Confessions of a Starving Artist

In my most honest hours I have found myself to be hollow in many spiritual and emotional attributes that most people find common.  I knew these things about myself before they were tested in life; I suppose I just felt that there was nothing to feel in those certain places.  That’s not to say I am incapable, but the nerves are well insulated with bone and sinew, perspective and logic.  Ironic then that my principal military instructor used to stay that I was too emotional for the hands-on portion of this job, and I am both proud and a little disappointed that I could prove him wrong in his assumptions.

Strange, though, what rings my bell.  I received word this evening that someone that I knew died recently… to be more precise, someone I didn’t know died.  A young bartender at a small Irish bar I would frequent, twenty-four years old, supposedly has passed, the circumstances are quiet beyond me at this point.  Moreover, they are mute.

In matters of death, I am rarely jarred.  The dead fall into one of two categories, people that I knew and people of whom I did not.  People of the former category are understood to be just that; people.  Mortals.  I understand and except what becomes to all of us as if the moment has already passed, thought I gather within that solace that time is finite for all and each meeting may be our last chance to express feelings to those of you whom are kindred spirits.  Death becomes us all, and for those who are known, truly known, to one another they will be able to meet again; to see each other without form or sense.  As for the people whom I did not know, well… I did not know them.

Still, times such as these arise where there is a third category, a category that is very hard to define in words as I have thus far been unable to.  They are those whom you have seen in passing though often continually in a spiraling life.  We imagine them from time to time, some times dream of, whether in earnest or in folly, admired perhaps, maybe even thought yourself inferior too.  What ever your crossed paths, these are the ones whom you never met but only passed, never spoke a word too, be it from lack of substance or lack of stone.  Regardless, and here is where the generalities stop, with these few and rare people, I lose sight of reality, instance, and the tried method remarked of above of acknowledging the finite nature of time.

A death has occurred to such a person.  I will not go into my personal relationship with her, because in reality there wasn’t one.  My relationship was simply put a personal and extensive one.  And now she is dead.  Now I am left to feel what so often I am completely incapable of feeling.

Why is this and not others?  There was nothing between us, no shared coffee, no sadness or laughter, no ties that bind.  She is the death of ideal, possibility itself, a dream without waking.  There are countless times in history when men have died for their dreams or ideals.  How horrible that they should be taken from one, never mind how trivial or unlikely their nature.  Such living temperament, sculpting Fate or musing the mind to wonder, fear, and in whatever event, become enviably indistinguishable to action eternally.  The loss is beyond that of a single life – it’s the death of hundreds.  This is what causes my nerves to shudder and send me to morn.

My peculiarities aside, I will return to that bar in sometimes that come later, after several months of sunrises and sunsets, to contemplate a final time in solitude and purchase single shot to the memory and possibility of Beth Ann.

Etranal rest grant unto them, O Lord
and let perpertual light shine upon them.
May their souls and all of the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.
Amen.

Unless you fall into the category of people who pay attention to my every detail, of which I believe only my parents fall into, then it is possible, nay probable, that you have missed some significant portion of my more tawdry affairs somewhere along the line.  No matter.  I have a feeling that some of the past stories may finally see the light of day over the next few months as the readership demographic category of those owning firm and perky breasts seems to be on the backslide, my posts now are more-or-less a consequence free environment.  Pointbeing, my past exploits over the past year, or however long it has been since I’ve indulged in airing my disappointments or mind-blowing revelations about women; are quiet trivial to this read.  Right now is more a discourse on a state of mind then a past state of being.

As you can likely imagine, the single male mind turns to wandering when he is on deployment.  Notably though, these wild dreams and expectations upon return are often reduced to the level of best intentions once one’s well-worn combat boots hit American soil after some seven months over-seas.  Nonetheless, current standings upon foreign soil place the mind to high-ideals, deep fantasies, and a disregard to the more likely and disappointing scenarios that a return home may bring.  The mind wavers endlessly on possibilities, and even the smallest correspondence of care is continuously rolled over and over for missed interpretations and subliminal messages, which may or may not even exist.  Still, most of the more grounded men learn to write-off high hopes when an accustomed letter or email does not appear in a few days, breaking a usual pattern and causing our notions of eternal gratitude and subsequencial sex-drive to tumble into the realm of reality, internet porn, and a likelihood that whomever was writing us is now gladly humping someone else.  Unfortunately this cycle can often repeat itself several times during a single deployment,; sometimes reducing one to pining after ex-girlfriends who are hopelessly wrong for the individual or establishing forced re-acquaintances out of old friends from high school or college whom may have slimmed down, divorced, or both… or neither.  Regardless, perceptions skew by inches at a time until we are hopelessly miles from our home, both physically and spiritually.

I’d like to tell you this doesn’t happen to me, but to some degree it happens to us all… and as a single man in his early-late twenties, I would admit that my sense of the promising and potential is infinitely higher than most, and as such is more easily bated.  Even so, I would consider myself to be more stable and reasonable than the average joe.  But that hardly says much and consoles less.

Now, much to the chagrin of those of you who are fans of my exploits, or rather their disbelief, I consider myself finally to be very open to the concept of a long-term and monogamous relationship.  True, in the past I would have attempted a clever misspelling of that term and written ‘monotonous’ instead, but I’m growing more and more certain that the frivolous days of this single play-boy are dimming in the distance.  To be sure, I am in no hurry, and if the current caliber of young lady does not increase itself then I have no problem continuing my more wistful ways as they are their own reward.  I can promise you the same thing I’ve promised myself, I may be looking to settle down, but I’ll not be settling any time soon.

All this being said, I can lend this vague and even theoretical talk to a more contemporary example.  I happened to discover a certain intriguing someone through more the more dubious channels of cyber networking sometime earlier this fall.  I believe that we were on the cusp of actually meeting for a cup of coffee about the week before I had to jump on a flight to a Central Asian country for a few months.  Circumstances being what they were, we never made it to the coffee house, and thus, we have never met face to face.  Still, our conversations have continued via email, and I do not think it is the deployment talking when I say she is one of the most interesting women that I have encountered in a very long time. 

However, all good things tend to lead to misery or mediocrity, very few last to magnificence and marvel.  The same is seemingly accurate in this poor state of affairs.  I’ve not heard from my dear correspondent for three weeks now, and as one who knows will tell you, if you’re not writing probing emails on Valentine’s Day, then you’ve got a Valentine.  I don’t question such logic as it’s likely a condensed fact of science.

The mind calms from wild concepts of the future with the advent of distance and silence.  Perhaps we see clearer, but perhaps we just see less possibility, which is akin to a less colorful world and dreamless sleep.  Who can say which is better for heart and mind or if they can both be dealt with at once in a place such as this?

I’ve neglected to put to pen any sort of juvenile list of preferred traits or qualifications to some sort of theoretical perfect woman.  My understanding that there is more in this world than I can possibly ever know, coupled with the fact that I continually surprised by my own taste and style and further what products that leads to my favoring; these particulars have bade me to ignore emplacement of restrictions upon promise.  That does not mean that I don’t have hopeful ambitions that a chase, but these rabbit holes are deep, and those who fall rarely return from Wonderland.  You’ll forgive me then if I expect a clean stumble, even if the investigation consists of emails and word play.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I like the day after Valentine’s Day better than the day itself.  You really can’t beat thirty-seven cents for a bag of candy hearts.

For me at this place in time, conditions have manifested in the form of tea.  Commonly Chai as it is simply referred to in both Dari and Pashtun, though the first time I was ask for such by this name, I thought that I was getting a pleasant frothy treat likened to Starbucks.  Nay.  The tea that is consumed in Afghanistan is something of a rougher blend with raw and unrefined chunks of the tea leaves themselves thrown into the water and left swirling at the bottom of your cup as a very common practice.  Mostly, it is akin to green tea, but on particularly cold or stressful days, you may be served something in line with a black tea, which in my humble experience has been known to pack more vigor than the average Afghan.  But I digress…

Tea has become somewhat of a corner stone to my daily routine, which, I am hesitant to say, has developed.  I realize that I have preached before that routine in a combat zone is either the mark of a fool who has a death wish or a man whose role lies outside the sphere of combat operations.  While I do not consider myself the former and will have words with any man who would call me the later, our state of affairs during this rotation finds us in this precarious situation, lending itself further to one of routine behavior.  My mornings begin with a cup of tea as I survey the mundane details of our current assignment, without which I am usually quite a disagreeable grouch.  As well, often after dinner, I’ll take another smaller cup to aid with digestion and full-hearted conversation with the men.  The necessity of these has become such that I have solicited an electric kettle for my room so that morning cups can be percolated from the comfort of my bedside, as well as two mugs, one for my room and one for my work desk, so that I am never far from either.  Moreover, with my sweet-tooth begin omnipresent, I have likely ingested enough NutraSweet to have developed a small bout with cancer by this point in the deployment.  Thank goodness the cook just got in a large shipment of Equal.

The only step that was missing was a light decaffeinated brew so that on occasion I could nurse a small cup as I watched movies or wrote in one of my various mediums before bed.  But my extreme distaste for those bedeviled fruity decaffeinated blends is so difficult to mask that I assumed that it would be highly dubious of me that anyone would have the raw nerve to send me anything that I could hope to use.  Low and behold, tonight one of my teammates produced a box of one and perhaps the only type of decaffeinated tea that I am found of.  I nearly fell out of my folding chair to rush to my room, snatch up both my mugs, plug in my kettle, and make us each a fantastic brew for the evening’s film… I even shared my stash of honey on this circumstance.

Minor accents to ones living, when mediated upon, grow to the more grandiose considerations of the aristocracy, the trappings of the aficionados, the lace of the bourgeois.  Certainly, it is simply tea, and more certainly is it simple circumstance that marries me a warm cup on each snowy Afghanistan morning.  Nonetheless, there are those of us who fashion the accouterments of what we feel are important in order to accessories ourselves with such at the various points within our shared or partial existences.  Perhaps brand names become our bane, or maybe we delve too deep into a type of designer culture that creates necessities and derivatives that compel the clothes we wear, the hair we dye, or the cigarettes that we smoke.  The car we drive may further us from who we see in the mirror each morning as so may the person that lies still within our beds, both simply acquired from a feeling of want disguised as a feeling of need.

I’ll speak shortly as one of the eternal transients; the apartment was the fixture that drove this fictional life noted above to its wants and needs.  It became the setting, the garden from which all other circumstances spring.  It was not purchased with contrived circumstances premeditated upon and cultivated towards… if it was, you and I have very different senses of transient living, and it would now and then cascade into the belly of such orchestrated trimmings as those listed above rather than a character-building and persona-enhancing basis for circumstance that daily life will award you regardless.  The metaphorical point is that apartments are for living in not simply for decorating.

I contemplate this as one who teeters, dipping his toes into both pools from time to time… and this is fair.  In all things, moderation, I suppose.  As such, a level hand must be kept and kept aware, lest one forget their balance and fall to one side or the other.  The simple production of drinking only the finest tea in the most habit-forming of manners can quickly escalate into something more.  Next perhaps is cigar smoking by the night fire or inclusion of a new movie every night at exact nine p.m.  I understand that these are the circumstances of Afghanistan and my place within it.  Should I take a single or all of these routines home and force them into a different set of dawns, how then should I take my steaming tea and scalding mug in the hot and humid summer mornings of North Carolina ?  Am I still the me that I have made?

Times are to come.  The eternal transient.  The new apartment.  The Guttersnake abides.

It is obvious, to me at least, why Mainers were taken it.  Sure, on the glossy surface, Mitt looks like the most squeaky clean, charismatic, well-spoken man in the running.  I’ll be the first to admit it, he crushed the competition at the last few debates.  However (and I don’t offer this up as an excuse), Maine is literally the furthest thing other than Hawaii from the Mormon Zion, and therefore it is understandable that there are things about a Mormon that you perhaps are not totally read in on.  First and most notable, is their extreme and near fanatical devotion to their faith, which mandates many of the traits that non-Mormons can mistake as “perfect” behavior.  Indoctrination happens very young; and after a long ‘mission’ to spread the gospel each Mormon is considered a priest in and of himself thus leaving Mormon societal enclaves being a near mandated part of religious service.  Now, I am far less concerned with the ‘cult’ status that gets applied to them (though it is founded justly) or the allowance of polygamy (which I’m neither for nor against), but rather I am extremely cautions of an order of men who believe that God lives on another planet, (of which they have a name for) and moreover believe that the ingestation of caffeine is a sin.  The charm is part of the evangelism; the actual ethos of the Book of Mormon is one of the most conservative in the political spectrum to date.  Personally, the idea of a man who doesn’t drink Coke-a-Cola sitting in my White House is akin to flying the Hammer and Sickle of the USSR over the Capital Building .

But it’s not just Mainers whom have earned the single up-raise eyebrow from the ol’ Guttersnake.  It began with the entire country buying into this election fiasco some fourteen months early / ago with such a host of miscreants, rookies, and reprobates preaching near comical propaganda that one may have thought that they were watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus rather than CSPAN.  What it has come to as of late is what appears to be an immerging four candidates as the lead Elephants and Jack-asses heading into Super Tuesday… and unfortunately, Rudy Giuliani isn’t one of them.  Seriously, it’s like we want to suck.

Let’s review the favorites at this point.  Mitt, well, I think we’ve covered my thoughts on that.  In sum, I don’t think of him as a military strategist, I support a woman’s right to choose, and I am against decaffeinated coffee.

Bounce to Hilary:  Fuck this uber-liberal, self-motivated, coat-tail ridding, two-faced, femishtapo whack job.  One of the largest problems in this country is that the average American does not consider success to be a job well done, but rather a position to be obtained.  Hilary is the embodiment of this ideology.  Since 1994, the Presidency has been this bitch’s goal, and everything she has said and done have been benchmarks and stepping stones to get her to this election.  She doesn’t have sincere bone in her post-menopausal body.  I leave it at this: if Hilary doesn’t get elected, what can anyone say about this woman that would fall under the lines of ‘a job well done’ or ‘mission success’?  Answer: nothing.

Barack Obama.  This guy is driven like a stock car and has about the same potential to crash and burn along the track before this whole thing is done… and by ‘whole thing’ I mean election and term, if applicable.  The reality of the matter is that this Barack is so cherry that even if elected, he’s never going to get out from under the sophmore status.  Let’s not forget, as much as we would like a well-spoken, smart, young President that this is a second-term Senator from a nowhere state.  Nonetheless, he’s already written more books about his life and inspirations then most wartime Presidents have after completing a second term.  I actually think that President Carter keeps writing his drivel because he needs to stay ahead of Barack in the publishing arena.  But, in what remains of a shattered and hopeless Democratic field, he’s my favorite… not because he’s got a great history, but rather because he doesn’t.  Maybe his lack of indoctrination into the system will cause him to stand-out and make smart decisions as opposed to the same old decisions re-hashed and served up hot.  But I doubt it.

Then we have John McCain.  Who would have thought that this old sea-dog would have made it this far in the race, let alone life itself.  But in all seriousness: I like John.  If he gets the wink and the nod from the GOP, then my ballot is cast come November.  The only thing that keeps me from absolutely loving this guy is his age.  Both because he’ll be as old as Castro when he gets out of the White House and also because America has just gone through eight terrible years of a President who cannot relate to the people, let alone the youth.  John McCain is ten years older than GW is now, which makes his choice of a running mate critical to his potential voters who will undoubted look at the possibility of a death in office.

Still, as in all elections in the past twenty-plus years, the inner-workings of the two-Party system has once again withheld the cream of the crop from the American voter, leaving me and perhaps millions more wondering if in fact there are any top-notch boys in Washington left.

Which is why I went looking to New York .  I cannot decide if I am more saddened that Rudy has dropped out of the race or that the American people have once again been taken in by the hypnotizing and repetitious words of Washington carpetbaggers and let him fall by the wayside.  Other than McCain, Rudy was the only other candidate who could both stand there and tell the American public not only massive accomplishments that his political tenure has achieved, but also how he has been tested as a leader in times of ultimate stress.  We made this mistake last time, choose a weak-minded, spit-shined individual, and when our nation required a leader at a time of unparalleled marking, America herself was left holding a smoldering bag of goods.

So well done, Land of the Free, you’ve spoken yet again.  Not so much in words, but as last time, rather, in absence of them.  As for me, I’ve never really considered taking anything but the highroad in this regard.  I’ve said on many occasions, if you did not vote, then you have no right to bitch.  While the idea of saving myself four years of complaining should November 4^th roll around with my disgust seeing no end in sight and my hope no options does sound enticing, I remind myself that saying nothing is saying something.  Silence, is indeed, consent; we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves when, yet again, all will be said and done.

Giuliani in ‘08
McCain and Collins in ’08!!