Confessions of a Starving Artist

“Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.”  - Carl Sandburg

With the advent of Drrt-Migerk, aka lil’ sister shotgun, from my abode, things have returned to normal; my time is once again maximized to the point of surgically removing moments from hours to make time for the necessary, which is unfortunately anything but.  Namely studying French, hitting the gym, and playing soccer and HALO2 as the boys have found it prudent that both should become near team events that meet on specific times during the week.  Women are all but ridden out of my timeline as it simply is impractical to think otherwise.  I carry whatever book it is that I am reading in the cargo pocket of my uniform so that if given a spare moment here and there I may have it accessible at all times.  Even now, I’m typing this piece-meal during ten-minute breaks in class… because that’s how much I care about you, constant reader.

What is most unfortunate is that the hits keep coming.  Saturdays have been days of work for the past several weekends leaving me one-day weekends; even Jesus needs more than just a simple day of rest, I’m sure.  The DLPT, or simply, The French Test, has been pushed forward as has been the OPI, the French speaking exam, which both terrifies and motivates me to all ends.  Moreover, even the completion of language with the successful passing of the DLPT (Inchaallah…) doesn’t offer any sort of reprieve.  Almost immediately following a successful outcome of Language Phase, I will enter into an all-encompassing CULMEX for the next twenty-four days.  The end is in sight, and yet, it isn’t.

Meanwhile someone, I do not know for whom this is responsible, has seen fit to give us a much needed break, though it couldn’t come at a more than inopportune time.  As it is one of my favorite holidays of the entire year, The Fourth of July, I was originally very disheartened to see that it fell on a Wednesday this year, meaning that we military folks would be receiving only that single day off for the holiday as opposed to the usual four day holiday weekend often reserved for events worthy of extreme military celebration such as Memorial Day and Super Bowl Weekend.  However the gods be crazy, it has been deemed fit for us to not only have that Wednesday off but also that Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday; we have to ‘work’ on Thursday.  While I was not expecting an full weekend, let alone a long weekend, anytime in the months of May thru August, I will not be one to stare this gift horse in the puckered mouth.  If anyone needs me I’ll be in Chicago for the four-day.  Cheers.  I’ll be doing my best to take some time off, but I should probably find a way to incorporate French into my visit to the Windy City. 

I have to keep reminding myself that this crazy merry-go-round is not the end all.  I’ve been in “the school house” for far far longer than anyone should be.  Roughly half of my five years in the Army has been banished in TRADOC and now SWTC, and I can say without equivocation that the vast majority of my development has occurred outside of the “learning environment“.  I find myself near daily reminding myself that there is a “real Army” out there and that soon I will return to it, as nerve racking as that immersion/re-immersion is.  Still, it is very much of that time.

It is no secret that the 82nd Airborne Division completely deployed to the Iraqi theater, nor is it less than common knowledge that across the board they are taking a significant amount of contact in their respective AOs as well as heavy causalities.  While disheartening and unfortunate for my brothers in arms, I have my own opinions on the Officer Corps of the 82nd as well as the way they ‘do business’ (we’ll leave it at that) so I am not horribly surprised; that as well as the acute adaptive nature of the enemy compared to our lumbering military and political bureaucracy.  The point being is that the first BCTs are returning to Fort Bragg late this summer.  The streets will be rue with young tanned (horny) pip-squeak paratroopers who have just returned from a tour with war stories and ego.  Of course that’s the worst case; many, as I was, will be humble just to be home, wide eyed and with a strange new level of understanding… nonetheless, horny.

Its been almost two years since I my first and only deployment dropped me off in Colorado Springs, and ironically, this forum was originated.  Two years of dwell-time is too much when there is a war going on, especially for one who is pushing himself to join more elite ranks to further make a difference.  It seems counter-productive; in order to join the unit that makes the most difference on the ground, one must first remove himself from the fight, effectively not making any difference at all, for more than a year.  Counter-productive and frustrating.

Yesterday I was in the Commissary around 1500 hrs shopping for my dinner.  I was still in uniform as I had just gotten out of language class, yet strolling around the Commissary before COB (close of business) while it is not looked upon as ’shady’, it is however looked upon as dubious.  The isles were filled with Army wives, most with children, some terribly pregnant from a prior-to-deployment baby-making session (or series of sessions as is more likely the case), as well as old retirees.  The only other people of military age that were in the entire store were those soldiers who seemed broken, older, or members of the one unit here who just returned from a deployment.  These men are easy to spot, not only by their very distinctive patch (the patch is of unit I will be going to), but also because they still hold a dull luster in their eyes when they look at you, as if the world that they are now in is not the real one, and their glace seems to say: you poor man of the gun… I can’t explain to you what is and isn’t, but I have seen it.  So what’s the point in trying…  I felt like a deserter, a shirker, but I know that I am not.  I am only ‘punching my ticket’.  Still, it doesn’t change nagging voices in my head.

Soon there will be an entire division of soldiers in Fayetteville with that look in there eyes.  And while a bad day in Baghdad or Sadr City or Samara is hell, it is niether kith nor kin to Ramadi; I have nothing in my eyes to respond to these men who’s minds will be so uncertain, so changed.  My eyes gleam again, but I still know.  

Part of me says that I need a vacation, and that Chicago will be perfect despite its poor timing.  And another part of me agrees.  However, there is a very loud part of me that says that I need a much larger and significantly different type of vacation: a sabatical to the sandbox. 

Chicago   by Carl Sandburg

My liver is clean and my helmet is strong; I am ready for a family visit!

For the first time since changing timezones, I will have a relative coming to visit me!  Hell, I think this is the first time in the last six time zone changes, three continents, and five years that someone has come to visit me, but hey, who’s counting?  Even though the only real cleaning up that I have done was during my lunch break today, I can’t help but feel like I’m down playing this all just a little bit.  After all, my sister, the one who goes by the loving nick-name of “Drrty” back in the upper mountains of Western Maine, is a bit of a homebody… or cheap-skate, which ever will do ya.  Getting her down to Portland or Boston is a bit of a task, so one can just imagine what a pain in the ass it must be to get her out of New England!  I think she gets that from my dad…  At anyrate, I’ve got a few things lined up that are centric to the area, and while the house isn’t quiet where I wanted it to be for a first impression, it will have to do.  The back yard is at about a 65% solution, I just put up new curtains in the dining room, and the bathrooms freshly smelling of orange scented cleaner as of this afternoon.  All in all, I think that’s ahead of what most families would do for each other.

The final phone call this morning at 0630 hrs was actually quite funny.  I reminded her that there was absolutely zero hair-care products in the house (unless she counted razors), and she wanted to know if there was room for two suitcases in a Thunderbird convertable.  I said, not if you want to fit two people in the car as well.  Then I asked her to bring me some Dunkin’ Donuts coffee… I’ve come to find that brand of coffee is unmatched by any other corporate chain.  The unfortunate part is that I find this out after I have left it’s regional boundries.  C’est la vie.  Further unforunate that Moxie would burst at high altitudes or I would have asked for some of that little sip of heaven as well…. for those of you from ‘away’, Moxie is a soda… or pop… or coke… or whatever your geographical venacular gives way to.

So for the next few days we’ll see what dreams my come.  My long-term free-loader house-guest / hetrosexual life partner, Dan, has gone back home to Alexandria for the weekend to knock around some ass in our nation’s capital, which is something I support fully as our constant aquiring of female breakfast partners helps negate the possible image that we are the new gay couple on the block.  I mean, two well-dressed, handsome, intellegent, worldly wine-drinking men living in the same house?  Trust me, in the South, there is an image issue.  So the both of us being reputed man-whores keeps it real.  Regardless, Drrty and I get the run of the town as well as the roost.  Come next Wednesday or so, I’d expect a full readout of the weekend’s events.  In the meantime, if you haven’t seen this, there is something to keep you all entertained.  Sainte! 

 ”I got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind / I’m just twenty-two and I don’t mind dyin’…”  - George Therogood

Earlier this week I purchased my first piece of original artwork. It is a large oil-on-canvas of a rose bloom, full and red. As far as art goes, I’m not one for what is cheap and what is expensive. The piece could be something from Target’s corporate gallery of prints or from the Cincinnati Conservatory; I’m far more concerned with the pieces’ ability to speak to me. The rose seemed to speak to me (not unlike Roland of Gilead), and I find it very apropos that I will hang it over my bed once it is framed sometime early next week.

That’s not the point. The texture of this story rolls more into the actual purchase. I went to the gallery shortly after it openned on a Tuesday. It was around 11ish, I suppose. Naturally, the only people in the gallery was the owner and the owner of the gallery next door; a rather effeminate and intelligent black man in his early fifties, and a matronly southern (and wealthy, I later found out) white woman who was in her late fourties. Conversation with those who concern themselves with art is usually very easy as most of the world of the artist is subjective at its very nature. More often than not the rapport begins very mundane, but after only a brief testing of the waters of what can be said and what can be voiced with a level of comprehension equal to collection, the subject matter often becomes as close as old friends between complete strangers. The great thing is that those who survive the initial incounter and are vetted into the world of the intellectual are free to discuss with a level of candid nature all manner of things that may be considered to be politically incorrect in more mixed company. All manner of things save, perhaps, their personally crafted art… but that’s pretty easy to avoid, honestly.

I drowned the better part of three hours in there with these folks. The discourse didn’t take long to settle on; the hardship of being in your late twenties and turning thirty. I found it interesting, though not surprising that both of these people said that turning thirty was the worst. Forty they claimed good, fifty was better. From my own standpoint, I’m not exactly enjoying this blocked out portion of my life, not so much as others, and I would be inclined to take their word on the furture decades. I’m in no hurry though, but I understand their points, as I echoed them in turn. True, the bullshit of trying to figure out yourself, your place, and your friends; all that concluded in your early twenties, and what’s more, any mistakes that you feel that you can’t live with (ie the starter marriage, the bad job, not finished school, etc) youth has figured a way to wriggle its way out of by will or by nil. However, thirty seems to be that major fork in the road in which, we three seemed to agree, lay three general paths: one can become family-oriented, job-oriented, or they can degenerate back into their twenties hang onto that as long as possible.

These are generalities. But we all know the types, and the interactions between the three as well as the downsides of choosing each. The Family Man sees his job as second to his family; a support mechanism at worst, a passion at best, but never his life - that belongs to his family. He is a humble father and lover. Unfortunately, they don’t typically ‘hang out’ once the baby inevitably comes, and some look up sometime in their late fourties only to realize youth was traded for raising youth. On the other hand, you have the man who chooses his career at the sacrifice of slowing down for that same family. Status is the trade-off, but same endstate is, from time to time, achieved; one looks up later in life and sees he has nothing. Or rather in both cases, ‘precieves’ they have nothing because of the old “grass is always greener” mentality. Lastly, I really don’t think I have to address the ‘old guy at the end of the bar’ as the third party, do I?

We talked about the dymanics of all this as it relates to the black man as well as how this falls with respect to a woman as well. The bottomline is thirty is the breakpoint. You make the decisions that will set the track from which you will most likely not be able to wriggle out of like you have in the past. Time to set your wheels into a track, nay, a rut, that one will not be able to pull one’s self free from with out damage to the vessel. The horrible realization is that no life that the majority of us can hope to achieve not without pitfall. The true American Dream of adventure, love, friendship and brotherhood, and finally success, well, that dream is kinda incapable nowadays, or rather, its not desirable. We enter into this ‘rut’, and we become incapable or maybe just unwilling to take those roads less travelled that lead to the real completion of all our dreams, which is what we truly want out of our lives. Maybe it is because the road well-travelled has such a high and bountiful success rate dispite its extremely displined timeline that it taxes all of its travellers with. Maybe its something competetive and free that has been lost within the American heart. Truly, I don’t know. But I did get comfortable enough to foolishly point out that fortunately in my carreer path adventure and spontenitity was hardly lacking. Sagely, the owner of the gallery pointed out that while this was true it was no more my choice than it was the choice of the man who is tethered to cubical; I’m at the whim of The Man just as much as any; while adventure is present, true control of my fate is not. Very interesting point, and it has keep me meditative.

Of course there was more in those three hours that what I’m giving up as I am paraphrasing with a mind that is rolling as equally on French as it is on English, so please forgive the mispellings and grammar. I’m fried. There is not enough time in the day to deal with my house, my social life, my job/studies, my car, my hobbies, keeping fit, and my floundering love life. Maybe your thirties is the turning point, because trying to walk the line in todays America isn’t easy. I’m not sure if it is possible to do it all - and by that I mean control your fate and ride it to success in whatever form it looks like, like Woody Gutherie, Bob Dylan, JD Rockerfeller, or Theodore Roosevelt - in today’s America. But I’ll try for a while longer . Until I hit that break point.