I don’t know why I remember.
I don’t know why I remember my parents arguing over Mark Hamill’s role in Star Wars. We were sitting in the living room at the Crottinger house, and it must have been just after we moved there because I remember this as the first time I was allowed to watch Episode IV: A New Hope. Colors brighten in my memory, and in this, the tan carpet is closer to radioactive than to the muted, unstainable brown that it actually was. It was probably that first winter we lived there. I remember the fire going in the Buck Stove. This wasn’t a fireplace. It was a freestanding stove, and where fireplaces dump a lot of the heat of the fire out this chimney, this stove, even with a moderate fire in it, would force us to dump most of its heat out of the windows to the living room. We were the only house on the block with the windows open and a foot of snow on the ground. I would run over and stand as close as I could, feeling the heat seep into my clothes and muscle until I’d be dancing around like a toddler doing the pee pee dance. Eventually, Dad would tell me to knock it off and go sit back down. Then I would run over to the blue-gray, corduroy couch and flop down on it superman style, yelling in pain and writhing from side to side as the super-heated fabric of my jeans pressed against the backs of my thighs. I still have this image of me flopping around like a fish, but I remember it from the outside, so maybe my brother was there beside me, flopping right along.
“I think they got a new actor to play in the later movies,” my dad said as Luke’s X-wing flew out of the base on Yavin IV to attack the Death Star.
“Who, Luke?” My mom asked.
“Yeah, doesn’t he look different in this movie from the others?”
They paused and watched the fight, as one after another of the X-Wing fighters either got blown up or peeled off of the approach to the exhaust vent cum self destruct bulls-eye. After a few minutes, just after the fat guy decided that he’d rather crash into the death star than eject, even though his guns were already not working, mom said, “He looks different, but I don’t think that it’s a different actor.”
Dad grunted, and that was the end of it.
I had no opinion on the matter, as I was busy at that moment trying to rap myself with an afghan so that I could sit on top of the stove without getting burned. It didn’t work.
From Wyandotte, Writer’s Block
John has perpetual writer’s block.
Or at least that is what he calls it. It isn’t that he can’t write; he writes fine. In fact, he writes for a living. John is a journalist for one of the biggest papers in The City, he has his own column, and he writes guest editorials for The Wyandotte Ledger six or seven times a year, but if you were to ask him, he would tell you that all of those things aren’t writing at all. He would say “That’s just my job,” or “I get paid to tell people’s opinions back to them,” or something along those lines. John would never call himself a writer because he’s never successfully written the one thing that he believes makes a writer, fiction.
So John recently joined a science fiction and fantasy writer’s group that meets at The Book and the Bean every other Thursday evening around 7:30 to read and criticize each others’ work. John was invited by The Bean‘s owner, Jim Whitney, who was familiar with his peculiar writer’s block and thought that getting John as far away from the mundane as possible might help him write fiction. Science Fiction isn’t really John’s thing. His favorite writer, in fact, is Charles Frazier, of Cold Mountain, and its structural similarity to The Odyssey, is about as close as he’s gotten to reading any Sci-Fi or Fantasy since he read Tolkien in 9th grade.
John visited the group, just to observe, and he liked what he saw. The group spent about an hour and a half going over three pieces, and everyone—about a dozen people—pitched in with at least one feedback statement. Suggestions ranged from ideas for how the story might flow better to questions of perspective to discussions of what the deeper meaning of a character’s action might be to what kinds of change would make publishers more likely to at least read through the story before sending it back to physics issues within the universe of the story. Of the three stories that the group talked about, one of them was a buggy android named Jim who fell in love with a bee hive that he thought was buzzing love songs at him, one was a chapter from a Tolkien clone that had apparently been in development for quite some time because all the readers talked about the characters as if they knew them well, and one was about an entrepreneur who prevented intergalactic war by getting the alien aggressors stoned on coffee, and became extremely rich in the process. One of the stories was meant as high literature, one as comedy, and one as a kid’s story. One was well written, one was garbage, and one was just weird. They all showed signs of having been worked on extensively.
After the discussion period, Jim introduced John to the group’s leader, Dan Green, who happened to have been the writer for one of the night’s pieces, the one about the fruity robot. Dan said that John was more than welcome to join the group, seeing as they had just lost a member and wanted to keep the number at an even twelve. John could join immediately as long he was willing to commit to reading each completed piece before the biweekly sessions, contributing to the discussions constructively (“We have a zero tolerance policy for trolling,” he said several times, much to John’s bewilderment), and have something ready for the group to read when his turn came up, which would be every two months, give or take. John said that he’d like to try it.
“Oh, there’s one more thing,” Dan said. “I hate to drop this on you, but the person who recently decided to step away from the group for a while, well, she did that, among other things because her next presentation is the upcoming meeting. Now, I can revamp the schedule, but that puts several of our veteran writers in a bind because they all tend to have fairly regular writing schedules, which will have to be changed. Or, if you think you could manage it, you could jump right in at the deep end and let us read something of yours at the next meeting.”
John didn’t like that idea at all. But then it occurred to him that he’s always been about to write fiction, but never actually written it.
“I think I can put something together for you.” He said.
Dan slapped him on the back and laughed. “Excellent,” he said. “I was hoping you’d say that. Just imagine me as Brad Pitt.” He took a bite of the panini he was eating, licked his lips and, while chewing said, “If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to write.”
* * * * *
That night John went home and started his story, one that he had been thinking about writing for quite some time but never gotten around to, and by the following Tuesday he had a completed draft, but rather than sit it aside and wait the week and a half for the next meeting of the group, he worked on editing and developing, tightening and compressing so that by second Tuesday when he finally emailed the story to Dan for distribution to the group, he had taken what started out as a forty page rough draft and trimmed it down to a tightly constructed twenty pages of razor sharp prose—or so he hoped. He sent the email and waited.
* * * * *
It isn’t that when he starts to write a piece of fiction, he clams up or anything. John has all sorts of ideas, and whenever he sits at his desk to write them, it seems like the stories just flow right off of his finger tips and onto the page or computer screen. And the stories feel so real. Oh no, he can tell stories just as well as any of the other writing that he does every day, but he still can’t write fiction because he can’t seem to deviate from the facts by so much as a middle initial for a tertiary character.
It’s the facts that get him. He’s amazing at facts, and that’s part of why he’s such a good journalist. He’s been writing for The Ledger for ten years now, ever since he graduated from Huntington, and in that time, he’s never, not once, seen a retraction or correction in the paper for one of the articles that he’s written. Sometimes he gets things wrong in a first draft, but by the time he’s cleaned things up, the facts will have adjusted themselves as well, even if he thought he had them all right in the first place, and was only line editing. He’ll catch the mistakes every time.
* * * * *
Because he was the first timer, John got to go first. The first ten minutes were dedicated to allowing the readers to look back over Johns story and remind themselves what they wanted to say, find the parts they wanted to point out, etc. While they did this, John sat nervously and looked back over the story himself, trying not to glare at the readers as they looked through their notes. When ten minutes had passed, John looked over at Dan to see if he would call them to start the discussion, but he was absorbed in his copy of the story, and it didn’t look as if he was thumbing back through for reference. It looked as if he was reading the story straight through. John looked around the room, and it looked as if others were doing the same thing.
Another five minutes passed, and John started to wonder if he should say something. Weren’t they supposed to have read this before they came to the meeting? He coughed. No response, so not knowing what exactly to say, he just sat there. Twenty minutes after they had started reading, the faster readers finished and looked up or closed their eyes, leaned back in their chairs, or stood up for coffee refills. Finally, twenty-eight minutes after they started reading, the final reader looked up from the page and stared at John.
John curled his lips away from his teeth in what he hoped would look more like a smile than the rigor mortis he was feeling. Dan Green started off the discussion the same way that he had started off the discussion of each piece at the previous meeting. “Before we start talking about your piece, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you were hoping to accomplish with it John?”
“Well,” John said, “I had some friends in college who were really into video games, and I had some other friends who spent most of their free time taking any drugs that they could get their hands on. The friends who were always stoned were always suggesting music to me, and I noticed that a lot of the music that they suggested was very similar to the music that was in the soundtracks to a lot of the games that my gamer friends liked to play. The friends who were into drugs told me about the stuff that they had seen in their various hallucinations, and I couldn’t help but notice that some of the visions they had were either very similar to those from some of the darker games that my friends played, or would have done well as parts of such games. That just got me thinking, I guess, and I started to wonder what it would be like if we were to develop the ability to digitally record dreams or hallucinations and convert them into digital realities that others who were not drug users would then be able to interact with in games or online. I hope that using illegal drugs as a plot device in my first story wasn’t offensive or anything. I used real products for the most part to add to the realism.”
Green shook his head. “I didn’t find that offensive at all.” He said. “Did anyone have any trouble with the drug references?”
People started shaking their heads, and one middle aged, conservative looking lady said, “I don’t know why we would be offended by drug references in a piece like this.” Still, John thought, people looked awkward, as if there was something they wanted to say but didn’t know how to start.
“Who wants to start with some of the strengths of this piece?” Green asked the room.
A middle aged man with salt and pepper hair and a completely gray beard started off. “I thought the prose was compelling.” He said. “It is obvious that you put a lot of work into making sure that there wasn’t a lot of extraneous verbiage, and the descriptions are beautiful. I especially liked your description of The Citadel of Mercury Rain. It was exquisite. I know.” He paused uncomfortably. “I know I couldn’t have described it nearly so well myself.”
John didn’t have time to wonder what the man meant buy “I couldn’t have described it nearly so well myself” because now that people had started talking, the comments came pretty quickly. Overall, people seemed to have liked the story pretty well. One woman said that she especially liked the descriptions of what Carlyle was thinking when he took the overdose that produced the Forest on a Cloud at Night, which she said was her favorite of Carlyle’s dreamscapes.
“I did have one question about that,” she said. “I know you’re a journalist. Is this based on an interview you did with him at some point, or is this what you imagine he must have been thinking at the time? My understanding was that before he became a complete recluse, he wasn’t well known enough that he would have been interviewed” She paused awkwardly, as John was staring at her with his mouth opened. “But I don’t really keep up with celebrity journalism,” she finished lamely.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean when you say—” was all John could come up with before the only teenager in the group, an intense looking fifteen or sixteen year old who John thought he might have heard called Jessie at some point interrupted to say that her boyfriend was a huge fan of the whole Dreamscape Scene, and he had gotten her Carlyle’s biography1 for her birthday. She was sure sure that his mother hadn’t been the jerk that John’s story presented her as. In fact, she was positive that it was only because of Nancy Carlyle’s support and encouragement that Dominick Carlyle had ever had the nerve to take the overdose that both sealed his career as the greatest of the first generation dreamscape artists and destroyed his sanity.
John’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click.
Finally, Green spoke up. “There’s no denying it John. This is a great piece of narrative history. It’s strongly written, captivating, intense. If I read this kind of stuff, I’m sure I’d have loved it. Even so, I have to admit I love it, but here’s the deal. This writing group is a fiction group. What’s more, it’s a fantastic fiction writing group. There are other groups for practicing writing literary non-fiction or whatever they’re calling it these days, though I’m not sure why you would want to practice, seeing as you get paid to do it all the time. The Bean has different groups meeting here all the time, but if you are going to have us read your stuff, you need to write fiction.
* * * * *
This is why John has fiction writer’s block. It isn’t that he is obsessive compulsive about his facts. He never ever does research for writing a fiction piece, but it doesn’t matter. No matter how weird the story is, no matter how sure he is that nothing like what he is writing about has ever happened, when John sends his story out into the world, the people who read it are going to recognize what he is writing about and tell him that they thought he was writing fiction and were very surprised to find themselves reading narrative fact. The one exception that John has found to this is when he does exceptionally bad writing, which is the only way that he was able to pass his creative writing class in college. At fall break he was failing the course because the teacher refused to give him credit for true stories, no matter how well written they were. Finally, he got frustrated and just wrote a flat story with clichés and boring characters who did things that went against their character. He wrote the story in a burst and never went back to check continuity, spelling, or even formatting. He turned the story in and got a C+. After much begging, John convinced his professor to let him write new stories to replace the true ones he had turned in previously, and the partial scores he got with those, and a lot of extra credit, let him pass with the absolute minimum possible percentage to get a C- for the course.
* * * * *
After The Bean was closed and everyone else had gone home for the night, John and Whitney sat in the café and John drank a cup of coffee with a double of espresso in it (Priest: “You won’t sleep tonight.” John: “I try to miss a night every couple of weeks anyway.”), and Jim smoked. Jim tried to distract John from the fiasco with the story by telling him about some research that he had been doing, something about a project that a PhD student at Huntington did ten years ago or so, but John, normally an attentive listener, couldn’t take his mind off of the fiasco with the story.
“I swear, I’d never heard anything about ‘dreamscapes’ or ‘Dominick Carlyle’ or ‘The Citadel of Mercury Rain’ before I wrote that story. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d have laughed at someone if they told me anything even remotely associated with using illegal drugs to make art. I still can’t believe that they are saying that this has been going on for years.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Seven Suns at Midnight is a pretty popular book for new media art aficionados, and it has been for quite a while. You must have heard someone talking about it at some point and thought you made it up.” He puffed on his pipe sagely, or at least that is what John supposed it was supposed to look like. The pipe had gone out though, and Jim sneezed down the stem, blowing a cloud of ash out of the pipe.
When he finished laughing, John scratched his jaw, wiped the tears from his eyes, and ran his hands through his hair. “This type of thing has been happening for years. I almost failed creative writing in college because of the same thing.”
Jim packed a new bowl of tobacco, relit his pipe, and puffed on it some more, finally almost managing the sage look he had been going for earlier, football player soot lines below his eyes. After a moment his face lit up. “I know what you need to do. You need to write something completely impossible, something that you know can’t be bleeding over into your imagination from the real world.”
“That’s what I did.” John almost yelled. “Am I the only person who thinks that letting people fry their brains just to make interesting computer landscapes is reckless and stupid?”
“No, you’re right. We do stupid things all the time.” More puffing. “I know. You should make your premise something that you couldn’t have found out even if it were true, something that mainly takes place in a person’s mind or something like that. Then you’d be safe. You have any ideas like that?”
John pulled on his chin. “Yeah, I think I have an idea,” he said.
* * * * *
That night, John stayed up most of the night letting the caffeine burn out of his brain and writing a first draft of a story about a man who lived life after life after life, always dying and immediately finding himself back in his mother’s womb, preparing to live again. The man always tried to change things, to make the world a better place, but he always failed. Sometimes the changes he made were huge, like finding a way to prevent the terrorist attack on 9/11. Other times, the changes were much more modest, like being in the right place at the right time and saving a single life. Sometimes he used what he knew about the eighty years that he had lived over and over again to become the head of a great business empire, or president. Sometimes he was poor. Sometimes he couldn’t take it anymore and killed himself as a child. Sometimes he was a criminal. Sometimes he was a prophet. The man’s greatest pain was that no matter what he did, he couldn’t seem to change to the actual amount of human suffering in the world. Crimes happened, atrocities. Once, when he prevented 9/11, Osama Bin Laden used a nuclear device that killed thirty times as many. Another time, a child he saved grew up to be a rapist. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he could see the shadows of his other lives, walking along beside him, haunting him until he felt his sanity must break, for he lived in a world of ghosts more frightening than any imaginable, his own ghosts.
Finally, after hundreds of lives, he met someone like himself, and he found out how to die, but he also came to believe that every time he lived, he did not change the universe, that time was not stuck with him, but that he created a completely new universe based on his actions, that he was a hub from which time itself shot spoke after spoke after spoke into the eternal void, and he came to see himself as a small part of a greater plan that would preserve humankind despite all its mistakes, because there would always be another version, a different path. In that realization, he found peace.
John didn’t stop by writing the story though. He had two months before his next time to present, and he wanted to do all that he could to make sure that the idea was his and no one else’s, so he revised and cut, tightened and clarified, and he studied theories about religion and physics, the universe and the multiverse, and even though there were many theories suggesting that the universe split constantly, no theories suggested that only specific people made the choices that caused the mitosis of universes. His story was his own.
When the two months were up, and John had read stories by all of the other writers in the group2, some of which were great, probably held back from publication only by their author’s perfectionism, and others which were, well, not, John’s story finally came before the reading group for discussion.
This time the discussion went much better. People still got sucked into the story and read the whole thing instead of just reviewing their notes from pre-reading it, but John knew from experience with his essays for The Ledger that people genuinely liked reading his work, and he felt confident that the longer review time happened simply because they were enjoying reading back over the work. One person, however, didn’t read back over the story. The salt-and-pepper haired, grey-bearded man who had liked John’s description of The Citadel of Mercury Rain, Steve Collins, just sat across from him in the circle of chairs and glowered. John found it more than slightly uncomfortable and was getting ready to go ask Collins if everything was alright when people started to look up from reading the story. Before long, the conversation became lively. The general consensus was that the impossibility of the story made up for the historicity of his last one, though Dan Green, whose last story had been about a sentient lampshade that had fallen in love with a throw rug and eloped to Dubai, thought it was a bit too farfetched.
Afterward, when Jim Whitney was congratulating John on having written some actual fiction, Steve Collins walked up and gruffly said, “We need to talk.”
“Ok,” John said, and gave Jim what he hoped was a “be ready to rescue me” look.
“You never put it in the story.” He said. “You say he learned how to end the cycle, but you never say how it was done.”
John had no idea what he was talking about, but he thought Collins must be referring to the man being able to end his lives. “How should I know?” He said. “It’s just a story.”
“Right,” Collins said, and winked sourly, with no mirth. “What I want to know is how you found out. I’ve never told anyone this time because of what they always do when I tell. I don’t know if it is worse when they believe or don’t. How did you find out? How do you know what I am?”
“What you are?”
“The hub, John. How did you know that I’m the hub?
John felt his mouth fall open again.
* * * * *
John didn’t know whether or not to believe Steve, and the next he heard, Steve had been transferred suddenly to Austin.
“Next time it is my turn to present,” he told Green one day as they were having lunch together (they had become good friends), “I’m going to go for something in the classic mold, something like what Heinlein, Van Vogt, Hubbard, and Dick were doing during the Golden Age, something that would never be publishable today because the genre has moved on, but something that might be good practice, an exercise in restraint. I think I’ll write about a moon colony that has a tragedy.”
“I thought you didn’t know anything about Science Fiction.” Green said. “Where’s all this ‘golden age, Van Vogt, Hubbard, and Dick’ coming from?”
“I’ve been doing some research.”
“Well,” Green said. “Even if the technology involved didn’t make the story science fiction, the price of such an undertaking certainly would in today’s economic climate. I’m thinking of writing a story about a Dachshund who finds the tree of life hidden at the bottom of a groundhog hole, guarded by fiery little sprites riding about on blind moles.”
John said that sounded right up Dan’s alley.
* * * * *
By sheer luck of the draw, John didn’t have two months to get his next story together. He was at the end of the cycle, and each cycle the whole group drew names from a hat to determine the date of their next reading. John fell at the beginning of the next cycle, so he ended up presenting with only one meeting between presentations, which meant he could theoretically not present again for another four months. Inefficient at best. He still had plenty of time to put his story together and do some research, and he intended to allow himself only a couple of technologies that didn’t already exist, finally deciding on the use of nano technology as both the anachronistic element and the problem in the story.
The night that the group read his story, John felt confident that they would enjoy it, even if they would know that the style was a little outdated. As usual, they took more time on his story than they normally would have on other people’s work, and John felt good that they were lingering over it even if the prose was more stylized than they were used to, but when people finished reading and looked up, they didn’t look like they enjoyed reading the story. In fact, most of them looked angry. Jenny (the real name of the girl whose boyfriend was a big fan of Dominick Carlyle’s dreamscapes) had tears running down her face, and one of the older ladies put her arm around her.
“Well,” said Green, “That was about as tasteful as writing stories about the sinking of the USS Arizona while the seamen inside are still pounding on its hull.”
John was about to ask what exactly Dan was referring to when Whitney walked over from the register, where he’d been watching the news, and said that they were finally pulling out the last of the survivors. People silently got up and walked out of the room. John went into the café last. Survivors of what? He wondered. He had read the news very thoroughly that morning, and no great tragedies had happened, no storms or earthquakes, no bombings or eruptions, nothing. John stopped and stared at the plasma screen.
“Impossible.” He shouted.
There, on the screen in bold CNN letters was written “5000 dead, tens of thousands more missing.” And below that, “Tragedy on Lunar Colony Alpha.”
* * * * *
They wanted to throw him out of the writing group for that, but Jim stood up for him. He said that John was writing out his pain, trying to understand for himself, in his own way, what was going on. Never mind that John hadn’t known anything about the accident. Never mind that he had told Dan three weeks ago what he was going to write about Green didn’t remember the conversation. Never mind that John protested strongly that his social skills might be a little rough around the edges, but they weren’t as horrible as all that. Never mind. Never mind. Never mind.
In the end they only let him stay because they had become his friends, and Jim provided their venue. John said that he wanted to provide a new story at the next meeting, even though it wasn’t his turn. He said that he wanted to use it as a way of explaining himself. They let him because Steve was in the lineup for the following meeting, but he was a trained counselor and he had volunteered his services for the bereaved of the Lunar Meltdown. John took his place.
John wrote about never being able to write fiction, about everything he ever wrote either already being true or coming true. He wrote about the frustration of trying again and again and never being able to write a good story, of wondering why he missed things that everyone else knew were going on, of writing down exactly what was happening while thinking that he was making it up himself. He changed the name, of course, and he changed all the circumstances, but the body of the story was the hard truth, all except for the ending. At the end of the story, John’s character stole another writer’s idea book, and he joined a writing group and wrote stories based on that writer’s ideas. And because it wasn’t his creation, because he had stolen the kernel of the story, it wasn’t infused with truth. It became fiction, nothing more, and they said it was his best work, better than any of his essays or reporting. The group loved his fiction and wanted him to try to get his stories published, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He couldn’t steal that other writer’s work. So he wrote one last story, confessing what he had done.
John didn’t email this story early. He brought a dozen copies with him, and the whole group read it for the first time sitting there in one of the group meeting rooms at The Bean. John watched them read, as intent on their faces as they were on his story. It was long, much longer than the stories that he usually turned in, but no one quit reading. No one fidgeted or looked bored. No one got up to use the bathroom or get coffee. They just read, and when they were all finished reading, Steve Collins, who hadn’t written for tonight because he’d been recovering from a root canal all week said, “So you mean to say that your story from last week, the one about the moon colony that we all liked so much was at least partially plagiarized?”
John smiled sadly, nodded, said “I’m sorry,” and never tried to write fiction again.
1 Seven Suns at Midnight: The Life and Vision of Dominick Carlyle, by Theresa King, 2011, Harper and Row, NY.
2 He had also read the first 27 chapters of the Tolkien clone, not because it was good; it wasn’t, but because he figured he should know what was going on in order to talk intelligently about it.
Terp Tales, Shit Happens Boss
I’m enjoying one of the great pleasures of deployment: eating filthy. I’m soaking wet with sweat, my face is smeared with grime, and my shirt looks like I got skidded over by a semi. The only clean part of my body is the palms of my hands, which I scrubbed down perfunctorily on the five foot trip from the gym to the chow hall. You can’t get away with this crap in garrison. Actually, you can’t get away with it at the larger bases here in country. But when you are one of twenty-some Americans within shooting distance, well, people make allowances.
Sometimes you just make allowances.
I’m watching the news, or trying to watch the news. But the satellite is confused, so I’m thinking about my record player, the one Andrea got me for my birthday, the one that I’ve never seen because it didn’t arrive at the house until I’d already left the country. I’m pretty sure if I took that horrible Green Day record, the one that sounded like it was probably just the rejected tracks from American Idiot, and drew zig zags all over it with my knife, smeared some peanut butter on it, and shot it a couple times, it would probably sound like the news does right not. I love military technology.
Hamza walks in.
–Hey Boss! Bundle drop today. You hear?
–Hey Hamza. No I didn’t hear about any bundle drop. You know when it’s supposed to happen?
Hamza walks over to the chow line and grabs tray, forks two big porc chops onto it, and comes over to sit across from me.
–About an hour. Maybe they will miss this time. Did you hear about the time they missed?
The Air Force must use us for training new pilots. They miss all the time. Last week they dropped a whole pallet of Dr. Pepper over the side of the ridge so that we couldn’t get any vehicles up to take it back to the base. I had a lot of fun throwing cans of pop down into the valley and watching them explode. They’ve also dropped pallets right on top of us while we wait to go gather them up. The first time that I was involved in a bundle drop here at Cobra, it ended up looking like some kind of rodeo. The bird started to fly over, we released a smoke grenade to let the pilot know where to drop the bundles, and as soon as he saw the smoke, instead of waiting until he was in position, he just dropped everything right on our heads. A few of the parachutes didn’t open, and the bundles commenced what we call “burning in.” Men scattered in all directions, hopping on four wheelers and GMVs, or just flat out sprinting for their lives. One guy didn’t get out of the impact area in time and almost got hit by one of the pallets. Parachute or not, if one of those things hits you, you splash.
Imagine this coming down on your head
–I guess I haven’t heard about them missing a drop, Hamza. What happened?
–Boss, one time, they drop the pallets right on the base.
–What do you mean by “on” Hamza.
–Look up.
I look up. The ceiling joist, a 4 inch I beam directly above my head, looks like it’s been bent into a pretzel shape and inexpertly straightened back out. I’ve seen it before but never really remarked on it. After all, this is Afghanistan, and poor workmanship is the modus operandi for this whole country, SOP for us military types. Now I really notice it for the first time, and it’s not just the beam that’s busted, the tiles that it supports are all cracked and shattered, some of them even missing. Obviously, the damage happened in place, not before installation.
–A bundle hit there. Hamza says. They were coming down all over the base. Boom, boom, boom. We were lucky no one got killed. I think they might have gotten one of the dogs!
Right then, the Omega Male walks in.
–Hey Jeremy, I say. What’s up?
–Hey David. He waves at me. He pauses and glares at Hamza. Kuni, I hear him mumble under his breath. Fag. Hamza doesn’t hear him. I know this because Jeremy keeps right on living. He walks to the line and grabs some food for himself, sits it on the table at the back of the chow hall and goes to the cooler to get two cokes and a Gatorade shake.
–What’s his problem? I ask Hamza.
–He is the pussy. Hamza says. You are not believing what we did to him last night. Jonny and I run screaming into his room and beat the fuck out of him in the dark. He cried.
Hamza starts laughing viciously and picks up one of his pork chops to eat with his hands, like a hot pocket. Deployed Army food is generally, um, bad, so if an item is supposed to be tough, it’ll be really tender (think soggy bread), and if it’s supposed to be tender, it’ll either be tough, or so tender that you wonder how many days it’s had to decay before making it to the line. I firmly believe that the lobster they insist on serving us from time to time was actually caught before I stopped eating through my navel. In this case, the pork has roughly the texture of twelve year old beef jerky, so Hamza holds it two handed, bites into it to get a grip, and then jerks his head off to the right as hard as he can, while pulling left with his hands. A bit of the meat tears off, and he commences the lengthy process of chewing.
–And then, he says around the food in his mouth, we wait until he went to the shitter this morning. He chose the stinkiest one, with the most shit in the bucket, and we lock him in. He is locked in the shitter from eight until eleven! Hamza swallows. I would kill someone who did that to me, but he doesn’t even have balls to ask who did it to him. But he knows it’s me.
Hamza smiles in what is, I think, supposed to be a mischievous way. He tears at another bite of the pork chop.
This is Hamza.
Suddenly it dawns on me what he’s eating.
–Hamza, I ask, you are a Muslim aren’t you?
–Of course. All Afghanis are Muslim.
That’s not completely true, but I’m not going to disabuse him of the notion.
–You know what you are eating, right?
–Yes, meat.
–Yeah, Hamza, but that meat is a pork chop.
–So?
–Pork is pig.
He swallows and looks at me calmly, stares at the pork chop in his hand, looks back at me, and takes another, larger bite of the pork.
–Shit happens boss.
The Horse and the Rider
I don’t normally copy and paste into my blog, seeing as it’s MY blog. But I think that today, some simple passages from scripture might give some perspective to those of you who think that it’s somehow ungodly for Christians to be excited about USSF having finally taken out Osama Bin Laden, who we’ve been trying to get our hands on for last ten years.
Exodus 15: 1-10 – Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the LORD, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt him. The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea. The depths have covered them: they sank into the bottom as a stone. Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy. And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee: thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as an heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them. Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them: they sank as lead in the mighty waters.
The Lord is a man of War? Huh?
Psalm 68: 1-3 Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him. As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God. But let the righteous be glad; let them rejoice before God: yea, let them exceedingly rejoice.
Let them exceedingly rejoice? What?
But then again, there are also these passages:
Proverbs 24:17-20
Do not rejoice when your enemies fall,
and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble,
or else the LORD will see it and be displeased,
and turn away his anger from them.
Do not fret because of evildoers.
Do not envy the wicked;
for the evil have no future;
the lamp of the wicked will go out.
So we shouldn’t rejoice because we want to make sure that we don’t do anything to cause God to change his mind and refrain from judgment. But wait, if the point is that any death is worth mourning, then don’t we want to rejoice so that God won’t let as many bad guys die?
Ok, what would Jesus say?
Matthew 5:43-48 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
So love your enemy.
Don’t forget that turn the other cheek thing. But it looks to me like both towers came down. We don’t really have another cheek to turn there do we?
How about this one?
Matthew 18:6 But if you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.
I guess Osama was ok to teach his radical form of militant Islam that preached violence and subjugation because the people he was teaching it to didn’t already believe in Christ so he couldn’t make them stumble?
Obviously, I’m all over the place here. And that’s on purpose. I’m not one of those people claiming that we need to go dance in the street and burn OBL in effigy. I think that’s stupid. But those of you who claim that people are sinful or in someway shaming Christ to celebrate the death of one of the most notorious terrorist leaders in the world, a man who has been followed and respected by the same men who have killed my friends and put my family in danger, and your family too, well, you should be ashamed of yourselves for judging them because they might be wrong about what God thinks on this, but you might be too, and sometimes it’s better to just shut up and watch what happens.
And maybe I should too.
Terp Tales, Meet Hamza
Operation Enduring Freedom XVI. A different year, a different place. The enemy, he never changes though. Neither do the interpreters. They are still about as quirky as Windows Vista and as arrogant as America herself. Kings, fighting amongst themselves for supremacy in their microcosmic hierarchy of who gets to fleece the Americans more.
There’s an obese mouth breather sitting by the fire in my compound, drinking tea he made from water I boiled for my coffee.
–Who are you?
–I’m sorry sah?
He’s clearly a terp. That sense of entitlement. That almost but not quite English.
–You’re the new terp?
–Yes sah.
–What’s your name?
–I’m sorry sah?
–What. Is. Your. Name? I squat down by the fire and dump two half liter bottles of water into the cast iron kettle and sit it back over the coals.
–Ah. I am Jeremy sah.
–Stop calling me that.
–I’m sorry sah?
–Stop calling me sir. My name is David.
–Ah. Ok.
–Ok. Don’t drink my water. He looks abashed. He knows he should have refilled the kettle when he dried it.
–Ok sah. Sorry sah.
–David.
–Sorry sah. It’s like a scene from a low budget film.
I need a terp who speaks English. Jeremy clearly isn’t going to do the trick. Sherrif, AKA. Steve-Dave, and Jonny Amir Karit were cuddling in the terp hut last night, but at this time of morning, who know’s what you’re going to walk in on. I check my watch. Thursday. Don’t knock. Don’t open the door. Stand outside and yell, just in case.
–TAJI MAN! I yell with my head against the door.
The door cracks opened and a sphere of hair, broken by a slit of crusty, swolen black eyes pokes through the crack. Last night’s hash hasn’t worn off yet. It’s like someone painted Keith Green brown and sent him forward in time to write bing bong songs in Afghanland.
–What’s up David?
–I need a terp to listen to something for me. You free Jonny?
–Sure, why not?
He closes the door, and sounds abstracted directly from a Laurel and Hardy skit begin to pipe through the chimney, the mouth of which pukes smoke beside the door, right into my face. From the swearing, I think that Jonny must be walking on everyone in the room, looking for his boots. “Sure, why not?” is Jonny’s catch expression, which he thinks means “of course” or “right away,” and we put up with it for the most part, those of us who know him, but it’s always funny when a new guy to the team asks him to do something and he says “sure, why not?” Just as my mom never really asked me to take out the garbage when I was a kid. We never really ask Jonny to interpret for us. We tell him politely, but when he drops that line on new guys, they tend to stop being polite.
I walk back into the courtyard and direct my attention toward the fire. There’s steam pouring from the mouth of the kettle, so I unhook the metal cup I attached to my belt when I woke up and pour in two packets of powdered “Via Starbucks” instant espresso, top them with the almost boiling water, and set about stirring with my pocket knife. Jonny is taking forever, and I’m starting to think about having Jeremy help me—or maybe going over and stopping up that chimney—when I hear a motorcycle roll up next to the side door of the compound and die. Machine gun fire doesn’t ensue, so I can guess that the partner forces have decided that whoever was driving it wasn’t a threat, which at this time of day, in this location, means it’s got to be the one and only…
–Hamza! I yell.
–Hey Boss, what the fuck is going on up in this place? He responds amiably with his bizarre accent that I’m not even going to try to spell.
–Where you been dude? I haven’t seen you in weeks. I open the compound gate, and he thrusts his wiry body through the gap to give me a hug and offer me a cigarette, which I take with relish and only realize is a Pine when I cough my lungs into a bloody heap on the ground a moment later.
–I went to work for the other team in Sarab. But I’m quitting because there’s no action there at all. I am not a terp for talking. I am a terp for killing Taliban.
–No action at all? I ask him. I’ve heard that the Sons of Uruzgan, as they call themselves have been doing fairly good work.
–I fucked all the elders’ daughters. And now I’m bored. I want to work for you guys and fight again. Check out my new boots boss.
I see that he’s wearing Jonny’s boots, and he’s written his name on the heel with sharpie marker.
I shake my head and chuckle, pour him a cup of coffee, and we set to work.
Blood Pools In My Ear
Blood pools in my ear from a cut I
made shaving this afternoon.
Not that it matters much, as
I’ve sweat trilling down the cleft of
my freshly showered spine still cooling
from my afternoon run.
Mean It ‘Till You Feel It
This morning in Church, I wasn’t feeling it. The music was “on” as they say, and people were all worked up. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t one little bit. I was distracted by how much the worship leader looked like one of my college professors, by how many women were wearing high heals with jeans, by the sheer number of mohawks (have the styles changed that much this year?), by wondering if the violinist would have that long of a neck if she hadn’t spent so many years playing the violin, by, well, everything.
Everything besides the songs we were singing.
And why shouldn’t I be? The music was thumping, everyone was emotionally charged, but I wasn’t feeling it. I don’t choose to feel it without a reason, and I wasn’t given a reason. Here’s what we sang:
You are good. You are good.
When there’s nothing good in me.
You are love. You are love.
On display for all to see.
You are light. You are light.
When the darkness closes in.
You are hope. You are hope.
You have covered all my sin.
Not bad right? Put some snappy music to it, and that’s something you can really get into. It’s got everything you need for an ecstasy. It’s repetitive, for nothing produces euphoria like a good chant. It’s simple. And it’s falsely humble, for no one who would sing that song can do so honestly. Any person who would want to sing it would also claim some influence of a perfect God in their life.
And so I sound like the bitter student who came out of CBC in 2002 with a chip on his shoulder. But I’m not. I don’t actually have anything against that song—for those who are in a state of worship already. Who have found that emotional stance that we pretend worship isn’t about. And it might work for those who aren’t ready as well, but the way that it works for them is a poor substitute for leading them into a real attitude of worship because it’s the music that’s going to take them there, regardless of whether their minds come along or not.
So I stood and thought about the song, and I worshiped in my own way, tried to find that mental worshipful stance without the help of a key change or the fog machine on stage.
Then a different song came on:
Come thou fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the Mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of thy redeeming love.
Oh to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, oh take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above.
What a different position I suddenly found myself in. The emotion washed over me like a flood, of minor keys and dry ice, and I was able to worship with abandon!
Not true.
My emotional state changed exactly zero.
What did change was the nature of the song and the way in which it was able to help me into a worshipful state. The difference between the first song that I quoted and this one is where they fall on the slide rule between what I call “Chase the Ecstasy” type worship and “Mean it ’till you feel it” type worship. These songs don’t represent the extremes by any means. If I was going to extremes, I’m sure I would have chosen that stupid Darrell Evans song from around 2000 “Trading My Sorrows” as my first song, and I might have chosen the Newsboys’ “Strong Tower” as the second one so that I couldn’t be accused of just liking old songs better than new ones (“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” was written by Robert Robinson in 1757, when he was 22). But this song helped me worship in a way that the other one could not have because it’s theologically relevant, a prayerful statement of devotion and a request for protection and assistance from the creator of the universe. The other song is exciting, and it’s not devoid of theological content, but it certainly is low calorie at best.
My point here isn’t to draw attention to extremes, nor is it to disparage either type of song. There’s a place for both of them—well, maybe not for “Trading My Sorrows;” that song is really horrible—at least to an extent. But I’ve been to churches where there was nothing to think about during worship, so if you don’t show up ready to get pumped up, then you aren’t going to get anything out of the service. I’m sure I always misunderstood, but I always got the impression from my parents when I was a kid that if a person couldn’t “get into worship” there was something wrong with their walk with Christ. My parents probably didn’t mean it that way. They aren’t that nutty. Regardless, I repudiate that thought. People are in different states when they come in. They have had different experiences this morning, this week—this ten months. And some people might need that ecstasy, but others might need a song that they can chew on and sing, meaning what they sing until they feel it, as I did. Or maybe even singing it until they mean it, one step further removed. I applaud Manna Church’s worship staff for taking the time recognize that both kinds of song are necessary.
I’m Back.
I took a break from blogging.
I should have done what everyone else does when they take a break rather than just lose interest and stop updating, and left some kind of away message as my last post, but I didn’t know that I was going to take a break. It just happened.
My last post, a deliberately stupid poem written as a response to a conversation that I was having with my close friend Jonathan Griffin via Facebook, was posted on 19 September 2010, as I was preparing to go on a major mission. That mission started on the 28th of September, and in the afternoon of the 29th, two of my friends, Cal Harrison and Mark Forrester, were killed in combat.
That mission lasted for another 10 days, and when I finally got back to the firebase, I never thought about writing another blog for the rest of the deployment. It wasn’t deliberate; as I said, it just happened.
But I’m back, and I’m gathering new material, so those of you who used to read this blog when it was active, keep your eyes peeled, I’m gonna be coming at you with some lyrical tricks I’ve been saving up for the prosal apocalypse. Keep your heads down and your lexicons limber. There’s going to be a hellfire of words up in this bitch.
Terrible Comfortable Silence (for Jonathan)
Terrible Comfortable Silence
A beautiful conceit
But that’s just telling, isn’t it?
What do you think your
(absent, imagined, clockwork god)
reader is going to get from that?
We sit on the balcony
slipping from Guinness
to Blue Ribbon as our taste for, well
taste, fades to the taste for, well,
pretension.
Is this painting working for you?
If you have lived a paucity of human
experience, it might! Show, don’t tell.
Maybe we shouldn’t show either.
Then we can be blind as well as deaf.
Let the rules go.
Is wayside still a word?
When was its last use?
How about the gutter? I’m sure that one
still has collateral (can we agree on this symbol?)
The old style gutter, you know the type,
where rain might collect in the spring, but
shit gets dumped morning and night.
Put your rules there.
And climbing back out
—phew, your shoes stink!—
you’ll have to pinch your nose to taste
a depth of human connectedness that
really does happen.
To say you’ll never really know or be known
is to take comfort, to own
self imposed
isolation in a lie.
Your argumental proof
(Rant at me now!)
these labels (we’re back on the beer,
but if that offends,
pretend we’re talking about billboards)
have reified us these
experiences made for projection.
I don’t think I’ve seen this poem,
those two lines offer lax control of language
in the service of beauty
(which is really a greater
control, one based on
love rather than law,
isn’t it?)
We (who?) prefer linguistic legalism
gilding tombs full of
bones (of course!), the ghosts of experience—
where the garden of life lived used be.
Or is it cliché to borrow Christian imagery
in this post-Christian now?
His conflation of physical contact with
emotional intimacy digs down to the
very core of this brief, intolerably long
human experience, and it’s vibrantly ghastly too!
(that’s three impossibilities we’ve lived now)
I caught that.
Did you?
When the are no absolutes,
the guides become rules become sacrosanct.
Let’s try another image.
Maybe we shouldn’t have cut that anchor loose.
Stephen King’s “Under the Dome”
Stephen King’s 2009 novel, Under the Dome, is a hefty work of something over 1000 pages. I’m not sure of the exact number because my reading of the novel was via audiobook, purchased from Audible.com. This is my second reading of the novel, both readings accomplished on different Afghanistan rotations, primarily on trips to the gym and on guard shift. In audiobook format, the novel, read by Raul Lesparga, runs upward of 40 hours.
On a crisp October morning, the small town of Harper’s Mill, Maine, is suddenly blocked off from the rest of the country (and world) when an energy field dome of unknown origin slams down in the sock shape that exactly matches the town’s boundaries. What follows is a Lord of the Flies esque cautionary tale about the abuse of power that takes place when government officials, unchecked by law or the populace, use the machinery of government for their own ends. As Big Jim Renee and his cronies take the town ever more strongly under their corrupt control, a small contingent of independents try to find a cause for, and a way out from under, the dome. Excess leads to excess, and things go quickly from bad to apocalyptic in a well paced and seemingly inevitable chain of events that fascinates the reader, leaving him feeling like the spectator of a car crash, horrified, but both unable and unwilling to look away.
The novel is typical King fare, though on the better end of his spectrum on novels with The Stand and Hearts in Atlantis, far from the shabby end of town where Carrie and many of King’s monster stories like to shake down the unwary for pocket change (unless you are foolish enough to buy them new, then it’s dollars). The plot opens like a flower, with no surprises per se, only inevitability, and a few of King’s much loved (19) and worn out (animals overly integral to the plot) tropes will be readily recognizable to readers familiar to his work. If you aren’t a King reader, however, don’t let this hold you back. This is a great novel, and those tropes are only dropped like bread crumbs along the trail. Not knowing them won’t take anything away from the book. It will only enrich the next of his books that you pick up.
What made me read this novel for a second time (besides not having easy access to new audiobooks), and what I find most interesting and frightening in it, is how much the events in the mill after the closing of the dome remind me of what I see happening today, not in some fictional city, but in my own, all to real country. Perhaps I’m paranoid. Perhaps my current situation as self-appointed (volunteer) indentured servant to mad old Sam cause me to have a more negative view than I should, but I don’t think so. I think that Under the Dome scared me as much as it does because it reminds me that our government is wide open to all kinds of abuses of power. Those in power, both currently and in the previous administration, might imagine that they have our best interest at hear, Big Jim definitely does, but the price they demand in exchange for what they offer is the liberty that lies at the heart of what it really means to be American. As Under the Dome tries to show us if we are looking, this price is simply too high to pay.
