How the bridge got it's name

We called it Weidemann Bridge.

It was about three quarters of the way down Route Michigan, if you were headed from Fort Corregidore to TQ, out there in Anbar Province. The bridge was the only one on the route, and was constantly manned by 1/506th on the topside, and only military traffic was allowed to pass underneath. The 506th had placed stretches of concertina wire on both sides of the bridge, which forced any traffic going under to slow to a crawl to get through it, so that even if a carbomb were driven towards the bridge, the guys on top would have plenty of time to light his ass up. Well, let's be fair, light his OR HER ass up.

But that came later. For the first couple of months, they tried to use stone blocks, about a foot and a half on a side, to force traffic to slow and weave.

Sgt. Weidemann was one of the NCO's for the cooks, and was widely regarded as being as full of shit as a five-hundred-head cow pasture in mid-June, and stupid enough that he almost needed watering every day. And it was he who gave the bridge it's name.

A convoy run was coming back under the bridge one night, and Sgt. Weidemann decided to ignore the guys on top. Wouldn't have mattered in the daylight, but the sun had just gone down, and, just like always, the drivers were using Night-Vision Goggles to see. The 506th would lend a hand on dark nights, when the lack of ambient light was so low that it made it very hard to spot the stone blocks in the road. The guys on the bridge would play their IR lights over the blocks to let the drivers know where the obstacles were, allowing them to be safely avoided.

Of course, Sgt. Weidemann was having none of it. I don't know what it was, maybe he got a testosterone rush, maybe he thought the guys on the bridge were insolent, maybe he decided to show the stone blocks how tough the LMTV he was driving was. Whatever the reason, eyewitnesses say that at one point, he just hit the gas and ran over one of the blocks.

Now, an LMTV is essentially a huge, top-heavy pickup truck, painted an unsightly green. Getting up an over an obstacle that's only one and a half feet high isn't a problem. But, when you ramp up to about ten miles an hour, as the Sgt. did, and you hit the obstacle with only one tire, as the Sgt. did, well, the driver of the truck might just find that the passenger side of the truck has risen into the air, and shortly thereafter might just find that the truck has, in fact, fallen onto it's side. OK, now replace the 'might' with 'did'.

To cut through the verbiage, dumbass knocked his truck over by being really stupid.

I don't think the Sgt.'s named would have graced the bridge in our minds, if we'd just been able to use another LMTV to get Sgt. Weidemann's back on it's wheels. What sealed the deal was that as soon as we started to right the fallen truck, tracer fire lit up the night. Yep, we had to correct this idiots mistake while taking small arms and RPG fire. Took about 45 minutes.

And so the bridge was christened, Weidemann Bridge.

Mean Joe Queenan

I like Joe Queenan.

For those of you who have never heard of this sage of the cineplex, I envy you. You get to go out and pick up one of Joe's books, maybe 'Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler' or 'If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be In Trouble' or suchlike, and experience the joy of reading the man's take on the world of entertainment. And by 'take on', I mean 'evisceration of', because Joe, man, Joe's mean.

Joe Queenan is, pretty much by his own admission, a professional bastard. This guy actually wrote a book about his attempt to be a good person, in which he takes the time to go through his complete written works to determine how many evil things he's said over the years, with only a little 'well, this guy deserved it' back-pedaling.

Being good didn't take.

Of course, he's not just mean. Just being mean would make him a depressing read. Joe is funny as hell. He's a virtual compendium of nasty remarks that you wish you'd said to someone, and will try to remember for future use. In the words of Dave Barry: "If you're a fan of informed viciousness (and who isn't?), you'll love Joe Queenan."

How can you not like a guy who once spent and entire day being Mickey Rourke? Who's made not one but three attempts to actually perform some of the less likely stunts that appear in movies, and has concluded, after endangering life and limb, that movies are full of shit? A guy who once described Abraham Lincoln as "looking like he'd come in a distant second in an ax fight with a stegosaurus"?

Beautiful.

More Action! More amicus briefs! More of our Native Brethren!

I find my heart embiggened today. For today, my bosses at Smogtrouser Comics have commissioned a second comics book series from yours truly, legendary creator of the Spork.

My new series will be more down to earth, more focused on real life problems. The hero is the first Native American appointed to the Supreme Court. By day, he and his stalwart allies wrestle with the thorny problem of testing the constitutionality of our laws, and by night, he fights crime in the nations capitol as Chief Justice! Garbed in a mask, judicial robe, and traditional Indian headdress, Chief Justice fights such enemies as: The Landgrabber! Captain Al-Kai-Hol! and, of course, Doctor Syphilis and his amazing infected blanket! And, of course, Chief Justice's arch-nemesis, the shadowy head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs!

Keep yer eyes peeled for it!

All too often, I was the idiot

I got smoked once for calling a Drill Sergeant 'ma'am'.

I didn't even have to look at him. I just got down on the ground and started knocking out push-ups.

I seem to recall staying down there for a very long time.

So Close, But Yet So Far

I don't remember who the guy was, but I do remember that he managed to screw up at the point where it seemed like it wasn't even possible anymore.

It was the day before our graduation from Infantry School at Fort Benning. Everyone in Alpha 2/58 had been given a six hour pass to spend a little time with their families before the festivities and hullabaloo of the graduation ceremony. And it was great, for all of us. Just some time off with the people you cared about, and who you hadn't seen in fourteen weeks. My parents were there, along with my brother and his girlfriend and a friend of mine who'd flown out from California. We went to the Waffle House and everyone commented on how much weight I'd lost.

At 1800 hours, the men of Alpha 2/58 returned to our barracks, standing in formation for one of the last times, listening to roll call. Then, one of the Drills from third platoon yelled, "What the hell are you wearing?"

Yeah, we were in formation, at attention, but we turned around anyway. Not that the Drills really cared. All of us had come through our FTX and the twenty-five mile march, we'd had our Crossed Rifle ceremony, and but for one more day, we were Infantry. Besides, the Drills wanted to know what was happening, too.

So we craned our necks and looked at the guy who was getting yelled at, in third platoon's front rank. And as we looked at him, it became apparent that something wasn't quite right with his camoflage BDU's.

The Drill who was yelling grabbed the young citizen-soldier and checked a tag on the inside back of the private's top. Then the Drill pointed at the ground, and the kid started knocking out pushups, which he was still doing when the rest of us were dismissed.

Turned out that to celebrate, the youngster had gone to an Army Supply store off post, to get himself four brand-spanking-new sets of BDU's. Unfortunately for him, he failed to notice that the BDU's in question weren't from the Armerican Army, but for use in New Zealand.

Today I am a Man!

I just got my Denver Library Card, and it's got that sweet new card smell.

Cool Girl

I met a girl once, in Japan. She was amazing.

I've always liked Asian women. The best relationship I've ever had was with a lovely Chinese girl. But this new girl, she looked to blow that one out of the water.

We met right after I arrived in country, and spent every minute together that we could. She spoke English very well, and taught me a lot of Japanese. She seemed to think I was perfect, and I was quite sure she was.

So we spent days together, mixing visits with tourist attractions and local places she showed me. We laughed a lot, and held hands, and smiled at each other constantly.

It was perfect. Up until the moment the lights came on, and they started rousting everyone out of bed.

It was the start of another day of Basic Training. I wasn't in Japan. I was on Sand Hill, in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Ain't that a bitch?

Thing is, you'd be wrong

It would seem logical to think that sometime in my 34 years of stomping this sorry and wonderful globe, I'da picked up some kind of useful job skill.

Ode to a Crackerbox

Ah, the joy of it. The joy of being in possesion of a place of my own, where a door can be locked on the whole rest of the world!

No roommates walking around arguing loudly with their significant others. No pets, constantly shedding, innundating my domicile with their fur, coating my clothes and flavoring my food. No fighting for use of the computer. Actually, no computer, but so what? The central branch of the library, such a lovely building, is less than a mile away. Gives me a reason to get out of the place for a while, close enough that even on hellish winter days it's worthwhile to go. Local shops, a couple of neat bookstores also within walking distance. Even a New York style pizza place, by which I mean a semi-sanitary hole-in-the-wall that serves wide slices you gotta fold in half while eating.

No walk to shovel. Bliss.

Sure the new spot's small. Sure, I can take a shower, cook something, watch a movie, and answer the door all at the same time. It's over-priced, even. But I don't give a rat's ass. It's no worse than the last place I lived in New York, and I don't have to go down the hall to get a shower.

Truly a joyous New Year, Y'all.

Top o' the Year to ya!

2006 ended with my air mattress springing a leak. Before turning in this evening, the last of the year, I used the pump provided with my inflatable sleeping convenience to achieve a comfortable firmness in the thing, and then woke up some hours later to find myself in the beginnings of a rubberized foxhole. I made this discovery at 11:55 PM, December 31st, 2006.

It’s really my fault, though. I mean, I’m an eighth of a ton of fighting American male, and it’s a mass-produced balloon. Of course over-inflating would lead to stress on its fabric and seams, causing the leak, the actual location of which has so far eluded me. But it’s there, leaking out precious air molecules.

I bought the thing just over a week ago, and I was hoping to get at least a couple of months of use out of it. And now it’s just another warning that I should probably lose weight.

I could spin the air-mattress into a metaphor for my life, and not just this past year. The high hopes at the beginning, the progress of some plan that at first goes swimmingly, the beginnings of failure caused by a combination of personal errors and flaws in design, the inevitable end finding me laying on a hard floor on top of a sadly deflated sleeping balloon. You know, that old chestnut.

The hell with that. It’s a cheap air-mattress, not a metaphor for the Grand Design of the Universe, or the path I tread therein. Even if it is, I don’t care. The year’s over. The year’s begun. It was a hell of a year, the one behind, in many senses of the word; and I have no reason not to think the coming year won’t be a hell of a year in its own right. The future, as always, is upon all of us, waiting for each of us to commit those actions which, woven together, form our existence. That last sentence was right purty, if I do say so myself.

In Watchmen, Alan Moore has one of his characters, Ozymandias, who has committed a great crime in what he sees as the service of humanity, ask another character, Dr. Manhattan, if his actions were correct, in the end. And Ozymandias is told that nothing ever really ends.

The air-mattress is just an air-mattress, like Freud said. It won’t be a metaphor for anything, just an object lesson about not buying cheap inflatables. It’ll do.

Happy New Year.

Time-Waster of the Gods

I’ve fallen in love with Wikipedia.

I always liked encyclopedias, the huge mass of knowledge they represented. We had a set of Britannica when I was a kid, and it’s mass dominated the lowest shelves of a bookshelf in my Dad’s study. But the size was a bit daunting, too. It didn’t lend itself to browsing. I’ve spent some good hours glancing through various Almanacs, just flipping back and forth, reading the thumbnail biographies of the American presidents, the lists of Olympians and Nobel Laureates. Often I was stoned, but that wasn’t necessary. It’s just kinda fun.

Wikipedia’s just like an Almanac, in that I can just flip through, using the random article button. Page after page can fly by, showing, at the very least, the amount of information that exists that I don’t give a rat’s ass about. Ganden Monastery. Xie Shengwu. James Budd. James Madison College. Stropping. Collectables Records. Absalom, Absalom! Okay, I’d actually like to know more about that last one, as I’ve heard good things about Faulkner. But next up come the Cleuh, who are a Berber ethnic group. And that entry says almost nothing else about them, which is fine by me.

But there are also the masses of information that I do actually want to know something about. And usually, there’s more information than I really want. And it’s all indexed, so that you can consult other, related subjects, without all that annoying page turning.

So, if I want to spend a couple of hours working my way through a list of British comedians, or the history and tenets of Scientology, there it all is. If I want, as I did a couple of days ago, read about the connections between the band KLF and Discordianism, and follow the links to read about Manichaeism, I can with ease. I can read all about the history of the X-Men, or Warren Ellis’ Planetary, the death of Yukio Mishima, quotes from the sitcom Scrubs, whatever.

The fact that it Wikipedia can be edited by just about anyone doesn’t bother me at all. Most of the people who craft entries seem to keep a pretty close eye on them, to ensure that the entry does reflect the truth, and not truthiness. It leads to some interesting oddities, too. I like the fact that the entry for Lindze Letherman, who plays Georgie Jones on General Hospital, said, at the bottom of the entry, “Lindze Letherman is cool, but complains a lot” the first time I read it, and it doesn’t now.

Why I was reading about actors and characters on General Hospital is beside the point.

Basically, I’m just saying that Wikipedia lets me spend hours reading online, instead of looking for a job or a new place to live, with slightly better odds of the information being on the up and up than most webpages, and with less searching. And I like that.

Ah, the Good Die Young...

Man.

In the space of two days, we lost James Brown AND Gerald Ford.

Good Lord.

Who's next? Yukio Mishima?

What?

Yukio Mishima died in 1970?

GOD DAMN IT!

Why was I not informed?

Too Much of a Good Thing

I love odd little bits of information. Strange little facts that you can pop out at random moments, covering a bit of esoteric knowledge. It takes the place of actually knowing anything substantial quite nicely.

For instance, did you know that the Boston’s North End was once hit by a flood of molasses? On Jan. 15th, 1919, a fifty foot tall container of blackstrap, holding about 2.5 million gallons, collapsed catastrophically. A wall of sticky sludge, estimated at between 8 and 15 feet in height, moving at about 35 MPH, spread out in all directions, smashing houses, destroying a section of elevated train track mere seconds after a train had passed, and killing 21 people. One of the deceased wasn’t found for 11 days; he was a delivery man who had been washed into the harbor, along with his truck. The container that collapsed had been built in 1915, overseen by a man who couldn’t even read the blueprints, and, upon the discovery of copious and continuous leaks, wasn’t repaired, just painted brown, so that the leaking molasses was harder to spot. They say the North End smelled of molasses for years. Far from admitting any culpability, the company that owned the defective container claimed that ‘Italian Anarchists’ had planted a bomb in it. But the judge didn’t buy it, and the company was forced to pay $600,000 in damages, which comes to just about $6.6 million in today’s dollars.

One well-armed deer

We were doing a field exercise in Basic Training. While four or five guys would run the lane to practice our spanking new Infantry skills, the other guys in the platoon would be doing what was called ‘concurrent training’. This was where you’d rehearse the more sedentary aspects of soldiering: running a radio, getting into your gas attack gear, basic medic skills and suchlike.

I was helping to set up the concurrent training spot with the other guys who weren’t going to be running the practice lane for a few hours. I’d leaned my rifle up against a tree to help one of the guys, and, of course, as soon as I was out of arms reach, one of the Drill Sergeants appeared. I seem to recall that he appeared in a puff of smoke and a corresponding stench of sulfur, but that might just be my memory playing tricks. In any case, I heard my name called, and turned to find the Drill standing next to my rifle. He looked me in the eye, looked at my rifle, then back at me.

“Private Lee, is your weapon supposed to be leaning against this tree?”

“No, Drill Sergeant.”

“What is the maximum distance you should be from your weapon, Private Lee?”

“No more than arm’s length at any time, Drill Sergeant.”

“Why is that, do you think, Private Lee? Why should you never get more than arm’s length away from you weapon?”

“Because that’s how Private's lose their weapons, Drill Sergeant.” I was at attention, just waiting to be ordered into some sweat-causing physical activity as punishment for my transgression. This was known as ‘getting smoked’, and it was never a favorite activity of mine.

“That’s right, Private Lee. That is how Private's lose their weapons. They lose their weapons by leaning them against trees, and forgetting them." He was still looking me in the eye, with his hands behind his back and eyes shaded from the Smokey-the-Bear hat he was wearing. Then, I swear to god, his eyes twinkled, just a little. "Or, sometimes they lose their weapons by being surprised by a deer in the woods, throwing the weapon at the deer, and having the deer run off with the weapon.”

And the Drill proceeded to tell us about how, two or three training cycles before ours, Delta Company had spent three days in the wood looking for a weapon lost in just those circumstances. Seems a Private had been startled by a buck while taking a dump, and had indeed just hucked his M-16 at the beast. The weapon’s sling had become entangled in the buck’s antlers, and Bambi’s Dad had gone running off into the underbrush, taking the no doubt aghast Private’s weapon along with it. By the time the Drill was done. The other guys and I were in tears.

“Drill Sergeant, did the guy’s weapon at least have a bayonet on it?” I asked when I could breathe again. “I mean, did he at least think he was gonna spear it to death?”

“No, he didn’t have a bayonet. And they never did find the weapon.” The Drill picked up my M-16 and handed it to me. “Be a little more careful than he was, Private Lee.”

It's just so goddamn weird...

Ya know what movie I love? Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It’s just such a balls out freaky movie. If you’ve never seen it, well, in a way I envy you. At some point in the future, you might be blessed to sit down and watch this unholy mess of a movie, this steaming pile of greatlessness, the ne plus ultra of misguided genius. Directed by the singular Russ Meyer, scripted by Roger ‘I never would have guessed he was such a freak’ Ebert, BVD is a movie that starts out immersed in out-of-control bizarreness, and rides the crazy train far past the point where the wheels come off.

If this were a movie review, instead of a misguided paean, I’d be forced at this point to try and describe the plot, or ‘plot’, to you. Thankfully, this isn’t and I don’t. Actually, I’ll give it a try: All-girl band goes to L.A., and hijinks ensue. Want more? Ok, there’s a lot of lip-synching, a chick with no rhythm pounding spastically on drums, wild parties, references to a wading pool full of mayonnaise, inferences that L.A. can be likened to a jungle, a plethora of large-breasted women, a freaky looking old lady in an orange wig, sex in a Bentley, Martin Bormann, eye-bleedingly bright set design and costumes, horny movie stars, a nefarious lawyer, a heavyweight boxing champ who never wears a shirt, lots of drug use, blood that looks like Sherwin-Williams paint, a beheading, and a guy with tits. My god, just thinking about it fills me with emotions I can’t adequately describe.

Don’t ask question. Don’t think about it. Just buy it, rent it, stab your sainted aunt in the leg to get it. Whatever. Just see it. Or don’t. I don’t actually care.

We have lost

We’ve lost Iraq.

We lost the minute we walked into the country. We lost, because there was no way to ‘win’. It’ll take 2 to 5 years for anyone in a position of power to admit this, because we don’t lose, in America. It’s not in our interest, as the last Superpower, to lose, so it’ll be later, rather than sooner, before we can admit that we’ve lost. And then we’ll face the long task of trying to find meaning in the deaths of our sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers. There will be claims by some that if we’d just followed this course, or that one, that we’d have somehow succeeded, but the dead soldiers, and their families, and the damaged survivors, will know the truth.

We were lied to by our leaders. And it would be nice to say that it was entirely their fault, but we, the people, listened to their lies through a haze of fear. We, the people, listened with the small, evil places inside us, and we said nothing. And some had the courage to look with clear eyes and see that we were headed down a dangerous path, and we, the people, didn’t care. We, the people, decided it didn’t matter if their weren’t Weapons Of Mass Destruction in Iraq, that it was actually better that there were none, because Hussein was an evil man, and if the WMD’s didn’t actually exist, that just made it easier for our boys to take him and his whole damn country. And we marched for 21 day, and watched the little man, in front of his huge ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner, chatter about how well we’d done, and we found Hussein in his little hole.

And not one of the dead or wounded was worth any of it.

And we condoned ‘torture-lite’. And we let the little man’s Secretary of War make his cold, soulless little speeches. And we watched as a little more of the promise of our fine country was destroyed, as more of our national soul was corrupted, as the next generation of those who despise and will work to damage us was created.

We watch, as the reports of battles, and the rising death toll, move farther and farther away from the headlines. We accept it as this small nasty war becomes part of the status quo. And still, those who putatively control the situation lead us deeper into the quicksand.

We brought this on ourselves. We were frightened, it’s true. We were angry, and wanted nothing more than to seek revenge for thousands of the dead, for the horror that came from a clear blue sky. But fear and anger mean nothing to the dead, be they American or Iraqi. The tin-eared rhetoric of the small man in the Oval Office means even less. And it’s the dead that we’ll have to answer to. It’s the names that will go on the inevitable monument to this nasty little war that will shame us. It’s the memories of the surviving enemy that will bring the true price home to us. And it will be brought home to us, to we, the people, not the little man in the shadow of his father. The little man will look back in pride. After all, he finally got to play soldier, and no one can say he ran away, this time.

We’ve lost Iraq.

And not one of the dead or wounded was worth any of it.

One Fine Morning

It’s odd, what you find when coming down from an acid trip.

I’d taken the acid one night at the Big Apple Circus. It was during the Lincoln Center run, and I had taken both acid and some ecstasy with my current girlfriend. She’d passed out, but I was still running pretty strong when the sun came up. New York has a great feel in the morning, when the city’s just starting to get rolling. I’d had an odd, unexpected conversation with the show’s general manager, Guillaume, about starting pay for workers on the House and Concession crews. It was unexpected because I had no idea Guillaume knew who I was, and odd because he seemed to actually be listening. Once that was done, I headed out into the street.

Lincoln Center, where the show was set up, is on the West Side, between 62nd and 65th street, and a couple of blocks away from Central Park. I headed south on a whim, wandering through the crowds of people just starting their day.

At the south-western corner of Central Park, at Columbus Circle, there’s a huge monument to the USS Maine, the sinking of which started the Spanish-American War. It’s 44 feet tall, and has, on the top, a woman in a chariot, pulled by three horses, with a shield on one arm and the other raised. The whole ensemble, woman, chariot, and horses, are a bright, almost golden bronze, apparently made from the recovered guns of the Maine itself. I knew none of this at the time.

That morning, the sun was obscured by lingering clouds, or the monument wouldn’t have been nearly as beautiful. As it was, the hidden sun lit up the gold statuary at the top of the monument, making it seem as though the golden lady was lit up from the inside. Combined, the still bright green foliage of the south end of the park, the lovely, triumphant lady, and the bright but hidden sun made for a heart-stopping combination. I stood, looking east down 59th Street for almost ten minutes, trying to burn the image into my memory. Then, feeling incredibly lucky to be alive, I headed further downtown.

I drifted down Fifth Avenue, probably thinking of seeing the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center, hoping it would be similarly ennobled by the magic of the early morning. I actually ended up finding something that moved me even more.

I’d passed Rockefeller Center any number of times, hurried through it a few more than that, but this was the first time I’d noticed the stone in front of the sunken skating rink. It’s no doubt old hat to most people who have even a passing knowledge of the city, but I’d never heard of it, or seen it mentioned anywhere. But I swear to god, I’m going to teach my children from this stone. It has carved into it:

I Believe

I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.

I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man's word should be as good as his bond; that character -- not wealth or power or position -- is of supreme worth.

I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.

I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individual's highest fulfillment, greatest happiness, and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.

I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. spoke those words in 1941, on behalf of the USO and the National War Fund. And in 1962, during the last peaceful time in that turbulent decade, they were set in stone. And I found them in late 1999, wandering in the hazy end of a drug trip, while working at the circus.

Each time I read them, I’m struck by their beauty, and their honesty. I don’t know much about John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and I’m sure that there are any number of people who could tell me stories that would make his statement of principles seem, at the very least, disingenuous, but I don’t particularly care. These ten statements contain singular truth, and that is all that matters. It is a Decalogue that is worth believing in, and following.

It’s odd, what you find when coming down from an acid trip.

Chip off the old block

The lady followed the kid around the curtain, and smacked him on the side of the head, right behind the ear.

This is at the Big Apple Circus, during the New York run. For three months of the year, from October to right after New Year’s, the show would set up in Lincoln Center, in the section where the hold outdoor concerts in nice weather. That’s a pretty sweet three months, being paid to live right in the middle of Manhattan, no heavy lifting, and good city drugs readily available.

It helped that I’d met a nice Chinese girl who was temping for the show. She was, and is, one of the sweetest people I know, and we got on like a house afire. Then, when we were traveling again, I lost my fucking mind and broke up with her. But that’s another story.

Unlike the usual lot set-up, in New York the concession area was under a tent, which connected to the big top through two short tunnels, one for each side of the grandstand. The tunnels were kind of cool; the acoustics were such that I could shout ‘Don’t Run!’ at unruly kids and have the sound waves hit them right in the back of the head.

And New York was the world capitol of unruly kids. We threw out more families in the first two weeks in Manhattan than we had to for the rest of the tour combined. Loud kids, kids who wanted to run around the aisles at breakneck speed, kids who wanted to throw handfuls of popcorn around with the abandon of a demented Johnny Appleseed. Little Johnny Popcornseed’s, joyfully ruining the show, and life in general, for everyone around them. And, of course, their slack-jawed, bewildered parents, who always said the same thing. “What’s the problem? What do you want me to do about it?” We should have been allowed to poison them.

So the kid comes around the curtain at the base of my ramp, which had been pulled closed in preparation for the start of the second half of the show. The woman, his mother I assume, followed close behind him and gave him a nice, solid smack. Her hand hit with a meaty thud, knocking his head forward and putting him off balance for a step or two.

“You’re just like your goddamn father!” she said, just before the lights went down.

Jesus, lady, if he’s not just like his dad now, he will be pretty soon.

Pay me more than I'm worth, please

I don’t do well at job interviews, especially those that involve a job with some kind responsibility. I don’t have the right clothes. I rarely want the job itself, just the good paycheck. I sweat a lot. And I seem to give off the vibe that I could care less about getting the job. This is invariably true.

I’ve been out of a job for a couple of months, enjoying the splendor of unemployment insurance. I’m actually getting bored with just hanging out. I think a lot of it has to do with not having enough money to do what I want. If I won the lottery, I’d loaf around ‘til my heart exploded from the massive amount of sitting around and eating to my heart’s content I’d do. As it is, I have just enough to get by, which isn’t bad, but doesn’t bode well for my future, specifically the part of the future where I’m too old to work and survive by eating cat food. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some cat food, but as a regular diet it makes me a bit gassy.

So I really do want to get a decent gig this time. I’ve spent far too long working the dead end, ‘What, me take responsibility?’ jobs. I’m thinking something with health insurance, maybe a 401(k) I can invest in. I had that at my last job, but there was a little too much getting shot at for me to want to make a permanent thing out of it.

34’s probably a little late to start shopping around for a career, but that’s where I am. I don’t see them offering any passes to go back and start over again, so I might as well stop procrastinating. I’ve come to grips with my lack of inspiration, the absence of a driving passion within me, so it isn’t a good idea for me to keep running under the assumption that the hand of God’s gonna come down and gift me with it.

It’s a tangential thought, but it’s a good idea to sometimes state your beliefs out loud. Often, you’ll suddenly be brought up against the raw stupidity of something you’ve held as true for too long. The idea that I’d receive inspiration via a Newtonesque smack upon the head by an apple was something I’d never said to anyone, just something I believed implicitly. Once I said it aloud, I felt like an idiot, with some justification, I think.

So now I want a real job, and find myself woefully unprepared to get one. Hi, my name’s Carter Lee. Will you hire me in spite of all the obvious reasons not to?

Idiots and Defecation

One of the worst things about the post on which I was stationed in Iraq was that there really were no basic amenities. For the first three months, we had to truck in fresh water in huge rubber containers, and there was nothing so advanced as a flush toilet. Everyday, some poor bastard in one of the platoons that wasn’t working in the city had to pull out the steel tubs that were filled with shit, and burn the stuff until it was a fine ash. Since my platoon was running convoys every day, I got to miss out on that neat little aspect of camp life. ‘Course, I still got to experience the thrill of crapping through a hole into a steel tub, which smelled delightful in the 90-115 degree heat.

Being in my platoon was a blessing, lemme tell you. We got to head to posts with more advanced latrines, and showers, and mess halls, and PX’s, pretty much every day. And there was a certain amount of hatred focused on us by the guys who hadn’t had showers in three weeks, and had run out of cigarettes last week.

Sometimes, you’d just have to crap on our post, though, which exposed me to one of the weirder aspects of Army life. In a situation like that, where you’re doing your business in an outside latrine, with other crappers on both sides and separated by a relatively thin slice of plywood, there was always some cat who’d take the next stall and want to chat. It never failed. You’d get settled, and through the wall would come some idiot’s voice, “Hey, who is that? Lee? What’s up man? How you doing?” What the hell kind of idiot question is that? I’m sitting in an outhouse in a foreign country, trying to lose a little weight, and being pestered by some moron.

So, all in all, I could have been doing better.