have to play tonight. i would have sucked probably but i had lots of friends come to the show so i was a little bummed that i couldnt play for them. soon enough they will be repaid.

we got to hang out with veronica (vodka) on pv and paul grabbed her boob and she hit him. i laughed. i wanted to spend more time there but we are on our way to portland now and that means a hell of a lot of driving tonight. sorry veronica :( next time.

my website is coming along well which is awesome. thank you melissa. im going to try and get people to send in pics from older shows to add to the page. im excited to see where i can go with it.

my mind is just a jumble right now, so much input on a brain that usually doesnt have a lot of change going on. i just want to listen to dune on audio book and play a bit of fire emblem my new gameboy rpg. yeah im cool like that. or maybe ill learn to speak spanish like the rest of the band… me gusta libros… my spanish sucks.

reminders:

my friends are awesome
my cd is good
tour is tiring but fun
oyeyoyoy!

update: fuck you taco bell for not letting me poop. and i stubbed the fuck out of my toe on the way back here. sadness.

In Tongues

2005-05-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

Touring so far is about what I thought it to be. A lot of down time driving, a lot of confusion with other bands getting sales done, small crowds and strange venue owners. Also it’s a hell of a lot of fun. You get to know the other guys in the RV probably more than you really want to, but it’s the kind of bond that only comes with being in very close quarters for extended periods of time. The girls are… interesting and although Inverse and I are relatively unknown, you can see that there bit of mystique about us in the minds of people we meet. It makes sense, we get to do the stuff that most people just see on MTV… well when MTV used to actually have music on it. And even if its on a small scale, we still put as much energy and effort into our performances and people notice that.

I’ve been recieved much better than I thought I would have been. I’ll admit I stereotyped the black clothed, fucked up hair having, makeup wearing guys and gals that have made up my audience so far, as rockers and metal heads who probably wouldn’t be interested in what I was bringing, but people have been more than complimentary and I have had quite a number sign up for my email list and have sold more CD’s than I thought I would have. Trevor, Inverses singer, said something like “Well the talent is undeniable and people pick up on it regardless of the kind of music they usually listen to,” (He makes fun of my love of Jason Mraz). But he’s right about that. On a side note he hit the crap out of his head on the stage last night during one of his more intense throws of passion. It looked like it hurt quite a bit, but nothing a little Don Pedro couldn’t fix. It’s a blast to watch him perform because he it totally into is music, which is something I’m still working on.

Where we played last night was an experience to be sure. What used to be The Gaslighter, in Gilroy is now, The Globe, a christian oriented venue thats stage is set up to look like a barn an old west gold town. On the bright side we did actually get in the venue unlike last years Gaslighter attempt but on the down side I was asked what my relationship with Jesus was about 15 times. The owner was nice enough and so were the people working there, especially this one staff member who was probably the coolest Mexican imigrant ever. He was always just right there when ever you turned around, ready to help move things, open doors, and just be generally helpful which most staffers aren’t. So to you, mystery Globe staffer, I salute you, you are in the hall of fame. Unfortunetly I don’t think I will ever see him again. Dominic, Inverses guitarist, got spoken to in tongues and was presented a bible by the Globes owner, a man who stood about 6 foot 6 who was very intimidating in the way that religious zealots can be. I think I’ll pass, but hey, we got paid and now it’s on to new and different things.

My friends are awesome. They drove fourty minutes to see me play a thirty minute show, brought my CD’s that had just been delivered to my house (3 days late) and then bought a ton of them. More of them will be coming to the Aptos show today and I’m excited to see some of them that I haven’t had a chance to in a long time.
I wanted this entry to be a little more compelling than the initial one because I want to look back at these in a few years and remember all the funny shit that has happened, but it wouldn’t do it much justice to type it all out and “what happens on tour, stays on tour.” ;)

Sleeping Anywhere

2005-05-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

After spending the night at Paul’s parents house in Temecula, which are both way more upscale than I thought they would be, I went to see his graduation from CSULB in Long Beach. We ate lunch with his family including grandmothers on both sides and his uncle and wife then went to Topher’s (Inverse’s drummer) house and packed up all the equipment and proceeded to down town Long Beach to have some beers. I’d write more about it but honestly nothing that I found of interest happened so I think that the brief description I gave should suffice.

I spent the night in the RV that we will be calling home for the next month. It’s actually nice compared to what it could have been, I can sleep anywhere though so it doesn’t really matter.
We finally got on the road today after a few delays and we’re currently on the way to Fresno for our first show. These should get more interesting as the tour continues, most of what came before this was just tying up loose ends and packing.

All for now from I-5.

mardi gras in san luis obispo

2004-02-22T06:24:00.000-08:00

ive been to a good number of mardi gras in san luis, since my sister was a freshman at cal poly in 1997 till this year i think ive missed it once. every year its been a blast and every year its gained a little more attention from people outside of the local community to the point that people come from LA and SF just to party there this weekend. a few years ago due to the shear mass of people that congregated downtown for the annual parade the city decided to shut it down as a form of crowd control. horrid idea. now they party has gone else where like to apartment complexes like cedar creek and its been crazy the last couple years. crazy but not over the top, now this year in "anticipation" of rowdy crowds cops were brought in cops from 20 different agencies to calm the storm as it were. but of course in typical cop fashion instead of blending with the cowrds to make sure the people obeyed the law and stayed safe they flexed their muscle and blocked off california street so people couple get to cedar from the campus side. a few fundamental reasons why this was a bad idea. it gives people a reason to not like the cops presence. it didn't really black anyone because if they were smart enough they could have just walked around like my friends and i did. it give people a reason to congregate and get obnoxious. this cost the city over $50,000. (http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispotribune/7871551.htm for info) there was a fucking police helicopter flying for hours overhead, FOR WHAT!? like that search light did any good other than to give people a direction to flip a middle finger to and yell fuck the police. this was a sad mardi gras because it just shows how little these agencies understand what their purpose is. do you really thing that all the vandalism that has happened in the past reached $50,000 in damage? i doubt it. city leaders need to get their heads out of their asses and out of our faces and realize that you can not stop mardi gras especially in a town that boasts the largest celebration west of the mississippi. so what you need to do it make san luis safe. have the cops but make their presence and integrated presence, don't line up in full swat roit gear and shoot people with tear gas paintball guns. come on people, i go to community college and i can see that that isn't going to work.

the crying game

2004-02-19T06:22:00.000-08:00

this entry has nothing to do with crying, games or the movie from which that title was borrowed. it in fact has to do with kittens and more specifically why kittens are so damn funny. i dont know. but every picture i see of a kitten is absolutely hilarious, and myspace is overflowing with kitten snapshots. whether the kitten be running for his life from rectangular masterbation demons, scratching records on a turntable, or being held and gunpoint cleverly captured in that little "you've excited me to the point where i must totally exagerate that im about to pounce on something" pose so that he looks like he is holding his paws up. they are all classic. i was in kind of a funky mood today, but no longer. kitten humor has saved the day. i hope i have a cool dream tonight, i love sleeping so much that i forget to dream too often.

pollen: plant reproductive cell or horrible plague from the fiery depths of hell?

2004-02-09T06:21:00.000-08:00

i spent the weekend in tahoe, beautiful snow, no pollen. i come back here and i am immediately assaulted by that god awful yellow mist. hacking, weezing, shortness of breath, this is bad for someone who trys to sing. but inspite of this adversity i sang quite well at our friends house after dinner tonight, one of my best performances to date i think, and my friend is going to hook me up with a singer/song writer dude in santa clara. soooo we'll see what happens with that. in the mean time claritin, you are my only friend. red wine, you can come too.

a funny thing

2004-02-05T06:19:00.000-08:00

we are a strange group of beings, we are so stuck an appearence. i think there should be institutionalized training to help people overcome first impression decisions. i painted my left hand finger nails black and its amazing how off put people get. i wear all "average" clothing so im classified one way then someone sees my hand and you can see in there eyes how they are mentally reevaluating their position on you. VERY interesting. i just wish i knew more people, talking to friends is so much nicer than strangers because you can be more honest. well usually. ;)

if you could only see the way i popped inside

2004-02-05T06:16:00.000-08:00

there is nothing worse than bad porn. and there is no worse porn than when couples get into the business. "oh hunny are you ok?" "you like the way that feels?" look im not spending precious hours of my life watching eccentric marriage counciling, i want non communitive grunts and that funny slapping noise and thats it... ok the occational weaking strung together plot line can come too. i was given these words: wisdom, vintage, fence, dolls, psychic, down, want , private, served , effect, homes, frequencies and told to make a sentence with all of them. so i made this: like wavering radio frenquencies, at times, in private, my want to feel the effect of my vintage wisdome outweighed my foresight, as it no longer sat upon the fence, or tumbled down as my dolls once did with a strange consistency that not only served to promote the notion that i harbored psychic abilities, but that the homes in which i was raised were somehow blessed beyond that of the average dwelling see this is what i should do for a living, people need to pay me to write and sing. thats the plan :)

exersizes in insomnia

2004-01-31T08:12:00.000-08:00

It is 4:15 in the morning, no man should have to have his eyes open at 4:15 in the morning. Nyquil you can suck my ass, sickness you can suck my ass, room temperaturs below 60 deg. you definitely can suck my ass. The future vexes me as of late. I woke up a few minutes ago thinking about two things, well three. First I thought how odd it was that I felt high on drugs because I'm so awake yet can't open my eyes, second I thought back to my performance tonight, and third I worried about my transcripts not getting to Arizona in time which means I would have to spend at least another semester here. Yes that would mean that I would still be attending community college courses with kids that were freshman when I was a senior... Another thing that worries me is a tangent of the Arizona problem. I love music, if I can I'll spend the rest of my life playing it. But as for the academic portion of it, I'm not sure if I'm cut out for it. I got kind of a late start in the music game and to major in it , but people assume that I've been taking formal lessons for six or eight years. I've made a good start and my ear is right on but I'm affraid of throwing myself into the frey and being embarrased. I don't mind critisism, but when it comes to something like my music that I spend countless hours trying to perfect, I don't like the thought of being marginalized by music professor who worries more about correct key signatures than the soul behind my piece. If I could have in my way, I'd go away to school to learn something music related maybe more on the technical end, get a new guitar teacher, and stick with my vocal coach here. Spend the next three years writing music and playing small venues while I'm going to school, then move to San diego or Los Angeles and see what I can do. Right now I'm a slightly large fish in a really small pond but I know my songs and my voice have everything it takes to make something of myself and I refuse to not try, I just need to work on consistency. And I'm still wide awake... What other issues need to be worked out this lovely morning.. oh maybe I'll get to watch the sun rise. Lets see so what is it that our society has set me up to believe I have to worry about, there's money, power, looks, sex, fame, and those are just the periferal ones. The day to day drudgery is even worse, credit cards, bills, cars, clothes. Who ever came up with the word "bling" should be shot. I guess I'm pretty well set on most things. Ok heres something that troubles me. I got a free year of maxim from my brother in law and I finally got the first couple issues... and they don't hold my interest- at all. Am I that out of touch with my superficial masculinity? The one article that I actually got into was the interview with michelle branch and I BARELY EVEN LOOKED AT THE PICTURES! Whats happening to me?! Did maxim used to be cooler or have I outgrown my 18-25 age demographic too quickly. Flipping through the pages of that magazine reminded me of a still life MTV, *Bam* new image/idea *Bam* new image/idea, I felt like I should go accuire A.D.D. before the concept would really make sense to me. I also hate grossiery store check out isles. 1. because I'd rather have a robot help me than most of the people you get doing these jobs 2. because I have to stare at those god awful tabloid magazines that display the most tragic string of human depredation. They literally hurt me to think about. Things that upset me continued: forgetting my lyrics, being hungery, pens that leak onto your hand, busy work, that fuckin guy at the M.P.C. language lab, the bullshit our government carries out in my name, the christian coalition - come on guys think for yourselves, yes it is scary to live in an uncertain world with no plan and to have to make choices about fundamentally difficult social issues, but please, president bush (which just could be a construct of my libralism, but he's done enough fucked up crap in office for me to back up my oppinion), being short (sometimes), disapointing my parents, that fucker that drove drunk and hit my parked car, rude customer service, presumptions without reconsideration, the thin red line, hurting peoples feelings, that hypertensive muscle in my thoat, blockbuster, that guy that spit on me in Santa Barbera, the inaccuracy of statistics and how we look to them as almost holy concepts, static behaviour patterns, loosing friends. Ok I think I'm good for now.

today is a most melancholy of days

2003-12-16T06:03:00.000-08:00

ever walk around with the blahs for no apparent reason? yesh i think we all must, its like at the core of the human experience, i think we might pop if we were happy all the time, or perhaps even worse, we wouldnt enjoy it. so i stand at a fork in the road, from this launch pad i could pretty much go anywhere in the world that i want to. artist, performer, teacher, producer, i could forseeably do it all, but im so stuck in the mud, like im moving in slow motion. i think i live the tragedy of the upper middle class life style where there is really nothing to worry about to so you start making shit up. of course there is always something to worry about in a universal sense, something that needs to be fixed, since we are such flawed and silly little animals thinly veiled by a rugged eloquence that keeps us guessed wether or not we have actually come all that far from the less advances species from which we split from not too many years ago. theres always something, hunger, welfare, terrorism. people are so ugly sometimes, and they try to smile to fake goodwill toward all, while cursing them with their eyes. everyone should seek counsiling, everyone should take feminist theory classes, everyone should learn the truths kept from us by our white washed text books, and most importantly turn on your muther fuckin brain and pay attention to people when they talk, even when you dont like what they have to say. ignorance is not bliss boys and girls and who ever keeps feeding you that line of shit is trying to manipulate you into a false sense of harmony with a people and an earth that we all too easily forget when given the choice between sedated comfort and the truth. I AM NOT A SATISFIED INDIVIDUAL! I am sad in my comfortably home because i dont know where you start making things better. i can only change myself and hope that i can lead by example. and dont make the mistake of thinking im preaching out to the unwashed masses while i stand on my cloud with my pearly white shoes and clean white robe, im right in the mix with all of you, just trying to figure out what in the fuck i can do to make a better tomorrow for my kids, for my family and for everyone who i dont know who is just as important in every way. we are a species with a shattered sense of community. and community, true community on a all encompasing level, will be our only salvation. period.