August 1, 2013

I forgot that I have also read The Shining by Stephen King. So I have read more than just Dreamcatcher and Under The Dome. Just the clarify.

I did another two-minute plank this morning and then I went to work. Yesterday I had to transfer two movies to one of the theaters because those movies were in there but no one thought to transfer them. And I focused one movies. Today I didn't really have anything to do so I worked on my cross stitch and read. I started to read Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad but I was too tired for that. I just wanted to take a nap. So I took a break from reading and eventually started to read Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, which is a collection of short stories. I like short stories because they don't require as much commitment as a novel. It makes me want to read Kurt Vonnegut's short stories again. I might need to do that.

After work I had dinner and then went to visit the new volunteer kid. It was a good half-hour visit. The kid was a little upset because of Facebook drama. Some dude was mad at him but would only talk to him through a girl and the girl got annoyed with him because he was trying to find out why the dude was annoyed with him and she kept telling him to ask the dude. Who would only talk to him through the girl. Ridiculous, teenage, Facebook drama. Never in the history of the world has there been so many different ways to communicate with people, a lot of them instantaneous, yet the world still suffers from a lack of communication. The kid was telling me about all this and when we were at Sonic we were talking to the girl who works there that he likes and she gave him the unsolicited advice that he shouldn't hang out with this one guy. Who ended up being the same dude who is currently upset and refusing to talk to the kid. So it seems like the perfect opportunity to severe ties with that dude. I also had to tell the girl that the kid thought she was pretty because he kept saying it and she kept not hearing it so finally I told her for him because I got tired of the awkwardness.

When I got home from my visit I went over to hang out with my friend who got into town yesterday. He wanted to go out and he invited his sister along, telling her to hurry up and throw on a pair of jeans. Maybe half an hour later she was ready. But then my friend couldn't find his shoes. We eventually got out of the house.

We started at a basement bar with an Oklahoma acoustic dude singing too loud. He was good but I'm not a fan of loud music in bars. Bars and alcohol are meant to be social experiences yet the music is always far too loud so you end up having to shout at people the whole night. I don't get it. Whatever. At the bar we talked to an old movie theater manager, my friend's boyfriend, and eventually my friend for a little bit. Then we moved to another bar where the events were put into motion leading to our main adventure for the night.

While at this bar we talked to one of our old friends/coworkers for awhile which is always entertaining because he's a pretty outgoing, talkative dude. At some point when my friend was ordering drinks he noticed a napkin that someone had written a name on with a date and “KIA” but didn't think much of it. So we moved onto the bar across the street.

We started in the back area and right as we sat down it started to rain so we went back inside to the front area. We were sitting by the door and my friend and his sister were playing the Yes/No game with the people walking in. My friend's sister pointed at two dudes and hadn't said anything yet when one of the guys noticed us and started calling her out for pointing at him. He was wearing cutoff, mid-calf corduroys and Chucks and he thought my friend's sister was commenting on his outfit and he started posing which was pretty funny. Those guys ended up coming to the table and it eventually came out that the corduroy dude is an Air Force guy who goes into combat with Army guys to call in air strikes. And then he found out that my friend flies in the F-18 and talks to the dudes who call in air strikes. Instant best friends. But it was a love hate relationship because two of the corduroy dudes best friends were killed by a friendly-fire air strike. And danger-close air strikes have also saved corduroy dude's life several times so he was conflicted.

Throughout the night we learned that corduroy dude has been on three deployments, I think, first to Iraq, then two in Afghanistan, and soon he will be going back to Iraq. As the night went on we learned that his reason for going out tonight was that it was the anniversary of two of his buddies being killed, one to an IED right in front of him. And, corduroy dude had been the one who wrote the guy's name on the napkin at the other bar we were at. What are the odds?

As the drinking continued, the night got more depressing for the corduroy dude. He started the night as a pretty funny dude but he got progressively darker, losing the funny-guy demeanor and becoming more angry at the loss of his friends and all things he has seen overseas. And it was heartbreaking. It was a perfect example of why war is an awful thing that has actual human consequences. Guys in their ivory towers declare war for their own reasons, feeding the public a bunch of excuses, and then throw a bunch of kids in to fight it. Kids who rarely feel any sort of responsibility toward the guys in the ivory towers or their reasons for starting the war, but feel an extreme amount of loyalty and responsibility to their buddies so they keep going back, often ignoring what is in their own best interest. Whether that is personal safety or their own mental health. It is sad and disgusting and completely unacceptable. But people don't talk about that kind of thing. The news covers war in a broad sense, at most listing the number of deaths or casualties, but almost always ignoring all the dudes that come back (and inevitably keep going back over) that are completely destroyed inside. There are amputees that obviously suffered mental as well as physical trauma. And there are the guys who might not show any signs of physical injury, like the corduroy dude, but when you knock away that happy facade with too much alcohol you are left with a guy that has an insufficient number of coping skills to deal with the things he has seen and done and the friends he has lost. And most of those guys will never get help because mental illness is still perceived to be a weakness in the military community and even if it weren't, there aren't nearly enough resources to help everyone. And even if there were, things are experienced in war that leave people so emotionally scarred that no amount of help can ever fix those people. The human psyche is not capable of dealing with war and the horrendous things people can do to their fellow man, in a healthy way. We ran into another military dude who ended up talking the corduroy dude and saying that before he went over he used to be able to feel all of these emotions but now he couldn't feel anything. That is how the human body copes. There is no way to rationalize what these guys have to go through so the mind just turns everything off. In Iraq and Afghanistan we aren't preventing the imprisonment and slaughter of millions of people, which might be enough to justify being over there in the first place if that was happening, but we are creating thousands, if not millions of people if you include friends and family, who are going to be emotionally fucked up for the rest of their lives. While politicians sit around in their suits, doing their best to convince themselves and then general public that war still needs to be a thing. It makes me sick.

At the end of the night we went to Jimmy John's, and a fight nearly broke out because some dude was disrespecting a girl, which doesn't go over well with a bunch of drunk military guys (when they aren't the ones being disrespectful) but the cops and MPs came and all was good. My friend left his credit card at one of the bars so he wanted to go get it and everyone else wanted to go to the gas station for cigarettes. It was raining outside so my friend's sister and corduroy dude's friend ran to the gas station, followed by my friend's sister's friend. Corduroy dude was slower because he could barely walk at this point and he wanted to go to my friend but this asshole of a bouncer wouldn't let him in because it was after closing. We weren't even sure if my friend had gone into the bar or if he had gone to the gas station and the asshole bouncer wouldn't even tell us if he had seen someone walk by him into the bar, he just kept telling us to leave, acting like Billy Badass, standing behind this little outside bar. Corduroy dude was refusing to leave because he wanted to wait for my friend but I eventually got him to step back into the alley. And then he decided he had enough and planted his feet and refused to go anywhere when I told him we should check the gas station. Thankfully my friend called me at that moment and I handed the phone to corduroy dude to break him out of his trance. And all of this was happening in the rain so everyone was soaking wet at this point.

Eventually everyone was back together and I gave corduroy dude and his friend a ride home. But we left my friend's sister with her friend and my friend didn't want to do that because that friend is kind of a bad influence so he refused to go home without his sister. So we tracked her down finally and I got them home sometime after three o'clock. It turned out to be a much longer and more intense night than I had originally imagined. But I'm glad I didn't miss it.

Other things from last night. I learned that my friend's brother got a bronze star during his last deployment. He is a Marine and noticed that the only time the bad guys would come out was when a convoy hit an IED. So he came up with a tactic of faking an IED hit so they would be prepared for the enemy attack. But on the way to the fake IED, they struck a real IED and my friend's brother had to hold off the bad guys and call in air strikes and earn a bronze star.

I ran into a couple other guys from my high school class and learned that one of them is the DJ on the college radio station that has an all Irish music show every week. I have listened to that show before and really like it but the DJ annoys the crap out of me because he exaggerates all his words and drags them out and it's annoying. And now that makes a lot more sense, knowing the dude behind it. Not any less annoying but it makes sense.

A girl came up when I was talking to my other high school friend and she was acting a little hyped up and admitted to snorting a pixy stick on a dare. And my high school friend very seriously, in a sarcastic way, asked if she needed someone to get her cocaine. It was pretty funny. I also ran into another old friend from cub scouts and Boy Scouts and high school that is now a cop and he's married and has a kid and looks all official in his cop uniform. It is so strange.