Sleep, 5 hours worth but we don’t miss breakfast, already hungry and its paid for with the room so we make the decision to abandon sleep and start it up early. Set the TV alarm clock for 1030, technology is kick-ass, we get woken up by supermodels dressed in superfashion to the rhythm of techno music on the Fashion Channel.

The gym had mirrors on the walls and we could see our progress for the first time since starting our program over here. We talk about the rows of arabs jerking off behind the mirrors as we exercise. Even though we both have done pretty good in the ‘get big’ department we are more focussed on the decline of our bodies in other areas (no not that area you fuckers!). But what the fuck..What are you gonna do when you’re human? You get old, you go bald, you get ugly, and you die. Fuck it.

After a workout we each take extended showers to totally scrape the scum and shit off our rusting chassies. Then get dressed in regular clothes for the first time in monts to sit next to window, 19 floors up, smoke Newports and drink vodka with Redbull from the minifridge (bingo). Noah makes an appropriate assessment of the beverage ”God DAMN this has gotta be the best fucking drink in the WORLD!”, at the moment I couldn’t agree more. This booze time is more than just a session in self-indulgence, it signifies the first relief we’ve had since showing up over here three months ago. Now I’m not going to say that we have the most stressful job on planet earth, or the most difficult, but for us it has gone pretty rough. The last time we were over here was during the big insurgency. T.S. Eliot in his epic poem the Wasteland wrote that ‘April is the cruelest month’ and in 2004 Iraq it really was. We had to do a lot of heinous things on a regular basis, going way above the line of duty for days and nights that stretched into weeks of what we would later look back on as 2 month of pretty much non-stop fighting. We were each out in the middle of nowhere supporting compounds that were undermanned and underequipped by 3rd world soldiers that will never see a penny of the money the US gov had to pay their county to get them to join our coalition. We frequently laugh about how the stress of the fighting, the shit conditions of this fucking country, the depleated uranium and industrial chemicals floating around in the air ground and water, the unchecked disease farm that are the Iraqi people, not to mention getting shot at and exploded etc.. have aged our bodies beyond our years. Well it has all aged our patience as well and right now, with the relentless attacks on the road that we travel multiple times every day, the inability of us to defeat the most prevalent threat of VBIEDs and roadside bombs, the continual stress of not knowing whether the car you are driving past right now is going to explode or just around the next turn waits 30 armed assholes waiting in ambush all coupled with our first hand experiences in watcing this shit happen and every day EVERY FUCKING DAY hearing about one of our friends getting killed or mangled has all basically left us at the end of our ropes. It is no exaggeration to say that we more often than not believe that we are not going to make it out of here alive. One of the major arguments posed to us when we told the guys we were not going to Dubai was “dude, you could die tomorrow, then what the fuck are you gonna do? You might as well spend $1000 a night at the Burj Al Arab and enjoy yourself before we come back here and get killed.” So even though we opted to steer a different course than Dubai this moment represents our celebration in our own way before we have to go back to Iraq and die.

We sit there talking and drinking. We watch eagle or hawk or falcon or whatever float above city.. not flapping just soaring and getting higher and higher with no effort. We get drunker and drunker and just let our stream of counsousness flow.. flow out.. like a river.. like a waterfall.. to cleanse our souls. To scrape our souls loose from all the shit too. The X-Files movie is on TV, the very beginning, caveman vs alien. I am both. I am both and I am each and I am the fight between them.

I call my state dept buddy ‘Bernardo’ (his name has been changed here to protect the innocent, and the guilty). He wants to hang. I ask him if he’s found the ‘eyes wide shut’ party yet here in Kuwait. This has been an ongoing quest for us in regards to this place. To give a little background information lemme start at the top.

First of all Kuwait is a dry country. That’s right, dry as in no alcohol, no alcohol whatsoever. Some people say they don’t trust somebody that doesn’t drink, what about a whole fucking country? The government type is monarchy with the Kuwaiti Royal Family running the show. Now of course, as in all countries over here, there is a very powerful Islamic Religious faction that influences a great deal of policy. This has caused a lot of fuck ups in the place despite the impending westernization due to media and commercial/consumerism. First of all, kinda like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic leaders in Kuwait push legislation towards more conservative fundamentalist ends. Women are not required to wear burkas but a lot do, women may not accompany any man who is not their brother or husband. If you get pulled over or pass through a checkpoint (some specifically for catching people on dates and stuff – like the date police) and you are a guy and there is a girl who is not your wife or sister in the car then she will be hauled off to jail. Jail for women in Kuwait basically equates to you are going to be gang raped. All forms of explicit sexuality or anything that could possibly cause sexual arousal are illegal. This is taken to such an extreme that even though there are American movies and magazines and CDs in the country (because everyone wants to read their People magazine and see what Paris Hilton did last week) all the images of boobs or butts or crotches that expose bulges or women posing in a seductive manner are scratched out with sandpaper or blacked out with a permanent marker. There must be this whole industry of scratching and marking over tits and ass, I imagine this huge sweatshop filled with hundreds of people all totally horny scratching and marking like mad with sexual frustration. Look out Kevin Bacon because dancing is illegal there too. Some more background on Kuwait is that it was one of the first countries in the Middle East to start serious exploitation of their oil. This means that they have a big head start on the other countries that are bigger, have larger populations, and have more natural resources. All water in Kuwait is imported. Now the Kuwaiti tribe was like the smallest and weakest for a long time. They got their ass kicked by everyone else in the Middle East throughout history until they eventually found themselves on the one piece of shit land that nobody else wanted (which is really saying something). As luck would have it they were sitting on some of the most vast oil reserves in the world but because they had been the whipping boys of the continent they were only really about looking out for themselves. All true kuwaiti citizens, from the kuwaiti tribe type thing, get a huge amount of money each year. This means that they don’t have to do any kind of work at all and still live in the lap of luxury. They all pursue advanced degrees (masters and doctorates) but these degrees are all in stuff like Islamic Studies. They are the only people allowed to own businesses or hold a professional position (lawyer, doctor) in Kuwait. Now no Kuwaitis work but they still want to have a country that works so they import a fuck heap of slave labor from India, Pakistan, Malaysia, China. They have these people do all the manual labor and lower class jobs, drive cabs, clean gutters, gardening, construction etc.. but they do not let them own their own companies. They also take their passports and visa paperwork away from them when they arrive in country so that they have no way to get out. It is not uncommon for female housemaids to be raped by their hosts. These women also turn up pregnant all the time and every single instance becomes a ‘suicide’ by ‘jumping out of a window’. Yeah right, they got raped and murdered and everyone fucking knows it.. its just like accepted. If a woman does try to run away from the place and she gets picked up by the cops, well use your imagination. So in a nutshell what you have in Kuwait is a country where alcohol, drugs, sex, and work are illegal which just creates a bunch of bored and frustrated fundamentalist muslims. Perfect right?

So when Bernardo and I were talking about the place when he first got there he was bummed out because there is no fun to have at all. I was like, ‘dude, people are people.. just because you get thrown in jail for talking to girls doesn’t mean that you stop feeling horny when you look at their hot bodies. Alcohol is illegal but you know every motherfucker drinks. These people have nothing to do and they are fucking rich as shit, there has to be like these ‘eyes wide shut’ parties with masks and palaces and tuxedoes and all kinds of fucked up shit going on. We agreed, and from that point it was his mission to find the ‘eyes wide shut’ party in Kuwait City. He said that he did have an opportunity to go to this island on yachts with a bunch of Kuwaitis but it got cancelled due to rainy weather. Outrage! So we agree to meet up for a few drinks when he gets away from the embassy.

At this point Noah and I are fucking BLOTTO. We jump out, exchange some money, walk for a few miles and look in every sunglasses store for the new hotness. Then the last drink really hits and we just walk for miles in a daze, drunk as shit, talking to passersby, street merchants, looking for a safe place to piss where we wont get caught (they cut your dick off if they catch you pissing on the street). Finally we find a safe alleyway and while I finish up with a snapshot of the mailboxes I pissed on Noah finds a watch salesman selling cheap casio digitals from 1981 and fake rolex that tells us about good restaurant..

We find the place an Indian restaurant and nobody speaks English. I give 4kd (about 12 bucks) and make hand motions to show eating and somehow the guy gets the idea… BIGTIME! We eat a huge salad, 4 chickens, 6 indian flaky tortilla burrito thingys, a bowl of curry spice soup sauce stuff (that they refill after we drain it) 2 mega bowls of rice, another set of fried chicken pieces, they would have brought us food all night if we didn’t do something. I told Noah to pay a 2kd tip and tell them no more.. no more.. we had too much too much too much. we just ran outta the store drunk, stuffed, and lost in a country that is like a G rated movie where they kill people.

Pissing our pants again becomes a painful possibility as we run all the way back to the hotel. Noah complains about his scarred bladder and somehow we get separated. I end up in a street squabble between security and 15 indian dudes who want to walk through a parking area that is closed down for some kind of tree-cutting or some shit. For a second I am the fucking hero when the crowd cheers as I ask if I can cut through because I have to piss. My drunken spasmodic hand gestures here must have really closed the case because none of these fucks spoke a word of Englo but they all back off slowly as I come forward with rabid kung-fu communications. I feel my bladder shoot lazerbeams down my pantlegs. I have to piss on a profound level that transcends the need to eat, find shelter, or fuck. I end up just running away at the moment of climax while the people sigh with disappointment. I make it back to the hotel room just in time to see Noah finishing up out the window.

We are idiots!! We left all the bottles of vodka out but nobody confiscated nothing! (excellent).. the workers wiped everything down, brought more redbulls, cleaned the whole place up, made our beds, brought nice clean new glasses, filled up the ice bucket, left mints on the beds.. booze is fucking illegal you assholes, duty free illegal. From this point on the entire staff will continually ask us every time we pass by if we need more ice with a creepy snicker.

We start back in with the booze and now that we’ve munched and have time to kill before Bernardo calls we go full power. Noah starts a rant and I finish it, I slam a hard drink and Noah laughs and says I’m a bitch then chokes a hard swig and I make fun. I start complaining about Iraq and he complains in agreement about how fucked up the US Army does shit. When I start to go insane and rant or go off on my brain trips and stare off at nothing for extended periods noah puts the headphones to his ipod in my ears and blasts me some techno. When he starts getting moody or argumentative about the fucked up shit in Iraq or the army or our job I just pass the ipod back and pour him another drink. We get on the internet but can’t even see the screen clearly. Email from Lorcan back in the raq, one psd shredded by big army, another by a VBIED. I go off on a rant amidst an insane conversation, the meat of which I have pieced together here:

Noah ‘It’s like a fucking psd a day back there, a psd a day!’

Me ‘A fucking psd a day back there.. I don’t think were gonna make it out of here alive.. I need a backrub from a hooker asap.. I need a backrub and then im gonna get wasted on crack and glue, and then im gonna pay 12 indian dudes to kick the fuck out of me and leave me for shit.. im gonna tell those fuckers that if I can get up and get help then im gonna come back and kill every last one of then and because I look like a gorilla on pcp they know ill fucking do it. I wanna suck gutter, I wanna feel just barely alive so maybe these last few minutes will mean more, I wanna know that when I am gone that I knew what it felt like, that I felt. I wanna know that I can still feel, right fucking now, pain, and a lot of it. Inhuman amounts of it. More than the newspapers and the television stations can freak out about. Murder, mass-murder, serial killings, genocide, extermination. I want to exterminate my soul right fucking now, and I don’t want to think about it when I’m done. Exterminate my soul and my body and my brain and the whole fucking world. Snuff it all out like a cigarette.. I think im gonna be sick.’

Noah ‘Dude, we’ve been signing into everything as Leroy and Beau.. man homie.. we’re fucked up.’

Me ‘I can feel myself getting left-handed.’

Noah ‘Pour me a dring homie.’

Me ‘I just poured the last one.’

Noah ‘Look, ive been babying you for the last 18 hours’

Me ‘What?’

Noah ‘Pampering!!’

Me ‘What!?’

Noah ‘Yeah, ive been pampering you for the last 18 hours!’

Me ‘No.’

Noah ‘Yeah.’

Me ‘Why is my face so hot?’

(we both start laughing hysterically)

We have the hotel call a cab for us to get to Bernardo’s place. We are beyond drunk and our driver (name and card in photo at right) an Egyptian from Cairo goes on a bitch session about how the Kuwaitis are totally lazy and only just drive their cabs up and down the street and hang out they don’t actually pick people up and give them rides. Then we get hit by a panic when we can’t remember where Bernardo’s place was… it was either Shamiya or Salmia and when the driver says the names I can’t even tell one from the other. I use the drivers cell fone to call and confirm and we get there in the end. (3kd-ride 1kd-cellfone call).

Bernardo is glad to see us. Offers us beer and bacon right off the bat (yeah, all pork products are illegal in Kuwait too). He’s a press attaché at the embassy except his boss and the 3 dudes he had working for him all quit so he basically runs the place now. Good gig for a single guy looking to discover the seedy underbelly of Kuwait City, unfortunately he has been slack in the quest. He gets a few beers in him and goes on the funniest fucking rants about the bullshit at the embassy. Tells us about how the wife of the ambassador wants to have a press announcement about her tea party with other US heads of state wives and shit meanwhile he is trying to get everything square for Ronnie Dumsfeld’s visit on the same day; I guess the us ambassador to Kuwait is a total moron. There are muslim extremists plotting us destruction in the area, there are big politics with oil and the sourcing of us forces with Kuwaiti oil, and this fucker wants to have his staffers sit around all day printing out 3×5 briefing cards in 14 point doublespaced text so that he knows exactly what he is supposed to say in his meetings. I think the way Bernardo explained it was better but you get the idea.

We slay a case of beer. Bernardo explain significance of beer in Kuwait. I guess even though all alcohol is illegal, liquor is much much much easier to get than beer. So he invited some people over and was like, ‘hey, anyone want a beer?’ like it was fucking nothing and they shit their fucking pants. We sobered up on the drive a little bit, but with all the laughing and story telling and ranting it just fuels our thirst. We get completely fucking wasted. Noah is talking incoherently and starts threatening us with ‘the chop’ if we don’t get more drunk with him right away. He later described his actions like he was just watching his body say these things and do stuff but he had no control or choice in any of it. He was just kind of a passive observer watching his body move and his mouth open and all this crazy drunken bullshit come out that he couldn’t even understand and then watch Bernardo and I look at him and then each other with these like ‘what the fuck’ looks then go back to talking. We sing along to bad religion and social d, talk about the stinky arabs and how they are thieves and liars, talk about us losing the war in iraq and the elections, talk about oil and mideast politics in general, swap stories about places where you can take your girlfriend and get 5 star service for like 10 dollars a week. Basically just go off. Noah passes out on the couch with a violent grunt and I have Bernardo call us a cab.

The cabbie helps me get Noah into the car and then gives him a smoke which Noah puffs on for 2 secs then throws on the floor of the taxi with a maniacal grin. I haul Noah up to the front door of the hotel in a drunken stumble. The bottom floor of the place is basically a huge open glass area. I can see about 25 rich looking arabs sitting in the reception area of the hotel and I give Noah a quick pep talk about us pulling it together so that we don’t get blackballed for rolling in like 2 bull elephants on a rampage. The plan goes to total shit. In retrospect this can be attributed to several important factors; 1) neither one of us can even fucking stand at this point. 2) everyone in the hotel was already watching us flop around outside like 2 fish out of water, pointing, laughing, and making a joke about the giant white assholes acting like Americans drunk in their non-alcoholic country. 3) I start dry-heaving then ending it with a meaty burp every few seconds and everybody knows that you can’t pretend like everything is fine when you are .9 seconds away from puking your life away.

The whole place is a blur of extravagance. A twisting vortex of polished metal, beveled glass, lights and mirrors and plastic flowers and strange dialects and I can feel my mind starting to spin out of control. We hack and slash our way through the vertigo with machetes, drunkenly stumbling our way through a jungle of color and incomprehensible images and sounds that flash momentarily in front of us like an insane slideshow. We finally make it through to our room and I promptly puke my guts out in the sink. Noah comes back to life and hangs over behind me while I puke telling me that I need to floss my teeth more as he points at the larger chunks.. ‘have you ever seen the meaty chunks that you pull out of your teeth after a meal.. have you ever fucking seen them’. I then sit down to take a shit while noah pisses in the shower and we try to figure out how we got so fucked up while the sink starts to overflow from when noah turned the water on to wash 34 pounds of regurgitated Indian food down the drain. I finish up and stumble back in the room only to find noah curled up in a ball in the corner babbling incoherently. I drag him up, across the room, throw him in his bed, pull his shoes off for him and then slump over and lay down on my bed. He comes back to life again and throws his shirt at me calling me a fucker, I quickly pick it up and huck it back but I totally miss and it goes flying across the room and somehow sticks to the fucking wall 10 feet up right next to the ceiling. With a puzzled look of utter astonishment I pass out.

I wake up, the room is freezing cold the windows were left open and icy air is whirling everywhere. I am under my blankets but just barely, I am laying on top of something hard. I reach up eyes still closed, brain still asleep and drunk, to see what it is. It’s a foot. I give it a squeeze and hear a muffled groan come from the far other end of the bed. Noah is in my fucking bed with me, under the covers, flipped around 180 so our feet are right on our faces. What the fuck!? Completely confused and too tired to figure it out I roll over and try go back to sleep. A few moments later I wake up to noah kicking around, moaning and muttering to himself. I can hear his discovery of the fucked up sleeping conditions by a groggy ‘what.. the.. fuck’ I roll over.

Me – Dude, what are you doing in my bed?

N – What.. the.. fuck.. (this time even more confused)

Me – Do you remember crawling into bed with me? Why did you do that?

N – Dude, I don’t remember doing it. I don’t remember anything.

(we both start laughing)

Me – dude, you crawled into fucking bed with me last night flipped around 180.

N – I don’t remember.

Me – I’m just glad you had your fucking pants on, we were in like sixty-nine position.

(we start laughing again then noah stops in confusion)

N – What the fuck is that (noah sees his shirt sticking to the wall 10 feet up next to the ceiling where it is still mysteriously hanging)

Me – That’s your shirt, dude.

N – What.. the.. fuck..

Me – Dude, I don’t know.

N – We were fucking foot snugglin’

Me – I know dude, like totally snugglin right up on each others feet flipped around 180 in bed.

So after breakfast we lay in bed, our own beds, for a few hours fucking around on our computers and drinking water while the liquor works it way out of our systems in a kind of daze. The hotel workers come in and totally take care of everything in the room all around us as we lay there clicking away. We have these little 1% communication discussions with the hotel staff as they flurry around the room folding up newspapers and wiping up spills. Like nobody is really paying any attention to each other and we don’t even speak the same language as each other but just by pre-programming and chance some of the stuff we are saying sounds like real words with real meanings to the other person even though they really don’t.

Hotel worker 1 to hotel worker 2: ‘brap brap brap brap’

Hotel worker 2 to hotel worker 1: ‘brap brap brap brap’

Me in a daze to hotel worker 1 ‘what did you say?’

Hotel worker 1 to me ‘brap brap brap brap’

Me in a daze to hotel worker 2 ‘adapter?’

Hotel worker 2 to me ‘thankyou sir’

Me in a daze to hotel worker 1 ‘thankyou sir’

Hotel worker 1 to me ‘thankyou sir’

(pointing at me) Noah from out of left field to hotel worker 2 ‘he puked in the sink last night’

Hotel worker 2 to noah ‘thankyou sir’

Noah from out of left field to hotel worker 1 ‘adapter?’

Hotel worker 2 to me‘brap brap brap brap’

Me in a daze to hotel worker 2 ‘thankyou sir’

Unable to get our brains to start working properly we resign ourselves to getting completely fucking wasted beyond all recognition in the safe confines of our hotel room. I tried to hold out, I tried to wait until the evening before getting loaded, but Noah was relentless and started drinking hard and fast so of course I get dragged in and we go totally suicidal on the vodka. Most of the afternoon and evening is a blur of splotchy unclear memories.

Throwing fruit out the window, at each other.

Screaming and singing.

Noah smashing the lamp and the glass lampshade to smitherines.

Broken glass everywhere.

Me tearing the sheets and covers off a bed.

Hanging out the window.

Ravaging the mini-bar.

Being smothered under a mattress.

Drinking vodka as hard as possible from the bottle.

Incoherent ramblings and rabid emotional outbursts.

A slap fight.

A wrestling match.

A flurry of phone calls to the front desk to get aspirin and ice.

Blood on the curtains.

Puke and piss on the floor.

Basically imagine the opening scene of Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard has completely lost his shit in that Viet Nam hotel room. The two of us, debauched, moody, sleazy, recovering from combat fatigue, drunk and hung over, alienated, sweaty, aching, deliberately closed off to the outside world, isolated, spastic, bloody, lost. Our minds race like roller-coasters, like 2 sine waves that are out of sync, one man is high as the other is down and every other possible combination. Descending into a memory-free waste state with only each other to pull ourselves out of it, and somehow we manage to do it. There was only one photograph taken during this time and I will place it here, I think it probably summarizes our experiences better than all this stuff I’m typing.

Somewhere in the midst of the rampage I got on the old laptop and typed up some really .. well .. interesting stuff. Here is the unedited, uncensored, raw excerpt. (I thought very hard about deleting this completely because it makes me think that I am a complete psycho, but in the interest of science I finally forced myself to post it. In order to increase the fun level I recommend playing this song while reading the following excerpt [Dead Milkmen - I Dream of Jesus].

“”Drunk drunk durnk’

I was raised by a self defeating closet lesbo and a possessive hyper-controlling alcoholic.. like when I was a kid// l like when I didn’t even know any better and I remember something.. like I was at the base of the stairs.. I was like 4 or 45 years old o. by th4 wy this is back in pernsnnsylvania and you know tht people are just fukked up in pennsylvaniea. and I was assaying my prayers like now I lay me fodonw to sleep, play lthe lord my soul to keep … when I lie before I wake.. an d my dad was like NO MOTHERFUCKER!!!! *(exgaffeeration) THAT’S NOT HOW IT FOES. If I lie befor e I wake. And I didn’t kniw and better.. like that’s how I was toaught how to prayu and im was olnkyl doing what I was rtaugh as a fuckign 4or 5 year old.. and my mom was cascaresd and I was like ok.. well im jusr fonna pray from the beginnignand then I know ill focues really fiucking hard and I wiont mess up this tiem.. mi gfonna pray just right and then dad will eb reallt happy that I got the prayer rifght and im a good boy. Now I lay me down to sleep, pray the lord my soul to keep, when I lie before I wake (`^&%^%*^%n NO< THTS RWONG<)(E ROENFGGG RONG RGONG GROFNHVFFJFJ I ewrememeber rcring .. cryin g and then my ememory blacks out . . my mom was like ‘jim pleas3’ ‘jim. Please’ and I was totally fucked up, like I had no clue what the fuck was happening but I was praying wrong.. because my mom didn’t want me to say IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE .. I was praying wrong…l beccauce I am fucking siddartha and nobody wantedt o show me death.. the fucking horror of death,. Death. With a capito l : BIG DEATH and im praying rwong.. like were you drunk motherfucker.. like me right now.. like drunk and that’s yoru excuse.. fir being an aassshbole to your son.. I cant even tyeoepe. Andd I know that you are a fuck A FUCKING FFUCKCKGNQ !!!! I would never ever fucjkug ever.. even if I was frunk,… especuall y if I wansss fdrink like ringgnt nw.. like right now I klnow I have to hide away.. hite the fick away in this lkittle room with the doors licked so theat I don’t mess anyone else up like really ba.d.. ok.. ok.. ok..

Ok

Ok

I know that there is no fucking fgod..ther is no GOD BUT ut doesn’t matter.. because when you beclieve in god you cant pray wrong. You cant do it. Ther is no way to pray wrong because that is your inner monologue with the fucking univers.e . how the fuck can someoens say that your inner monologuye with the unbiverrse is FUCKING WRONG!!!!><! wko knows if I will ever get to be marred witlkh kids but . I think that if I just keep working towards tht goal that I will become a good person, that like,, like that.. but I will never make a kid feel bad about anything.. NEVER!!! those little fuckers can do stuff that most the time their stupid parents have no ficking clue that they can do.. I believe that there is unlimeited potentian and its being squandereddd by ficfkgin Assholes that tell their cilds that they are praying wrong.. who the fucking.. fuck.

(22 mimnute break while I try to wake noah back up because he is passed out druunk and we have to go out tonight somehow +++ (plus) I just finished off the 3 rd bottle of vodka (that makes 3 bottles in less than 48 hours) and we only have one bottle left and noah has it hidden somewhere and I don’t know where)

And

It

makes

me

think..

about jim Morrison.. and the doors and rhe END and the thing they called rock what used to be called Rock ‘n’ roll and how it all got swallowed up by decadence. And then there was like this revival sparked by the pommies.. that’s what Cornelius calls em, back in like early 70s like the new york dolls n iggy pop made it happen.. but you cant not say that elvis didn’t have something to do with it..and they went very far. That went too fucking far. It was articulate. It was expressed. Then it became self aware, which I think is the death of any movement… It became incestuous. The energy is gone. There is no longer a belief, just an act with no afterthought. NIHILISM. And I know the fucking dichotomy..l I know that there is no punk without an audience, there is no art without an audience, there is no humanity without an audience but they didn’t want to be fucking seen. They didn’t want to be fucking heard. They didn’t want to be fucking known. To know me is to kill me. But their clothes and their music and their message says LOOK AT ME AND DIE MOTEHRFUCKER!!! And you want to look.. into the void.. look into the fucking void. Listento the who and do a lot of drugs, or get fuckked out and forget where you came from.

[[*added afterwards as a ‘fun-fact’*]] Townsend wrote in 1965 “My personal motivation onstage is simple. It consists of a hate of every kind of pop music and a hate of everything our group has done…I don’t see any career ahead.” I have truly never been into the Who that much.. I’m not sure where that last part came from(?)

To let the soul of rock and roll that you actually once knew turn against you and sell you short just for a few more dollars, a few more pig skins, a few more duckets.. and the language is as antiquated as the empire, and every empire will fall. So smash you fucking GUItaR!! But still keep fighting like we want to lose, like this fucking war, like losing is cool, like getting killed is the height of fashion. Death and fashion and horror and sin. And we can’t get enough, but we have to keep trying. TOO MUCH IS ALMOST ENOUGH! Even though they chop off our heads we fight wars with hugs and good intentions. WE WILL LOVE YOU TO DEATH… culture is the real weapon, fuck the cost in lives. I see blue jeans going out not burkas coming in.. spell checker on Microsoft word © underlines ‘burka’ with a jagged red line. Even the computer knows the horror of a culture war. And we don’t care about oil or technology.. ONLY AMERICANS HAVE WALKED ON THE MOON. And when the oil goes dry they will have squanderedd their birthright on swimming pools and cadillacs. And we will claim the asteroid belt when we find 300 cubic tons of gold and plutonium and all the stuff dreams are made of. That’s where im gonna live. Out there. Out there with the rocks. They named those rocks after their gods. Out there on the asteroid belt on a planetoid made of gulf-war syndrome. My halo is the rings of SATURN .. and Saturn was the god of the FUCKING UNDERWORLD. On an asteroid made of conflict diamonds and aids medicine. Out there with all the extinct species and untold histories.. because all history is lies about the past written by FUCNKGIN ASSHOLES for OThewR FUCKING ASSHOLES and I’d rather COMMIT SUICIDE than let time or fate or nature TAKE MY LIFE FROM ME From my cold dead hands

So I don’t really know what to say about that little piece of heaven, but it makes an interresting read.

Some indeterminate period of time later Noah and I have recovered enough to try and get out of the room for a while. On the way out the door Noah reaches into his pocket and finds a chocolate covered matchbook and a chocolate covered USB drive. We have no fucking idea where the chocolate even came from. He licks the chocolate off the drive and it makes him hungry for more chocolate so he buys a Snickers at a small ghetto looking shop..

noah ‘dude, it’s a Snickers, but it doesn’t taste like a Snickers.’

me ‘huh?’

noah ‘It’s a Snickers but it’s not a Snickers man, don’t you GET IT!?!’

We hit up Bernardo ’s place one more time and probably outstay our welcome, stuff our faces at the local creperie because it reminded me of Paris. One of the posters on the wall describes the newest flavor crepe ‘Super Viagra’ it includes shrimp, squid, and crab on a crepe.. We also took part in the best tasting drink ever.. Lemon juice with mint! Its basically just lemon juice and mint all whipped up in a glass but the taste is super-good. After a horrible half-understood conversation with the taxi driver on the way back to the hotel, topics included:

Prostitutes / Escorts (where can we find them in every major Mid-East city, most importantly here and now)

Drugs (can this dude get his hands on some, how much, how fast)

Murder (are there any favors that we can do for him)

So yeah.. it sounds like we are hardened freaks at this point but we are really just milking the dude for fucked up details while we laughed our asses off in the back seat. We finally make it back to the hotel around 6am and crash out hard.

The next day we are ruined but victorious. It was Friday, the day of rest in the Mid-East, kinda like their Sunday. Everybody wakes up late, gathers in the parks and cafes and street corners. People talk about the week they have just finished and talk about the week they have to come. They consummate the solidarity of their lives in the fellowship of the common man. Their friends and neighbors. I like to think of this Friday in terms of the documentary of the 1974 heavyweight championship bout in Zaire between champion George Foreman and underdog challenger Muhammad Ali (When We Were Kings). After the fight and Ali is victorious he walks among the people of Zaire, in the towns and on the streets, he touches them and is their champion.. the peoples’ champion. There is for the first time visible a soft spoken quality to him since the hype and sp-ectacle of the championship fight had begun. A gentleness, a soft leadership and a glow. So this is what we did. At least a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than anyone for a million miles. We are white, we a dressed like Hollywood dirt-bags, and even though we speak English nobody here has the vocabulary to understand us. Our brains are fuzzy, reflexes slurred, expressions tired and our mannerisms are gentle and strange. So like Ali we walk among the people, in the malls and on the streets. At the restaurants and cafes. In the crowds and at the meeting places. We take pictures, form memories, watch people watching us. We are unique and mysterious and as we appreciate the gutters and the alleyways the locals look at them with us to see them as if for the first time. They crowd around and behind us and look at what we are looking at to see what the aliens see, to know what the aliens know.

The day quietly evolves into a reconciliation for all our indiscretions. We take inventory of injuries we can’t account for, piece together explanations for messes and broken things, go on an easter-egg hunt for buried possessions and memories alike. The news on tv screams death and violence in Baghdad and we know we have to go back tomorrow. The US and British embassies have now officially announced that the road to the Baghdad airport is impassable. Im-fucking-passable. We will be driving this route roughly another 50-70 times (each time being a down-and-back) in the next month and a half. This means a decrease in military convoys, a decrease in military security, and a tacit victory for the insurgents in the area. The most immediate effect will be the increase in attacks on private security personnel (who will be some of the only people on the roads), contractors, PSD teams.. us.

We shrug off the rest of the evening in our room, gathering ourselves together for what could be a very long day. Get on the internet, check email, try and figure out what the hell happened to us over the past several days. What the fuck did happen to us? Noah had an email from Marcella where she was like ‘dude, where the fuck have you been the last few days?’ and to the vodka’s credit it has mostly been lost in a black fog. When trying to piece together the chain of events for this page I kept asking Noah if he had any memory of some stuff that I wasn’t sure was a dream or really happened until in frustration he finally just says ‘dude, I blacked out for 2 days straight, I lost 2 fucking days and I can’t remember anything’.

We finally call it quits around 1am and get a couple hours sleep before waking up and going to the airport by 4. Another ride on the death bus, another day of military travel hell, and we make it back to Iraq just in time for dinner.

We go through a quick readjustment period where the stuff that we had become numb to pains us until we become reacclimated.

The next morning Noah is awakened by a mouse crawling on his face.

I come back from getting a fork at lunch and find a fly standing on the small brown island of chocolate syrup in my pre-stirred chocolate milk.

At dinner a fly repeatedly lands on Noah’s head over 25 times until I have to scare it away with a great deal of effort, Noah’s face in his hands emerges red and tired and it is clearly evident that he was close to losing it.

Noah is now the tail gunner on the team, an un-enviable postition. I have been promoted to C-2 (second in command) but now they tell me that even though I have added duties and responsibilities that I will not be paid any more than before. We have both come to agree that while the trip was good for us to get off the streets for a couple of days but that we are actually worse off now than we were before.