Back From The Dead
I find it almost surreal, like a new chapter in a play that seems to be rewriting history as it goes along. I’m sure there will be a lot of acclaim and ridicule because of this insignificant sequence of events, in some circles the site has taken on somewhat mythic proportions. I have heard my name praised and condemned by friend and foe alike because of my ridiculous scrawling here. Truly I hope to reconnect with what I consider to be the more favorable virtues of the site before its downfall while avoiding in any way possible the negative results of maintaining this virtual underground newspaper. Believe me when I say that I have no delusions of grandeur here, but god-fucking-damn it… it feels good to launch this bitch again. In the spirit of the site as it was at its peak I will attempt to contribute a significant initial monologue here to inspire some excitement and controversy right from the start.
I have to truly say that the site embodied in my life more than just an opportunity to have a voice or some form of artistic expression. It was more like a continual event that became a mouthpiece to the kind of things that had shaken up my worldview and in varying degrees awaken me to what I would consider a deeper and more significant understanding of the intricacies of the cryptic nature of my experiences and environment. Kind of like an existential communist revolution in which I was continually challenging my thoughts and beliefs as a way of just keeping the ball rolling. Like being given the opportunity to play a character that asks the basic human questions “Who am I? Where do I come from? What does this mean?” In a way it’s like going right back to childhood where a group of children simply come into a room without toys and begin to play. I was learning how to think again.
The site was salvation to the many desperate and violent thoughts that wove themselves into my mind – thoughts that would merely have evaporated into the ether, lost forever, and with them any proof that I had truly thought them or felt the experiences that shaped them in the first place. All the while offering comfort in the release of these manic ideas so as to disentangle myself from their destructive effects.
Regardless, ’05 was a hell of a year. I will not go into excruciating detail except just to say that all the challenges faced, all the mistakes made, and all the pain felt only offered opportunity to define my character and hopefully come out stronger on the other end. How fucking cliché, somebody needs to kick the shit out of me immediately.
Most people I met thought there was something wrong with me. They didn’t say that but I could tell that that was what they thought. But, you see, what I think I experienced was for the first time in my life, to know what it means have a complete awareness of death. And strangely simultaneously to know what it feels like to be truly alive, because – they go hand in hand.
I remember always being exhausted in that period. I always felt weak, you know, I really didn’t know what was going on with me, and I would just get totally drunk, rage against newspaper dispensers, smash into walls, destroy relationships, and do nothing but write bullshit in this site, and I was always thinking about death.
Mercenary, god what a fucking crock of shit. It’s not easy, as some people seem to think. A guy told me in a bar that I was “living every man’s dream”. Well it’s all bullshit. You work hard, network, grease palms and give spineless and inappropriate complements, take dangerous jobs just to keep busy, and you are either a completely overworked burnout or nobody has work for you at all. You take up other lines of employ to try to make a living, teach shooting, write lesson plans, discuss tactics with inexperienced military types who spend most of their busy day polishing their unearned medals and their vast uncompromising egos. In the end it either works out or not based on the shifting tides of invisible forces over which you have seemingly no control. You just stick to the values instilled in your training, the spirit of the attack, do the right thing always, but in the end you just spend your days doing the errands of your trade. Today I had to be up by six in the morning to make some important phone calls back to the east coast. Then I’d gone to the stationery store to buy envelopes. Then to Kinko’s to transmit some faxes, there were dozens of things to do. By five o’clock I’d finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my resume, meanwhile checking constantly with my email and voice mail to see if my contracting agent had called with any work. In the morning, the mailbox had just been stuffed with bills and coupons.
When I got back from that last job early in ‘05 I lived like an an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music, sex and violence. By the end of the year all I was thinking about was money.
Anyway, the desert was pretty horrible. It was pretty hot. I was searching for something but I couldn’t tell if I was finding anything. The desperate struggles to stay alive, the meaningless battles to find purpose in my actions .. in my life. In other words, I didn’t know why I was there, I didn’t know what I was looking for, the entire thing seemed completely absurd, arid and empty. It was like a last chance or something and I had the distinct feeling that despite coming out of the whole thing alive, richer, and only really wounded in my mind, that I had squandered my opportunity.
In those days, I went completely on impulse. So on impulse I just kept doing what I was doing. Driving on with my airborne mission. And inevitably it all fell apart. I suppose on strange journeys that strange things happen but I was feeling all wrong. I mean, you know, I’d been to Afghanistan and Iraq, fought a thousand battles, and I had just felt like a tourist. I’d found nothing. It was like being in a William Blake world suddenly. Things were exploding. And I was finally faced with some of the consequences of my actions.
I got back from the New Orleans hurricane bullshit and that was really the last big event. I mean, that was the end. I mean, you know, I began to realize I just didn’t want to do these things any more, you know. I felt sort of numbed you know, like that chapter in Moby Dick where the wind goes out of the sails. My life had finally reached an impasse. Friends and family lost, girlfriend lost, job lost, money lost, mind lost. I woke up one morning and found myself in ruins. I thought I was a very cultivated man, an intellectual, an artist, an elite soldier, you know, so somehow the ordinary rules of life didn’t apply to me. Sometimes I really feel that everything I’ve done is horrific and yet I loved it.
You see, I’ve seen a lot of death in the last few years, and there’s one thing that’s for sure about death – you do it alone, that seems quite certain. That the people around your hospital bed mean nothing, the people fighting next to you mean nothing, your accomplishments mean nothing, your beliefs mean nothing. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that fighting for your bro next to you doesn’t matter – quite the contrary actually, but when it comes to death, whatever it is, you do it alone. And so the question is, when I get snuffed out, what kind of a person am I going to be, and I’m just very dubious about the kind of person who would have lived his life those last few years the way I did. I don’t want my greatness to be defined by the number of men I’ve killed.
Having been inexorably altered by things that I couldn’t understand I felt alienated, isolated, like an outsider. I have dinner with an old friend and they talk about sports and the weather and their family (endlessly) and the whole time I’m thinking ‘god, what a phony, god what a stuffed shirt – pompous asshole’ and feeling as though through time and divergent experiences that I had lost another friend. And then after he had gone I went home and turned the television on, and there was this disgusting fat woman who had just won a bunch of cash on one of those fucking shows, you know, some reality t.v. thing, some kind of great big check. And she couldn’t get the check between her legs and pretend she was riding a horse because she was too fat. She wasn’t even listening to the announcer or her friends and family, she was just trying to soak up the experience like it was the crowning moment in her pathetic life. And I looked at that disgusting fat woman and I thought “What a horrible, empty, skag” Then I thought “That bitch is me” and I suddenly had this feeling, I was just as creepy as she was. And that my whole life had been a sham, and I didn’t have the guts to challenge myself either. There is this saying in the teams “the comfort zone is the kill zone” meaning that without continually challenging yourself that you are becoming weaker and more apt to be killed by the enemy. I need to get out of my comfort zone.
I look around when I first get back from these trips, you know, when the vivid flavor of life and death is still fresh in my mouth, and I see a surreal world that exists from birth to burial in the comfort zone. People washing cars, walking dogs, drinking soda through a straw, complaining about politics, arguing about religion. They can’t see me, they can’t see what I’m seeing. My old friend couldn’t see it. People in my home town couldn’t see it. I mean, they were just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we’re all in a trance. We’re walking around like zombies. I don’t think we’re even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things, we’re just going around all day like unconscious machines. Unaware of our feelings or reactions because somehow in our social existence today we’re only allowed to express our feelings weirdly and indirectly. If you express them directly everybody goes berserk. I’m guilty of it too. Sometimes I don’t even know what I feel until I think about it later. And I mean, in most situations even if I had known what I felt, I might say something, if I’m really fired up, like “oh, yeah. Well, that’s interesting” and then laugh.
We can’t be direct so we end up saying the weirdest things. I mean, I remember a night, it was a couple of weeks after Dingo had killed himself, and I was kind of bummed out about it. And I got together with some old buddies overseas and we went to the chow hall. These guys, two of whom had known Dingo really well, and all three of whom had known me for a couple years. You know that we went through that entire evening without for a moment getting anywhere near, not that I wanted to sit and have this dreary evening in which we were talking about all this pain and everything. Really, not at all, but the fact that nobody could say “damn, what a shame about old Dingo.” It was just as if nothing had happened, like “hey, you guys heard about Dingo? Haha, yeah what a pussy, I would never kill myself – that shit is for fucking pussies that can’t handle shit”. They were all making these jokes and laughing. I got pissed off and ended up telling some random story about this time Dingo got drunk and made an ass out of himself and I was his boss at the time and I had to totally dress him down. And later, when I got back to my rack, I realized I had just been trying to break through this ice.
But in a sense those are typical evenings. I mean, we go out to dinner, and go to parties like that all the time. These evenings are really like sort of sickly dreams, because people are talking in symbols. Everyone’s sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings. No one says what they’re really thinking about. Then people start making these jokes, that are really some sort of secret code. And what often happens at some of these evenings is that these really crazy little fantasies will just start being played with, you know, and everybody will be talking at once, and sort of saying “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if Carlos Hathcott and Richard Marcinko blah-blah-blah were in such-and-such a situation,” you know, always with famous people and always sort of grotesque? Or people will be talking about some fucked up thing like, like the disappearance/death of Chandra Levy, and what they think happened between her and Gary Condit, and they’ll just be laughing their asses off. It’s kind of unbelievable, that’s the only way anything is expressed, through these completely insane jokes. I mean, I think that’s why I never understand what’s going on at a party, and I’m always completely confused. Since I’m always gone I’m completely missing the context, the indescribable essence of the never-spoken nuances that everyone else totally takes for granted I haven’t been around to absorb. Because the parties themselves become the focal discussion of the following party in some kind of self-perpetuating lifestyle that has no real substance. It almost seems at times like people are acting out what they perceive to be the image of themselves and not just being themselves.
And yet we have these reality t.v. shows that are just taking over the fucking planet. Those shows are just so bizarre because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really doing in life, even though by performing these roles all the time we’re just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. It feels like we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know even about our supposedly closest friends. Suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would like to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don’t dare to ask each other. It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.
It seems like we just put no value at all on perceiving reality. I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our bullshit careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn’t matter what you perceive, or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way. You can sort of turn on the auto-pilot. Our minds are just focused on these goals and plans. Which in themselves are not reality, they’re fantasy. They’re part of a dream life. It always just does seem so ridiculous somehow that everybody has to have his little goal in life. I mean, it’s so absurd, in a way. When you consider that it doesn’t matter which one it is. And because people’s concentration is on their goals, in their life they just live each moment by habit. Life becomes habitual and very few things happen now that cause shit to go totally crazy. And if you’re just operating by habit, then you’re not really living.
Comfort just separates you from reality in a very direct way. If you don’t have money to pay the rent, and you are about to be kicked out of your apartment, and you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, well then you know that you’re busted. And depending on how you react it starts this whole chain reaction. Like if you could just call daddy and a million bucks appears it’s like taking a tranquilizer, it’s like being lobotomized by watching television. I think you enter the dream world again. I mean, what does it do to us living in an environment where something as massive as the seasons or winter or cold or darkness don’t in any way affect us? I mean, we’re hairless apes for fuck’s sake. I mean, what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the sky and the stars we’re living in a fantasy world of our own making.
I think that maybe we’re all starving, we’re having this great, comfortable time, and meanwhile we’re starving because we’re so cut off from contact with reality that we’re not getting any real sustenance. Because we don’t see the world. We don’t see ourselves. We don’t see how our actions affect other people. Maybe that’s why there is such a hunger for violence on t.v. and sex in movies. Maybe we just need this injection of raw experience because we’re all just bored. Just totally fucking bored. And it’s not just a question of individual survival, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep wont say “no”? Mindless consumers of goods to make themselves more comfortable, more asleep. There was a time when I wouldn’t get cable – just watch movies on my t.v. because I can’t fucking stand commercials. And everybody knows that the news is total and complete bullshit. Well what if everything that you hear these days contributes to turning you into a robot. What if San Diego is just a prison paradise built by the inmates themselves where we all exist in a state of split-personality both inmate and guard. And because of this people no longer have the ability to escape the prison or even see it as a prison at all, in fact they are proud of their creation.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Related posts:
