5254454

“End up like a dog that’s been beat too much, till’ you spend half your life just covering up" Bruce Springsteen “Born in the USA” Why? I have always wanted to know why? About everything, and I can remember as a child, my father telling me that the only words in my vocabulary were who, what, where, when, and why. Even now, as I roar into the night on my motorcycle at 160 miles per hour, I am contemplating the consequences of losing it. I watch the pavement fly by six inches underneath my bike like some devilish conveyer belt just waiting to grind these old bones to dust. The broken yellow divider lines don’t look so broken anymore, and they appear to pulsate as I continue to escalate into the top end of my machine. I think that maybe this is as close to inner peace as I will ever see. Self-actualization at 234 feet per second, eat your fucking heart out Dalai Lama. The wind and the sound of my motorcycle at 12,000RPM intoxicate me to the brink of madness and I don’t even care when my goggles fly from my face and I can no longer see, I just hammer down. The tears stream like bullets from my face into the vacuum behind me, and the memories come back to me like a migraine bull-dozer, throbbing and crushing. I find myself awash in the war again; awash in the inequities of man and his unjust tyrannies. The streets of a dusty Sunni village come into focus on the backs of my closed eyelids, and I am once again immersed in a world of violence and death. They are all here you know? Friend and foe, all are here and the stage is set. Sins of the past revisited every time I close my eyes, but as always it starts to slip away again. Everything starts to fade from the real to the surreal and I snap back to reality and the 120 horse powered rocket ship between my legs. I back the throttle off to a law-abiding level and smile at cheating The Big Kahuna once again. One thing that the war definitely taught me was that you feel most alive facing your own mortality. Kind of a twisted appreciation of life, but then again life is pretty fucking twisted in general, and for that matter so is war. I am so lost these days. My life is a paradox in that I am this happy person struggling to find happiness. I have this fear of being alone. To be alone is terrifying, because that’s when they come for me. The ghosts, I have a lot of them, because war has a tendency to do that. For most people the ghosts only come for them in their dreams. Not me my friends. My ghosts come for me on these long and lonely drives from point A to point B, and it seems that more often than not I never know where point B is. That’s the story of my life, final destination unknown. I try to fight the demons of my angst with drugs and alcohol, but nothing ever seems to take the edge off. Most people will never know about the ghosts that haunt me. So often I feel as if I am the extremist, but only in the emotional sense. I go from being mad, to sad, to glad in an instant, with the apparent hair trigger catalyst being the evening news. Which by the way not to mention, I am fucking obsessed with. I find myself looking for the names of my friends on the lists of the fallen on CNN with an almost obsessive-compulsive frequency. I wander through my memories and wonder where so many of my comrades are. I love them so much and miss some of them to the point that often times it is unbearable. Some of them alive, some of them dead I will never see so many of them ever again. My mind is like a floodgate and my feelings gush out in a fury, swallowing me whole in a wash of sorrow and happiness, of love and hate. My emotions are warped as is everything in war. My feelings are like a whirlpool pulling me down and crushing me within its depths. My soul sucks me into its murky bowels to have its way with me. I am tumbling and falling through the darkness, a well of hatred unfathomably deep. At home in bed I try to catch that last train to Sleepville, waiting for the dreams to descend upon me. They will come with the force of a freight train. Unstoppable and uncompromising they have come to crush me with the weight of the world, a weight that I have continually insisted on bearing since my duty overseas. Some can handle the load through faith. In fact, many gain a higher sense of faith from war. Not I, it ruined god for me. I found it very hard to swallow adages about “mysterious ways” after my first car bombing. The whole “God’s plan” thing got a little shaky when the children I loved were blown apart like so much garbage, their limbs tossed and scattered like the candy I loved to throw to them. My dreams of a just and righteous god were shattered along with those children, murdered in his name. These days I try to just be a good person as well as I know how. I no longer worry about some afterlife retaliation for watching some lesbian porn or smoking a bowl. I am good to other people and try everyday to make the world a better place. Someday I wish to raise children who are empathetic, kind, and emotionally stable. At the same time I will teach my children to question authority, and to never let it hinder their creativity and imagination. I will teach my children tolerance above all else, especially in the fields of religion, ethnicity, and nationality. I want to love and be loved for the good person that I really try to be. I am spiritual in my own way and cherish all life. I wish I could make people see things through my eyes, but then again that is perhaps what this is all about. The explanation for my arrival at these conclusions to all the things I have seen in my short yet turbulent life. If that should be the case, then perhaps I should take a step back and start at the beginning. Go back to the day I left for basic training and the day the whole journey began. It seems so long ago now. I had no idea the magnitude of signing those papers for Uncle Sam. Such naivety in that summer of 2001, yet perhaps it was just my head full of drugs................