More joy

Alright, so I decided to make some concerted effort to take down the specific gravity of my little site here for a few days, but it isn't working. Any effort I have ever made with that goal in mind came off as pretty lame, anyway. So, for reasons that might be clear later, let's just assume anything I write in October will be hateful and crazy. That's just the way it is.

I hate October. I hate it with a passion I usually reserve for hating commercial radio and Toyotas. The sense of impending doom and gloom drags me down into a deep seated fear of another year going away. October is the month of loss without hope of renewal. October is when the niceties of summer give way to the cold and dark nights of winter. I didn't used to mind winter, but I usually had some form of accompaniment to keep the chill out. I shouldn't say usually, since that has been a singular unlikelihood in my adult life. Whether it was the nasty Chicago winter when I was twenty or the long, cold winter down RimPac way, I knew they were going to be miserable by the fact that they kicked off in the godforsaken month of stupid people dressing up as morons.

A quick tour of the bad things I have dealt with during the winter over the last few years:

10/05. Transitioning out. Go ahead and think it's easy.

10/04. Going somewhere for the Holidays? Sure you are. CVN 72, bitch. Merry Christmas! How about Happy New Year '05 down in the death smelling waters of Indonesia littered with corpses!

10/03. Have fun being assigned duty as a prison guard, try not to get attatched to a bunch of guys who are getting their lives fucked by a bunch of elitist prick officers. Make sure someone you love comes down with an incomprehensible disease. Then have your Toyota have a design flaw blow chunks of expensive, foreign parts out of the engine block. Make sure the cost of repair is five months pay.

10/02. Goodbye, wifey. Hello Connie. USS Constellation, that is. While you're at it, throw in a war. And your best friend dying.

10/01. OK, this one was alright. Except the part where they told us we were deploying two weeks after we got home. Fucking Osama.

10/00. Bootcamp.

10/99. Broncos go 6-10.

Octobers have held particular angst for me over the last four years for obvious reasons.

Some nights I can't sleep and I don't know why. I've lost twenty pounds since the first of the month and I don't carry that much extra. I blame it all on the cold and on women and on money, but it comes down to the simple fact that I'm in the wrong place. I miss my guys. Milf, Coleburg, Frank, Bart, Little Bart, Crispy, Flower, Gunner, Chief, all of them. They're not doing any better than I am, I know it. I can feel it. The old friends I stay in touch with are having the same problems. We all feel like part of us missing and we need to find it. A call has went out through the haze of oil fire and jet noise.

I know where it is. It's sitting out there in the sand and fire. My body came home from that fucking bullshit, but my soul still belongs there, in the action.

She sat on the porch to our small home with tears running down her pretty face and cried through the cigarette smoke and the California haze, "You changed. All you fuckers changed. It's like you never came home from...that shit."

I didn't accuse, but asked, "Are you sure it was us who left a part of us out in the Gulf? What did you go through while I was gone?"

It was terrible on her. She never answered, but the tracks and hollowed eyes told me what I needed to know.

Years later, we were supposed to be preserving life for a change. The aftermath of the Connie had run its course and I had no one to go home to this time. I looked over the rail into the prairie fire sunset. When I first saw the families float by, bloated and devoid of the golden shine that they would have had, down there by Thailand, it reminded me that some people are lucky enough to leave everything in the waters of the world ocean to be consumed by the engines of life. Some of us only leave half of ourselves out in the blue.