Happy Birthday, Susan.

     Can’t say it better than I did last year… Only now… even more is missing.

aka  Before It’s Over, I Have to Say Something

     I usually write a post on Veteran’s Day.  Last year, I couldn’t.  I’d watched a friend get shipped off and returned a few days later, and had quite a lot of subsequent conversation with him that left me dry.
     He had really high expectations of himself.  He went through his education and training with honors.  He knew where he wanted to be, what he wanted to do.  He’d planned his entire life around his career in the military, and everything was going to be okay.
     When he finally got to Iraq, however, anxiety took its toll.  Sent home, he felt like a failure, like he hadn’t lived up to the expectations his family had.  Though all of them were supportive, he felt that they didn’t, even couldn’t, understand.  
     More than that, even, he wanted the respect of the people with whom he’d served, and knew that he’d let them all down.

     Through the course of the conversation with him, I tried to put it in real-life terms, hoping he could get his perspective back.  I told him to think of it as a job, and nothing more. 
     It was a job he was trained to do, and, many times, trained through repetition.  His job, a lower management position, was to manage and train others, often by repetition, as well.  Sometimes, no amount of training can prepare you for the reality of the job.
     I explained that it was like going to McDonald’s and training to be a run the drive through, and being thrown into it busy as Hell on the first day.  Things will happen, mistakes will be made.  People will be upset at you.  Some will even hate you.  But you do the job until you either get better, or you’re laid off, or you quit.  At either of the last two points, you find another job.
     “But you know,” I told him.  “What you tried to do carried with it a lot more prestige than some crappy job flipping burgers, or even selling advertising a company who’ll never last two years.  You were part of something bigger than yourself, and went duty-bound into something that most people are terrified to even think about.  And that, right there, is why you haven’t lost anyone else’s respect.  Not even the guys you served with.”

     It’s one of the things I always enjoyed about Military.  Guys who worked together consider one another friends.  Sometimes, they only see each other in an aeon, but will still have a clandestine beer, perhaps even in silence for the friends they knew and lost.

     That fact was driven home for me even more over the next few months.  Pretty much all of my uncles were in the military, and I just never was cut out for it.  But I’ve worked with and around them in a civilian capacity for quite a while.
     In December last year, a few of them looked for me, found me, and all but twisted my arms.  “Mark, what?  Man, you were right there with us.  Get your ass out of that damn house!”
     I was going through a really rough time a year ago.  If it hadn’t been for them, I was so stressed I might never have left the house again.  I never really told them what was going on, and just took the opportunity to get away, to get out of Knoxville, even, if only for a little while.
     Almost exclusively, it was just a bunch of us sitting around in a hotel bar.  We told stupid stories about each other, making sure to exaggerate as much as possible, smoked cigars, bitched about politicians, drank copiously and laughed a lot.  And then, there was always the silent drink to the ones who weren’t there…
     Philip, Joe, Terry, JD, Nate, John, Larry, Joel, Paul, Tony, Dennis, Neal… and I know there are more, but I just can’t remember right now…  You guys don’t even know what you did for me.  And I thank you all.

     Those little road trips always ended the same.
     “It was great to see you again, man.  If you ever need anything, you give me a call.  I mean it!”
     There’s an unspoken rule of mine, and that is that I respect them too much to ever ask them for anything.

     To my surprise in January, “Mark, I’m shipping out for Afghanistan.  You fixed this Xbox for us, so, uh, we won’t need it, figured you’d want it?  And give me your address… we’re gonna send you some games when we get tired of them.”
     So now you know the root of my other time-waster / stress-reliever…

     And so, back to Lt. Cpl. Jared…

     Jared, you didn’t get to serve your entire time, but you were let out honorably.  You did your job as best you could, and I seriously think it was just bad timing.  But for all that worry, all that being down on yourself, and all that crazy shit you were thinking back then… look at how you’re doing now. 
     You’ve got everything together, just like I told you would. 😉

     And those people you crawled through mud and walked on sand with, even the ones you sat at a computer next to, or sat around all night in the barracks playing Xbox with, they are the salt of the earth.

     And I’ll guaran-damn-tee, after they’re back, given a little time, they’ll call you up and wanna go out for a beer…

     Jared … and everyone else … Happy Veterans’ Day, my friends.

     While the media keeps going off to castigate Fort Hood as a violent military installation, do remember that it houses nearly 50,000 people.  It’s less a Base than a medium-sized small town.  It’s also on the outskirts of the small city of Killeen, Texas.

     Please keep this in mind when you listen to this “bullshit” that Media keeps portraying about “so much violence in recent years.”  At least half of said violence has been caused by people who didn’t even belong there, much more in off-base apartments, etc. etc.  Its “record of violence” is miniscule when compared to “business as usual” in many average towns of the same size, so these assertions by Media — made because they have nothing REAL to report —  are becoming pretty ridiculous.

     In the meantime, for those who *have* the heart and soul that our media seems to lack…

     We watch.  We listen.  And we care.

     And I hope to hear from some people soon…

     Last night, there was a party I didn’t bother to attend, as I only seem to get in trouble when I hang out with them, anyway.  But, from most accounts, it was a pretty good party.
     Apparently, someone really liked a friend of mine, and instead of mentioning it, decided to be a wallflower, and wait until today to ask.
     “Would you have danced with me last night if I asked you to?”

     It’s been a long time, but  I remember girls asking things like that in high school.  They were young, hadn’t come into their own, and lacked the self-esteem to just walk up and say, “Hey, wanna dance?” “We should go out some time,” or “Here’s my phone number.”
     Even worse were the silly, self-doubting, unsure questions after “hanging out” somewhere.  Things like, “Would you have kissed me last night?”
     For me, even though I was the same age, the answer was always, “No.  You’re too young.”
     Honestly, that probably didn’t help their self-esteem either, but nobody’s ever called me on it, and I did try and explain myself.  Although I probably could have explained it better, I wasn’t trying to hurt their feelings.  It was just that, for a lot of reasons other than making out, I had very little in common with them, and I simply wasn’t interested.

     I think that’s pretty much how my friend felt this afternoon, when replying, “No, you’re not mature enough.”

     I certainly hope her answer didn’t hurt his little high-school-girl feelings.  I mean, with that much self-doubt and low self-esteem, a rejection like that might throw his damn-near-forty-years-old psyche directly into a mid-life crisis, thus destroying the mood for his Monday Manicure…

     Back in January, I was looking for an Xbox 360 and scouring and scraping to get one.  I got screwed around with tremendously, and with a lot of false leads, ended up without one.  Finally, thanks to Lt. Cpl. James who was shipping out to Afghanistan, I managed to get one.  I didn’t have games — only Uno — and he said prior to shipping out, he’d send me a few from home.  True to his word, he did.
     And thus, I ended up with Call of Duty: World at War (he’d said Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but hated World at War, and send me that instead).  And, of course, our friends decided to send me a lot of their old games, as well.  So I’ve ended up with quite a collection…
     Working in and around military for so long, I’ve met a lot of good people like that.  And getting back in touch with a lot of those guys has helped me get through some of the shit-in-my-head that’s been bugging me for so long.

     Last month, I came upon a weird opportunity, whereby I could basically “trade” my Xbox 360 Pro (the one with the 20-Gig hard drive) for an Xbox 360 Elite and not have to shell out any cash for the upgrade.  I jumped on that like white on rice.
     Unfortunately, even though it was new in the box, the damn thing red-ringed on me after two days.  Iit wasn’t a 2008 Holiday Bundle, but one built in July 2008, but still, yeah, yeah, my luck.  Fortunately, I called Microsoft, and they shipped me an empty box, which I dropped my Xbox in it and gave to the UPS guy.  They shipped it back in under a week!  The “bad” ones are so few and far between now that the repair center just rocks the party — especially given that they extended my Xbox Live account, to boot.

     Even though I enjoy playing a lot of different games on there, I still end up playing Uno.  This is especially true if I’ve been drinking so much that manual dexterity falters, something which happens quite a lot lately. It has the alternative positive effect of keeping me from blogging while smashed.

     Now, playing Uno should be pretty sedate, right?  It’s a relatively passive game, so you end up chatting a lot.  And if I turn on the Xbox Live Vision camera, then it’s always mildly amusing.
     “Dude, you’re that guy from Crank, aren’t you?  You the fuckin’ Transporter man?”
     “Ahh, no.  I’m just some old, psycho bald fucker.  At least that’s what someone I cared about told me in December.”
     “Ahh, man, you’re not old.  What are you, 25, 28?  Nah, whatever, man, you’re cool!”

     Some days, I admit it … I need that kind of validation, because I feel like a right-royal ass most of the time any more.  And I definitely feel old.  And I am bald.  And sometimes it’s nice to hear, “Nah, man, you’re alright.  That guy was an asshole,” because … sometimes, playing Uno, chatting becomes a bit of a chore.
     I mute, kick and block communications from an innordinate number of people… usually after I put up with their shit to critical mass and tell them exactly why they don’t deserve to have an Internet connection, and perhaps that they are the perfect argument as to why Abortions should stay legal.

     At around 5PM, the drunks start coming home from their UK pubs and acting like pricks.  At midnight, you start ending up with drunken Americans and Canadians.  By 3AM, the west coast of the US and Canada are purely lit, and they end up coming in with so much off-the-wall insanity that you end up having to jab a spork in your eyes and ears.
     When the asshats show up, it’s usually for one reason: To be disruptive pricks and attempt to garner some attention that they obviously didn’t get in whatever bar they were in.  I’m constantly amazed at how many otherwise introverted, perhaps even awkward, people go completely and totally insane over Xbox Live.  It is even *worse* than the way they act on the Internet alone.

     It seems Xbox Live also adds incontrovertible proof to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory… And as the link says, “Be glad for the anonymity; it’s why you still have teeth.”

     Although, I sure many do not…