Filed under: Uncategorized
It is nearly midnight, but I am finally finished cleaning my apartment. I started at about 8:30, so it took me awhile, but the place is now even more clean than when I moved in about two weeks ago. It feels good to finally organize everything that hadn’t found a place after being unpacked. I find that I am generally more organized with my life when the space around me is organized.
Well I should probably get some sleep, we’re taking a (strictly diagnostic….suuuuure) PT test tomorrow morning and I need to be up in about five hours. But, one of my neighbors is drunk, or angry, or both, and can’t keep it down. If I could find him, I would tell him to shut his pie hole, but I can’t so I will just wait it out. Hopefully he has to be up tomorrow morning, too. My unit has been divided up and billeted all over post, so I am surrounded by a bunch of support weenies from Brigade. I don’t like them much, but it’s a good situation because they stay out of my way in regards to keeping everything in order around here. Since they are the ones leaving empty bottles in the hallway and fast-food trash in the stairwell, let them clean the entire place without my help. Fuck ‘em.
Tomorrow after our PT test we’re closing out the barracks, and I should be making my way home to Michigan on Wednesday night. When I arrive on Thursday, it will have been eleven months to the day since I was last home. It has been a long year.
Each day I am more and more grateful for… everything. Coming home safe, for all the things I have to look forward to in the coming year, for good weather and a beautiful place to live. For my own, personal space to call my own and for the ability to wear some nice comfy civilian clothes again. For the resources to prepare my own meals, and to come and go as I please. For a steady paycheck every two weeks. To walk down a street and have to scan rooftops and windows for snipers or gutters for IED’s. Adjusting to “normal” life again continues to go well. I was fortunate enough during my tour to be spared all of the most traumatic events which occurred, and so my main challenge lies in adjusting my frame of mind from war to peace. Loud noises still startle me but that will pass with time. Sometimes I feel, inexplicably, out of place and ill at ease, but I just close my eyes and take a breath. I often find myself easily irritated, or angry at… everything, but again, when I take a breath I feel better. That’s what I did with my loud neighbors. I think, actually, that they may be on the balcony below me. I’m just going to start pounding on walls until they shut up. They’ve got to be on one side or the other. If they give attitude I’ll just use my magic Sergeant powers and everything will be fine.
I miss the stars at home.
The Milky Way
And the faint Northern Lights,
Green skies in the winter;
You can see them sometimes, you know.
Every evening, either my brother or myself would walk down to the barn, feed the horses, and put them up for the night. We hated doing it, of course, because a chore that would take an adult five minutes takes a ten year old boy twenty. And to a ten year old boy, the twenty minutes before bedtime spent feeding the horses is time better spent doing whatever it is a ten year old does. Which, during the dead of winter, is most likely done inside.
I used to go down into the basement, and bundle up. I would put on some thick socks, and boots too big for my feet. I would put on a sweatshirt and an old barn coat, covered in dirt and dung and snot. I would put on some old mittens, usually my dad’s old leather snowmobile mittens, or a pair of ratty ski gloves, and maybe a scarf, and a hat. Out into night I would waddle, making tracks in the new snow, or following old tracks in old snow. I would feed the horses their grain and hay and make sure they had water for the night. When it got really cold, my brother and I would both go down together, each carrying two gallons of hot water to pour over the ice in their buckets. We’d also carry a rubber mallet to break it up.
After the horses were put up for the night, warm and comfortable in their beds of loose straw, I would leave the barn and go back out into the night. I would usually make it down the fence, to the corner where I would turn up to go to the house again, before I stopped. And there, I would look up, and take in the beautiful night sky.
The stars extend all the way down to the tops of the trees to the west, south, and east. Big ones and little ones, some bluish and some white, and the world would go quiet for a few moments as I drank it in. I would watch the vapors of my breath rise up and dance on the milky way. Often I would stand there for a half hour or more, until I became aware of my numb toes, and then I would always sing to myself, softly… “then sings my soul, my savior God, to thee… How great Thou art.”
I have been around the world a bit. I’ve been to Mexico City, and to Hawaii, to California and Iraq and Georgia. I have spent many nights sleeping under the stars. In Hawaii they are amazing, because the islands are so far away from the rest of the world. In the Mojave Desert, the stars are quite beautiful. In Mexico City the teeming city lights may blot out the stars, but seen from the rim of the northern mountains, they form constellations of their own. However, nothing can compare to the stars in my home sky.
Filed under: Thoughts
I would marry Zoey Deschanel. If they had a “Marry Zoey Deschanel” raffle, and tickets were a dollar each, I would probably drop a grand on tickets. Unless more than two thousand people entered the raffle, in which case I might spend more.
The reason I bring up Zoey Deschanel is that I just saw a movie in which she played a part. The Go-Getter, which is pretty good if you were wondering. In it she deflowers a 19 year old named Mercer. Which is pretty tame compared to her role in Winter Passing in which she snorted cocaine and drowned a kitten. But don’t get too mad about the kitten, she didn’t want to do it. But it was sick.
Anyway, I am in the writing mood so I’m just going to start and see where I go. I’m lying in bed, right now, listening to Ray LaMontagne. He’s coming a little staticy, because back about March I accidentally put my boots onto the headphone jack and so now it sits loosely in the computer, and sometimes I have to jiggle it, or, as in the case with the movie, hold it in place. Also, my headphones are broken in three places. So that might have somethng to do with it.
The reason I have to even use my headphones is that Johnny, my roomate, figured out how to use Skype to call his fiance. It’s not that I give much of a shit if he can talk to her, it’s more like I can’t stand to listen to the conversation. Imagine having to listen to a teenage couple talk for something like a hundred million hours straight. They break up once every day or two.
So I’m sitting here with my broken, ninety-dollar noise-canceling headphones, wishing I could go choke Johnny, and typing my thoughts out. In the movie today, Mercer, the lucky boy that gets deflowered by Zoey Deschanel, goes to a nice artisan community which operates a kiln. And now I want to learn pottery.
“But Andrew,” one might say, “Do you really want to learn pottery just because you saw a five minute scene in some indie film?” Well, it’s not entirely random. I have known for awhile that I want to pursue something like it. Carpentry is my other big idea. I just want to have a hobby in which I can work, alone, with my hands, and make things. Things like…tea pots and rocking chairs. It’s not what I want my career to be, but something I just do on my own. It would actually be perfect, since I want to be a teacher. Teachers don’t get to work with their hands very much. And they have summers off. I can’t think of a better way to spend summers than making rocking chairs.
Today I went to pick up mail. We do that two or maybe three times a week. Anyway today there was a LOT of mail, because of Christmas. Johnny was excited because he hardly ever gets mail, and today he got five packages. I got a package from my church in Hawaii, which was great. And my airsoft pistol came. I ordered it when the pranking started to get out of hand. Now it stays under my pillow, loaded. It’s fully automatic and stings a bit, so it should at least make people think twice before throwing stink bombs in here. People keep on asking to see it, and then shooting Johnny. Each time it happens, they hand it back to me, and I laugh, and unload the rest of the mag on them. They never see it coming.
For the life of me, I cannot recall how we got together. All I know is that at some point during my eighth grade year, I managed to achieve couplehood with a pretty blonde girl with braces whose name was Alanna Smeltzer.
Prior to The Couplehood Moment, I can only dredge up two memories of her. The first is from the 4th grade, on Halloween. I remember walking door to door with my mom and brother, and seeing Alanna and her mother on the sidewalk ahead of us. “Hi Alanna!” I shouted, and waved at her. I remember seeing her whiskered face (she is the only blue-eyed tiger I have ever seen) break into a smile as she raised a paw in greeting. The second memory takes place a few years later. She had invited me to her fourteenth birthday party at her house on Little Fish Lake. This was before the dry years, and the water actually stretched all the way to the foot of the Weeping Willow and wrapped itself around the dock. As I write I am reminded of all the good memories that took place on that shore. The long summer evenings, spent canoeing and swimming and playing on the raft. Kissing Alanna under the raft, surrounded by spiders who had made their home there. Good memories, too numerous to remember individually, so they are all meshed together in one big blurry mess of nostalgia.
Back to The Couplehood Moment. I remember now. My friends had caught wind that Alanna liked me, and encouraged me to ask her out. I vaguely remember doing so, at her locker. She liked me, and being her boyfriend would boost my social status, so I did it (this is the older me talking now, the one that looks back with some degree of cynicism). I remember that I didn’t know how to go about being a boyfriend, and she didn’t know any more of being a girlfriend. But somehow, slowly, we figured it out. I would walk her to class and go to watch her volleyball games and she would come to my basketball games and spend an hour or so talking to me on the phone most nights.
I quickly found out that I had somehow managed to net myself quite the catch. My friends were jealous, though, and that played out in all sort of minor school-yard dramas. But, overall, those were good days, at least, they are when I can manage to remember the good things. What a terrible shame, how immeasurably easier it is to remember the bad than the good. But more on that later.
I remember school dances and youth group meetings and live concerts and football games. I remember days spent on the lake and evenings spent around a campfire. I remember falling asleep together in the hammock hanging between the willow and oak trees by the water. I remember track meets and baseball games and my very first kiss. We were watching a movie, in her basement, with Brooke and Caleb. Caleb and Brooke kissed, and then Caleb looked over and suggested we try it. I looked at her and nervously asked, “do you want to?” and she shrugged and said “I guess so, if you want.” As if she was some sort of experienced kisser. I was sloppy and her braces were rough. If only we all could get that innocence back.
I remember First Like turning to First Love and First Love turning to First Lust. So many memories are tied to that girl. Blue eyes and bouncy blonde hair. Ice skating on the lake. Kissing on the ski lift. My first time getting to second base. Some sneaky cuddling under the blankets on hay rides. As hormones raged, innocence turned to… well, you know. The sort of things kids do when they think no one is looking. It felt like a huge adventure, although compared to the things kids do nowadays, we were as innocent as could be. But I remember a period in which we were constantly (or maybe it was just me?) trying to duck adult supervision and get away by ourselves.
It had to come to an end sometime. First Love eventually turned to First Loss. I remember that we were freshman in high school, and it was basketball homecoming week. I came in to school to go to practice, and my Beloved was already there painting signs and banners. I saw a giant blue handprint on her perfect butt. A butt that belonged to me, And I was filled with hurt and anger. She and Caleb (the friend who had encouraged us to kiss for the first time) had begun a casual flirtation (as if any flirtation can be described as “casual” when it’s your girlfriend doing the flirting) which soon escalated to the point of downright promiscuity. She did it at an away basketball game, in a deserted hallway. I took it well, until she began dating Caleb about a week later. At that point, I ceased talking to her.
Well, things were awkward after that. After all, when your locker is right next to the girl you love, and she dumps you for a friend, drama is sure to unfold, with plenty of adolescent angst thrown in. Please, if you have kids, don’t let them make that mistake when choosing their lockers. Anyway. For a long time I refused to talk to her, though she tried to get me to loosen my lips. When I did begin talking to her, I only had mean, bitter, spiteful things to say. This went on for a year.
Eventually we made up and became friends. For two years or so we were pretty tight, because we were in the same crowd. Eventually though I realized that I was the only one who put any work into our relationship. From that point forward we ceased to be friends. I have received one email from her in five years, and even that was a seemingly arbitrary “happy birthday.” I wrote back and never got a reply.
I have not thought about any of this in a long, long time. It took real effort to take out the good memories, dust them off, and put them back on the shelf for all to see. For too long the bad memories have been the ones on display. And there are far more good memories from those days than bad.
It is so difficult to go back to that time, and remember who I was and what I felt. To once again wear those shoes. I was mad about her. I idolized her. She could do no wrong. But wrong she did. She is human, and eventually our humanity will always shatter the illusion of our deity. It is inevitable.
————————————————————————————
By the way, she dated Caleb all through high school, and married in in August of 2007. Go figure.
I miss the stars at home.
The Milky Way
And the faint Northern Lights,
Green skies in the winter;
You can see them sometimes, you know.
Filed under: Experiences in Iraq, Personal Growth, Thoughts | Tags: Depression
I don’t think that I’ve ever even considered the possibility that I could be depressed. Not until tonight anyway. I usually say “Eh, I’m having a down day” but it feels like I’m having more down days than up days anymore. Which is what seems to me to be a decent definition of “depression.” I think maybe I’ll just start counting the hours. Up hours and down hours. See if I can string together twenty-four up hours. Then maybe thirty up days. Then maybe just five or six more up months, and then I’ll be home and hopefully this shit goes away. Hah. Like it ever does. Problems don’t dissapear with relocation. Unless of course the location is the source. Which could be possible. This lack of aloneness, of peace, of community that I’m going through.
Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad. It can’t be Capital D Depression. The clinical kind. I have energy. I don’t try to sleep twenty hours a day. I don’t think about throwing myself in front of moving vehicles. Often. haha just kidding. But really, it’s just… well it’s hard to describe. Maybe I’m not feeling depressed just a bit worn. Frayed around the edges, so to speak. But still good.
Filed under: Experiences in Iraq, Personal Growth, Thoughts | Tags: coffee, weariness
This morning is a morning for Tom Waits, Velvet Revolver, Ray Charles, Nick Drake, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and the like.
I must have been quite the sight. Sitting in my chair, pen and paper in my lap. Slumped to the right, left hand resting on my left knee, right elbow braced on the chair’s arm and my forehead cradled in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. I had started my letter, but found myself unable to even think, much less continue.
This environment, sometimes, wears me down. It’s not the job. It’s the lack of aloneness. The lack of peace. The ignorance I see each day. It all adds up and weighs heavy upon my shoulders.
6:00 am and it’s time for a coffee break. Rise, and get my boots on. Open the door and be greeted by cool air. For the first time in months, the air outside is cooler than the air inside. The sun is still low in the eastern sky. I can hear the birds spinning on the airfield, and I find the sound comforting. The sound of aircraft engines, strangly enough, brings solace to me. I think it is because once the engines begin whining, I am thrust into my own world again. It is impossible to communicate over that racket, so we each sit, alone to our own thoughts. And it is more than that. Jet engines mean something else entirely. They mean going home. Of course, they also mean leaving home, but I choose to believe in the other. Going home. Six months. Five months and twenty seven days. Three hundred and ninety nine days until I am free again, out of this Army and out of this war completely. If I can ever be completely out of here, that is.
The fresh air does me good and I am already feeling better. As I walk, I begin to have an imaginary conversation with the man at the counter at the coffee place. “Why the long face?” he asks. I smile a smile that says “well, you caught me” and that is as far as my conversation goes. His imaginary concern has lifted my mood. I step into the shop and hear a banjo. A bunch of small, Indian men are listening to country music. Do you like country music? I ask the man at the counter. His dark countenance breaks into a smile, white teeth against brown skin. It is enough. I pay for my coffee and leave.
I arrive back at my hooch and the dark, stuffy, oppressing atmosphere is too much for me. I grab my folding chair, coffee, paper and pen and walk outside to a semi-secluded spot, and there I set up. I sip my coffee and enjoy the morning while I write my letter. It turns out much better than it would have if I had stayed inside.
“A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands, love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper; his hands remember the rifle.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
I am going to buy a motorcycle when I’m back. That’s what I want to do. I want cruiser, not some silly sport bike. It’ll be a triumph or an Indian, at least until I become an experienced rider, then I could spring for a Harley. I would roll up to places, riding my bike, wearing a cool leather jacket and jeans and some cool boots too, like James Dean or Steve McQueen. I would take girls on dates on my motorcycle, and when they told their friends about me, they’d add “oh, and he rides a motorcycle!” at the end of their description. They’d be attracted to me, because motorcycles are for tough guys and bad boys and renegades, but I’d be really nice and treat them right, but look cool while doing it. I could take trips, too. I could pack a tent and some water and a few changes of clothes, and take off for wherever. I could grow a cool beard and wear a cool bandana to go withmy cool leather jacket and boots. I would write poems and songs about the open road, and about the beauty of nature, and read them to girls on our dates. We would, of course, park somewhere cool like by a waterfront or at some lookout, and be sitting on the bike facing each other. Then I’d take her home, and ride off into the darkness.
Filed under: Experiences in Iraq, Personal Growth, Thoughts | Tags: Adventure, Music
I slept a few hours last night, and awoke at 3:30 am. This is an ungodly hour for most, but for me it is like the middle of the afternoon. I spent the rest of the “afternoon” listening to Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, George Jones, Kris Kristofferson, and the like.
The Highwayman by Johnny Cash
I was a highwayman. Along the coach roads I did ride
With sword and pistol by my side
Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade
Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade
The bastards hung me in the spring of twenty-five
But I am still alive.
I was a sailor. I was borne upon the tide
And with the sea I did abide.
I sailed a schooner round the Horn to Mexico
I went aloft and furled the mainsail in a blow
And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed
But I am living still.
I was a dam builder across the river deep and wide
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around..I’ll always be around..and around and around and
around and around
(There’s more to the song, one last verse, but I don’t like it much.)
I read a book once, called Wild at Heart by John Eldgridge. It’s one of those Christian bestsellers. Well, in it, John says that men need certain things to live fulfilled lives. The one that sticks out to me, that I remember most, is that a man needs adventure. I believe this because it is the story of my short life. Adventure. Adversity, competition, journeying, seeing, experiencing. It is why the sailor, the soldier, the cowboy, the explorer are romanticized. It is why I seek out the hard jobs. Why I can’t stop myself from volunteering sometimes. It is what I am already trying to fill my future with.
Today at 8:00 am we drove our Strykers to maintenance, and there we installed some new armor. It was dirty, sweaty, grimy work. Muscle work. I love the sound of a shop. The hammering of hammers and the drilling of drills and the banging of metal on metal, the shouts of men over all the din as they work together to get the job done. Shouts of instruction and shouts of warning and shouts of anger and shouts of laughter, everything coming together to form the terrific racket of work. Sweat glazed brows and dirty knees and shirts dark and wet, bulging, flexing forearms blackened with dirt and grime and sweat and grease. I love working with my hands, the feel of a tool in them, the strain of muscle against metal. It is good for a man to know his body, to put all his strength to use. To strain and push and pull and feel his muscles working together. A reminder that there is strength in these hands. The hands with which I will shape the world. A strength which must be used for good.
The weather broke yesterday. I noticed the lighting in my room was a bit different than it usually is, after sunrise, so I opened my door and I looked up into the sky and I saw a ceiling there where there was once open blue. And I felt a wind blowing, not a summer breeze but a steady wind, and I felt a raindrop. And I said to myself, “summer is over.”
It didn’t rain, though. Not really. The clouds here have a habit of teasing the Earth for awhile before giving her a drink. Then they drop their heavy loads and the Earth drinks her fill, and still the clouds drop the water, and the Earth gets soggy and wet and she clings to my boots in thick gobs.
I got in from a mission this morning. I sat down and ate scrambled eggs, and then I took off my boots. My feet thanked me, because they had been cooped up inside my socks and boots for over twelve hours. And they bear such heavy weight. I sat there and pondered my tired feet for a few moments.
I took off the rest of my dirty uniform. And then I went to take a shower. On the way to the latrine I could feel every ache and pain, every sore muscle and every creaky tendon. But I stepped into the shower and I turned on the hot water, and let it get hot hot hot. And I let it pulverize my neck and then trickle down my shoulders, and run in tiny rivulets down my arms, and finally flow gushing off my fingertips in tiny little waterfalls that splashed onto my weary feet. I closed my eyes and felt my pores open up, and I breathed deep and felt the steam fill my lungs. And I stretched, and I flexed, and I felt all my muscles, and it felt good.
My room is cool and dark. The windows are blocked to keep the sun from coming in. My fan blows air at me while I sleep. It feels good to be in bed.
Good night.
