Hai's Broken Clavicle

I once had a friend named Hai,
One day, while I was traveling by
His house, I knocked and asked if he'd play
A game o'soccor or footbol, if you may,
At yonder field with Tammy and I.
"Of course I will", was his reply,
And he shuffled inside to change his attire.
His purple umbro shorts were something to admire.

Behind yonder house our games began most well,
Until my shoulder smacked into his face and he fell
On a steep incline and landed with a thudd.
"Oh me, oh my, my deer friend, my bud."
His face crunched and twisted and he seemed to be
In an utter and complete state of agony.
"A broken bone", I thought, "could be his affliction"
Relief of his woes, I pursued with this diction:

"Let me look at it.  I assure you I must.
Just give me your arm.  In me you can trust.
Ah, a broken bone, I proclaim this is not.
No sir, you've just a case of the bone rot.
Let me yank on your shoulder,it will feel like heaven.
If you won't let me on three, I'll count to seven."

No tugs or yanks or pulls or pranks, then , ensued.
He up and walked away, which was really quite rude.
In his footsteps I followed behind.
Little did I know at his door I would find
A weeping mother devastated by her son's
Foolishness while having a little fun.

I walked home alone that day and I thought
About all the nice things that I would have brought
Him if he stayed in a hospital that night.
What can I say, we were friends we were tight?
No overnight stay at the hospital was required,
Which was good because that night I was tired.

Runk Rock Rebel

The irony was undeniable.  As I pulled away from the gym in my Hmmmv wearing the civialian clothes I'm not authorized to wear I saw the Sergeants Major headed towards me and realized that Milencolin's "Punk Rock Rebel" was playing on the my headphones.  Yeah that's right I was wearing clothes I wasn't supposed to and listening to my headphones while I was driving.  I'm a damn rebel, what can I say? 

My father used to always say that I had a problem with authority.  And I'd say, Damn right I have a problem with authority, not to him because he would have smacked me, but to myself, in my head, because even if I whispered it aloud to myself he'd hear it and then I'd feel his wrath.  But the thought was there.  I mean why should I be forced to listen to what other people tell me to do.  Land of the free, right.  If I want to go out and drink myself retarded, I think I should have that right. 

Now I don't mind following orders when they make sense or don't conflict with what I want, or feel I deserve. In this particular circumstance one of the rules I was breaking makes sense but conflicted with my wants and the other doesn't make any sense.  It doesn't make sense for us (the Army people here) not to be able to wear civilian clothes when we are not on duty.  It doesn't make any sense because:

1) The base is full of
civilians and 

2) The air force (which are also
basically civilians) get to wear theirs when they are
not on duty.

Why we're not allowed to makes no sense to me, so I don't obey that rule.  Now the headphones
makes sense.  It really does.  It's a hazard.  If you can't hear a horn or the someone screaming for you to stop because you're about to run over their dog, yeah that could be seen as hazardous.  But they don't have a radio in the Hmmmv so what do they expect?  I think every HmmmV should be equipped with at least a cd player.  It's torture being forced to drive around without music to pimp through the base with.  How am I supposed to get my roll on without any music to stroll to?

I realized after writing that last email that it wasn't a complete story.  I thought about writing the rest and sending it out but figured no one would really notice or care but my aunt wrote to me asking what happened so I'll finish it in this.

Nothing happened.  The Sergeants Major just smiled and waved.  I think he may have cringed his eyes a little to make sure he was seeing things correctly, to get a closer inspection, but he didn't say a thing.  Maybe it was because I wasn't really trying to hide.  Instead I waved right at him and smiled and pretended like nothing was amiss.  I do the same thing with cops when I'm speeding.  I don't bother slowing down or pressing on the brakes.  That's just an admission of guilt.  If you're blatant about it you must not really being doing anything wrong.  It's like when your parents ask you what you were did at your friend Jeff's house and you tell them that you got drunk and high and they laugh thinking it's a joke because what child would tell their parents that they were doing something that the parents would frown upon unless it was in jest?  I know I wouldn't.

Sun Daze

In this land of massacres and poverty and a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy, I make a
point to bathe my epidermis in the golden sun for at least one full hour on each side, on top of our picnic table.  Until about a week ago when I first started working on my tan I had a pasty white complexion fitting of an undead zombie.  Okay maybe it wasn't that white.  I don't think I get that white.  My ass might be that white because it always is.  I remember as a kid my mother used to make me show our neighbors and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and the milkman and the paperboy and the UPS delivery guy...

"Just show them Johnny", she would plead. 

When I refused she would grab me and pull my shorts down herself, not all the way, but enough for me to be embarassed.  So I learned to just pull them down myself because everyone would see my white ass one way or another.  She just wanted everyone to see how tan I had gotten that summer.  Like it was a source of pride.  It told everyone that I was an active child, embracing nature and stealing away a piece of that glorious fireball that stares at us from above.  Nowadays, I have to work at that former gloriously rich tan that came to me without thought as a youngster. 

And believe me it really is work.  My whole day is planned around my tanning schedule.  I like to get out there to get things started laying out an hour (1/2 on each side) before heading off to lunch, which is open from 11:30 to 1:30.  This way I can hop in the shower before going to lunch.  Then I have to just stay out of the sun for awhile and take a nap inside because the sun makes me tired.  When I wake up I go to the end then I lay out for another hour.  And then, after all this hard work of tanning and eating and sleeping I usually take an ice cold shower.  And in this ice cold shower, sometimes, I dream of being under a waterfall. On the occasion that I get the one part of my brain to completely fool the other part of my brain into believing that I am in fact under this waterfall and I can feel the rocks underneath my feet and hear the birds chirping in my ears I feel an utter state of bliss engulf me and I have to smile.  It never lasts long but for that brief moment I am not in a desert or on an army base at all.  I'm somewhere else.  I'm where I belong.  It's nice to know that I can go there any time I'd like and I do as often as possible.

Watermelon

"I was telling my sister about you", she said, then crossed her arms and leaned against the bathroom wall. 

I smiled and looked up at her from the crate that I was sitting on.

"I told her that you're like a little boy trapped in a man's body."

At first all I heard was little boy and wasn't sure what to think about it but then I realized that she
said that I had a man's body.  I'd rather be a little boy in a man's body than a man in a little boy's body so I smiled again.

She put a watermelon jolly rancher in her mouth and sat down beside me.

"You're quiet today."

"I don't know what to say."

She smiled a comforting smile and tucked her hair behind her ear.

"Say whatever."

Our eyes caught for a moment and I realized just why I wasn't speaking.  As beautiful as she was sitting
there next to me and as good as she was making me feel, I knew what she wanted to hear from me was the promise of a dream that I would never fulfill.  I would never meet her sisters or her parents or marry her and take her back to the states with me.  We won't ever have a happy life together and raise children and live a fairy tale romance.  She won't ever hear I love you come from my mouth and sitting there, listening to her tell me about her telling her sister and her mother about me I realized that this was what she was looking for.  And I'm not willing to give it.  Not so much because the situation is impossible but because I know that she isn't the one.   As easy as it is for me to realize whether someone has something inside them that I could love I also realize when it isn't there and with her it isn't.

I thought about offering her the dream that I knew I didn't truly believe.  I thought about telling her
that I would meet them someday when I return there to see her as she's pleaded me to do.  Instead I just sat and smiled and said that I didn't have anything to say and for a second I thought I saw recognition come across her face before she asked me what my favorite jolly rancher flavor was.  I told her apple.

Summer Skies

The other night while I was having some champagne and cheese (okay so it was sparkling grape juice and goldfish) I wandered outside to take a gander at the summer night sky.  I don't know what it is with me an skies but I have always felt very drawn to them. 

I like to look up at the night sky and picture what all the people I care about are doing under this very
same sky.  I like to picture them going through their days and maybe even taking a look up at the sky at the same time that I am, like Fievel and his sister in Fievel Goes West.  And I like to picture that they are thinking about me at the same time that I'm thinking about them, like there is a cosmic force between us that draws us to look at the sky at the same time. 

When I look up at the night sky i don't just see specks of light scattered through the sky.  I see
entire Sun's and different galaxies circling around them.  I see different worlds and atmospheres and creatures.  I see another reality.  I think of all the different types of life forms and music and cultures
and I wish that there was some way for me to visit all of them, and not through some stupid scifi movie or book but first hand.  I want to see them first hand them and breath their air, taste their food and speak with their various creatures.

I'm sick of reading about other people's experiences and not living them out for myself, experiencing them myself.  This life is so short and the universe so big to be wasting time not experiencing different things and holding on to the things that matter.

I recently watched the Devil's Advocate after not seeing it since the first time I watched it as a
sophomore in college.  I remember relating with Keanu Reeve's character in the movie back then as he tried to excel in his career and even though his wife was having a breakdown, he continued to work on the murder trial.  Much as Keanu never backs down from the challenge, I never thought twice about doing the same in my own life.  But as I watched it for the second time years later, my view was completely different.  Knowing the outcome already, I still wished that Keanu would stop working on the case and just take care of his wife because in the end, what really matters most?

I think this is something that I will always struggle with even though I know the right answer.  Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the things that really matter in this world.  Somehow, looking up at that summer night sky reminds me of this.

Looking at the daytime summer sky is something altogether different though.  The daytime sky with the sun blazing, the sweat pouring and the heat sweltering as that brilliant blue sky smiles at me offers presents the possibilities in this world that have not yet been achieved.  The possibilities that the night
sky mocks me with is shown fully to me in the day.  It's just asking for me to grab it and take a hold and ride it.  It's mine for the taking.  I'm like Keanu at that waterfall in Pacino's office on top of the world. On top of the world with all the people that helped me get up there staring up at me from the bottom and I want to bring them all up there with me.  I want them all to see how great it is first hand.  I want them to taste how the snasberries really taste like snasberries and swim in the chocolate river.  But some journies you have to make on your own.  And sometimes people get left behind.

I'm learning to cope with letting people go.  I'm learning that sometimes people really don't care as
much as you thought they did or as they did at one time.  I'm learning that not everyone can go along with you for the whole ride.  They all have their own stops to get off at and completely different rides to get on.  And that doesn't mean that the portion of the ride that they existed on in your life means any less to them than it does to you.  It just means that it's over and is left to forever exist as a memory.

They say that when God shuts a door he opens a window. I guess this is the symbolic window of opportunity.  And even though I love an open window, I don't really like the doors to shut all the time.  Sometimes I like to keep the door ajar.

Grim

Yesterday I received an email from a good buddy of mine asking if I was coping with the deployment alright.  The reason he asked, he said, was because some of my emails sound grim.  At first I couldn't
really understand where this was coming from.  I mean I always thought my emails were funny.  I think if I make myself laugh then other people will laugh too.  And I am seriously laughing when I write the majority of my emails.  But then I thought about some of the emails and I wondered if maybe I am grim after all.

I decided to look the word up and be precise in the determining of my grimness.  On Dictionary.com there are 5 different definitions for the words grim.

Definition 1- unrelenting, rigid. 

Hmmm.  I don't think I'm ever entirely unrelenting or rigid.  So I'm a little stubborn at times.  It's not like I don't ever budge.  I'm pretty open-minded to other situations and people's opinions even if they are completely wrong.  Rigid I am not.

Definition 2-uninviting or unnerving in aspect,
forbidding. 

 Come on, I'm a friendly guy.  Sometimes I growl at people when they try to sit next to me but
it's all in good fun until they do sit next to me and I bite them.  I don't think that's so uninviting, I'm just trying to help them out really, prevent them from getting a bite wound.  Are you guys scared of me?  Do my emails sound forbidding?  Don't you dare say they do, or else... grrrrrrr.

Definition 3-ghastly, sinister. 

Wow.  If this is what he meant by saying that I sound grim I sound pretty damn cool.  Like a super villain plotting the demise of the world.  I can't really accept a compliment like that.  My plots are much smaller in scope and usually have something to do with smuggling food out of the chow hall.

Definition 4-ferocious, savage. 

Now, I don't want to brag or anything but may say that they agree with this one.  At least I would like to think that some would agree with this.  Not in like a bad ferocious, but a good, primal, sexual kind of ferociousness.  I'm like a savage African Tiger with these big fangs and claws that can't be tamed.  Awlllright, gigadee gigadee.

Definition 5-dismal, gloomy.  Gloomy? 

Do I really sound gloomy?  I dunno.  Maybe I am gloomy sometimes, but that has nothing to do with being deployed.  No it has more to do with facing, each and every day, the fact that reality never completely lives up to my dreams.  Knowing that my "relentless" optimism is "ferociously" beat down every day and that eventually this old heart of mine will become "sinister" from all of the disappointment and in turn become an "uninviting" organ for any person to take a gander at. And that, is the "gloomy" realization that I have to face every day knowing that I'm as hopeless as can be.

Charlie, you're right.  I am grim.

Nyquil Drenched Babble-on

Nyquil Drenched Babble-On  July 10, 2005 I drink the Nyquil straight from the bottle on nights like these when my haunted mind makes the insomnia unbearable.  Most of the time I don't know or comprehend just what it is that's keeping me up.  I just know that resistance is futile and that it would probably last until the morn if it wasn't for the Nyquil and even then, sometimes it still does.

Sometimes I can write and that will put me to sleep soon after.  Sometimes I can read and it will have the same effect.  I've tried music but that has the exact opposite effect.  I need words to put me to sleep I guess.  Words without instruments to be specific.  I wonder if it all goes back to being read stories
before bedtime.  I can't recall being read stories before bedtime but I can recall be shown/read stories on Reading Rainbow with that star trek guy before he ever got those weird glasses.  I can remember that.  I can also remember The Neverending Story later on with the big dog and the lost horse, who I think was named Atreyu.  Is that right?  I don't remember.  Point is I drank a lot of Nyquil, because the words weren't working.  Or were they?  Are they? 

I'm not sure if it's that or the green soothing liquid= that I need one more guzzle of.  That should do it.
My eyes are beginning to droop and my head is feeling like it's under a hand dryer in the men's restroom which I've stuck my head under before, after fixing my hair on a date, but shhhhh, don't tell anyone.  That's a secret. 

I just wish sometimes that my head would feel the fuzzies in my heart and follow their lead instead of
making their own troubles but then again maybe that's what my head's problem really is.  My heart is
attacking my head which is in turn attacking my body and here I sit babbling nonsensical trivialities of baneful decorum and narcissistic tendencies in a wasteful perpetuance of inefficient typing.

I think I've said all I need to say.