Summer Leave - Part One

Somewhere around 29,000 feet, above sea level of course, I wrote a bunch of notes in a well worn notebook, sandwiched between a metrep and a grid loc for an overhead firing heavy machine gun, somewhere, sometime. Of course now they are too cryptic to understand, like signpost arrows nailed to a fence picket lying broken in the mud.

This is why they always tell us, be careful with your relative indications, you have to use absolutes. And it's true, because my left and your left are probably different directions, and I don't want you to get lost, or shoot something you weren't supposed to shoot, or pass me curry when I needed cumin. But really, absolute or relative, all my spatial references are shot, let alone any crude map model I had managed to construct of where the hell my life was going. Writing notes about things you want to write while sitting tired, hungry, and reflective in a tiny airplane next to some guy way too into men's Olympic swimming, after reading 121 pages of Henry Miller is clearly a bad idea, in fact, I think it's specifically counter-indicated in the owner's manual for Life, productive, human. Along with a lot of other things, like, spending your vacation in Manitoba.

That metrep was wrong, by the way. It rained so hard we debated building an ark, then realized that we were hard pressed to find a female anything at the time, which would have made pairing off a bit of a short-straw kind of issue.

On the way out to Manitoba, courtesy of a lengthy airport delay, I re-read Starship Troopers - the old sci-fi book, not the bad sci-fi movie where you get to see pretty much everyone's tits but Denise Richards. For a Navy man, Heinlein has some pretty useful insights into Army life. Mostly in his claim, and I'm paraphrasing here because the book is easily on the other side of the room, that women are the only reason men ever go to war. That is to say, that when anyone says they're fighting to protect society, yeah, they mean women. And when anyone says that they have to make a stand for humanity, for sure, they're talking about the soft, pretty, good smelling humans.

And really, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but at least I figure, this Army racket should make me look good to the ladies. And it does, every time I'm on vacation and someone is looking for a quick cheer-up rebound.

And yeah, that's life and it's as funny as it is sad, and I'm as a complacent as I am a victim and this isn't whining or complaining it's just illuminating a fact that isn't so obvious to those of you who still manage to lead something resembling a normal life. Of course it's not like I have anything better to do. If men are fighting to protect women, and I buy that the male vision of society, the community, the body politic, the Republic, the Leviathan, is entirely sex and reproduction centered, I'm wondering where myself and many of my peers fit into it. We haven't even been fighting, other than not to fail out of the training program for a profession where we'll have to fight just to get a platoon to take overseas to fight, and even 3 levels removed from any fighting, most of us wouldn't even remember what to do with a woman anymore, except for maybe an incredulous 11 seconds or so; sex that lasts just long enough to remember that A: you miss sex, and B: it really has been a long time since you had any.

Where this is all going, is that if I'm really pursuing my dreams of leading brave Canadian soldiers into violent, brutal combat against the enemies of freedom as a means to an end nestled between milky thighs and smooth, soft legs, this may explain just what the hell I was doing in Manitoba.

So I went and I visited the base, where at last indication I'm to be posted as a course officer to oversee the training of young infantry privates, and where I've got aspirations of seeking a permanent posting with a battalion. And it was small, and flat, but not without its charms, and built in roommates, among other inter-personal arrangements.

And of course, I'm looking gift-horses in the mouth. And it's not because I'm paranoid, or an asshole, but because I've been burned enough times that its getting embarrassing. Not to mention annoying. I'm real good at being a stoic (read: douche bag) loner; you want sure you're trading up to a good thing if you're going to abandon a sweet gig like this.

And it's that feeling between feeling like you're missing something, and knowing that everyone is laughing at you but not being able to figure out that joke. That feeling that you know something is up, and you know you should figure out what it is, but you don't have the heart to pry the answer out of the liar.

But really, it's that feeling when you're almost happy, and you know that whatever is you don't know is going to ruin that, and maybe you'd rather end up the ruined fool so at least, for now, you could be almost happy and just almost believe it yourself, almost.

And you almost have to respect the liar - and I use liar here in the Camusian sense - that it is not just a lie to tell someone something that is not true, but also not to tell someone something that they should know - because it takes a special kind of courage, to dance around a lie like that, to pretend that it's not there, even when you know that just in avoiding it you are tracing an outline of the lie - in trying to ignore it you are sketching its limits and shape with painful accuracy, to anyone who wants to know the answer.

But then again it takes a special kind of courage to be lied to, to know there is a lie, and yet to move forward anyways, to play the fool, to take each step further when you can see the liar dancing, can start to guess at the the true nature of the lie, like some reluctantly clairvoyant Wheel of Fortune contestant, who knows just what phrase the letters will spell out, but it desperate to live their full 15 minutes of fame under the camera lights.

And like so many things, this isn't what I meant to write, it isn't what I thought I would write, and it isn't want I want to be written. But it's what happened. And I've watched myself, so many times, just accept what got written, that really, I'm just afraid that when it really matters, when it really should be exactly what I meant, I won't tear it up and try again.

And it's worth noting, that Camus. that chain-smoking old French stoic (read: asshole) bastard didn't have the heart to tear up all the crap he wrote, but he knew better than to publish it. Sadly he did not know better than to avoid running his car into that tree head first, and leaving his entire life's work at the hands of his survivors to publish. Even the best of planning will always be subject to the cruelty of chance...