sick man dreams

My allegorical graduation from the marines preceded what would become the field work for my master's thesis in psychosis -- a logical progression for students of hardship (a 'fine art'); and I was as oblivious to the process as are most who study suffering. The years between my discharge and my crimes, I believe, typify the experience -- the American experience, the Twixter experience, the early 21st century experience -- for so many of my generation; faceless in the mob of the single, "middle class", twenty-to-thirty year old, perennially working dead end, low paying service jobs. True to style, I was a lonely serial dater, finding contentment only with increasing levels of sedation, while adopting anti-materialist tenets with an attitude of the desponded, self-destructive hipster. Characterizing the chief lessons derived from that time, I think in platitudes and humor article titles:

• The Horror of Mediocrity
• Life as a Case for the Merits of Abortion
• If You Detect a Trace of Mania in my Humor You're Probably Not Far Off the Mark

A sad reality is that the experience of prison, for me, is not so different in terms of interpersonal isolation, financial deprivation, fulfillment, etc. from the service job lifestyle. I don't think the reader should misconstrue this as my saying that prison simulates a certain real world experience accurately.

It is the other way around. Certain real world experiences simulate prison almost to perfection. Mine was exactly such a one.

One might think that I am speaking of the effects of the gap between the rich and poor -- and there is something to that -- but what bothers me more is the much subtler culture gap I have seen and experienced -- where people are seemingly barred from their own potential; their own depth; their own humanity; their own free will, really -- and that experience is the same, in here or out there.

Distractions still exist of course. People like to point to those and say that life is not so bad. And it's true that distractions can seem the whole point of life in the first place. I had my share -- drinking, partying, hanging out, the fruitless search for my soul-mate, experiencing art & music, exploring the trappings of modernity, pondering those weird quantum events embedded in reality, writing ever-evolving musical shorts… they helped me forget how miserable I gradually became again. What was the source of this misery? Was it internal or external? Or both?

Prison, for all its faults, is providing clues. I do feel more content than I have in a long, long time. I should be mad and frustrated. I should be railing against the walls -- at least, the TV says so. Reality shows tell me that this is how prisoners behave. But I am becoming more serene. Why is this so? I am away from all the people and things I love most. What is this lizard- like contentment crawling up my spine? I told my mother recently that I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than ever work in a customer service position again. I feel so glad for the break it is almost a fair trade. But it is also unnerving -- would other people feel the same in my position? I would have never believed it myself. There are so many others like me out there. My life feels better than at almost any point since moving to this country.

So what is it about this damn country?

I don't know what America used to be -- whatever it was -- but the land of the free doesn't seem to exist any longer. Maybe it has never been. Maybe it was always someplace else; in some other city, in some other state; as an abstraction. Or maybe it was in the potential of the "undiscovered countryside", while the internet has allowed us to more thoroughly recognize this societal delusion. People speak of the American Dream. Is it a promise or a carrot on a stick? Equality of freedom for all -- to do what? Work as a paycheck-to-paycheck wage slave? Obviously that isn't the case for everyone. I just had the unfortunate luck of being a young adult during an economic decline. I suppose that is a key to understanding how my life unfolded next -- when it seemed that things were against me, they were -- as they were against other people my age. The Confucian Curse comes to mind when I think of the present day: May you live in interesting times. The times were interesting, indeed. They are still interesting. They are, in fact, becoming more interesting every day.

After my discharge I moved back in with my parents. I was extremely happy to be starting my adulthood from scratch. Although I had wasted some early years, and my mind resembled something not unlike a defused bomb, I could see the bright side of my situation. I would have worked some job or another, I told myself, waiting for my band mates to graduate college; it may as well have been one that showed me some of the horrors of the world. I felt it could even lend some much needed credibility to an otherwise naive and pretentious musician.

And there were also the moral sensibilities I had adopted -- creeds and convictions I may have never considered were it not for my military experiences and the lessons they taught me. I was Pacifistic. I distrusted contracts fiercely, seeing them as a coercive tool. And as for coercion itself, I began to see that as a sort of rape -- a rape of the will, or the mind, perhaps; or of the dignity of the individual. And I saw it everywhere -- in business, in government, in families, in friendships. It would not be recognized as time would unfold, but I knew my past could serve me as well as any education for a man my age. I exhibited refinements which were not present in my peers. All I lacked was a certain social insight. I still had no idea who my American peers really were -- what their values were, their dreams, or their idealizations. I lacked the cultural context of my own mind -- and was discovering it had always been that way. I had been a perpetual foreigner.

It would have helped to know, then, that my friends and I would never get our band off its feet. I had everything I needed to go it alone, but I didn't. I wanted to share the experience with the people who had made my teen years bearable; who, in a very real sense, had kept me alive. When opportunities with other bands arose, I turned them down. I resisted a temptation to break away as my own artist. But over the years I realized, in succession, certain realities, each affecting me with a taxing emotional weight.

These were actually variations on a similar theme. I already substituted as the drummer since we couldn't find any. Later, I noticed that I was writing all of the guitar parts, too -- it seemed my band mates weren't confident in their writing. They couldn't commit to any of their own ideas. Later it became apparent to me that I was the only person writing any music at all, and I had also been recording everything. Then, I was the only person coming up with vocal ideas, melody ideas, and the only person sharing them.

But it was more than that. They weren't committed financially, either. They didn't have the resources. They were bogged down with work and school. And it took me too long to notice. I was busy myself, after all, blinded by optimism.

Ultimately, my friends admitted that my talents intimidated them -- even induced an occasional jealousy. And meanwhile, their scholastic and financial responsibilities dwindled their ability to collaborate with anything we had ever dreamed about doing together. Meanwhile, I became even more self-sufficient. And by then, life had crept up on me, too. Another four years had waded by, making for a total of eight fruitless years spent on that band.

This motivated me to develop a sort of axiom to help the aspiring musician: If you are not already doing it, you will never start.

I don't harbor any resentment for my old band mates. Unless you are born rich, musicianship requires a sort of fanaticism that must be adhered to or you will be swept into middle-age before you know it, and that turns many off, especially the professional and sycophantic sort. But it is also a refreshingly legitimate way of being, from my point of view. If you're not writing songs, start now. If you're not performing, start now. You have to already be doing it. You don't need to ask for anyone's permission, you don't need a consensus, you don't need a vote, and you don't need a push. You don't even need a band. Do it, or give up.

In Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman's character has a parole hearing near the end of the movie where he says that if he could go back and talk some sense into his younger self's mind, he would. One can speculate as to what he might say. If I were to alter my own history with any sort of 'future wisdom', I would not go back to the night of my arson, or to the nights I vandalized Lady X's car. I find such an idea somewhat insulting, to be frank. I already knew and believed that arson, vandalization, & targeted victimization are intrinsically disruptive and emotionally traumatizing, and I know and believe that forcing trauma upon a person is wrong. I am not trying to dispute the wrongness of my actions, nor was I when I committed them.

No; if I were to give my past self any advice I would say two things: 1) ditch your band mates immediately; and 2) if a bank ever raises your credit card payment by a factor of 5, just stop paying them-- since life has a way of making avalanches out of the strangest things.

But at first, right when I got out [of the military], things were looking good. I felt good. Calmness descended on me as I allowed my hair and beard to grow more naturally. The minutiae of my daily life no longer depended on the whims of older men whom I could not admire; whom I, in fact, had come to despise. And I would not be forced to serve that new enigma, the war-on terror. It still feels good to think of that. I know most Americans think the war on terror is a good idea. I think it just makes more and worse terror the same way the war on drugs has made more and worse drugs.

The first things I concerned myself were, typically, employment and housing. I could have stayed with my parents; in fact, probably should have, but I had become unaccustomed to living with them, their values, and some of their expectations. My father also had the classically paternal idea that grown offspring need to assert their independence or risk becoming a drain on their parents forever -- and I agree, to the extent that if employment and cost of living are reasonable there should be no reason a young adult cannot achieve independence rather easily -- and being so inclined (he) would enact certain "house policies" intended to incentivize my flight from the nest. These included, not surprisingly, chores, rent, mandatory employment or enrollment in school (which required employment by itself), and a never-ending stream of sarcastic remarks aimed at my behaviour, goals, and values.

And I think this is fairly typical behaviour for a father although I can't foresee myself behaving thusly. I suppose the son usually fights back, as I've seen in others' homes. But I never challenged or otherwise much engaged my--father because he was so ill. I probably should have asserted myself more around him. Hepatitis C had such drastic effects on his energy, his psyche, and his personality that I felt challenging him might actually help to kill him faster. Hence, we never really grew to know or respect each other in ways that I can only guess are more healthy and normal. We speculated over one another from a distance, as do countries in a cold war. This caused a disharmonic environment at home that I could not easily endure. I adopted a mask when at my parents' home - a sort of version of myself with all the volumes turned down, opinions put on hold, and problems I dealt with set aside.

(I do not mention my mother at this stage because her and I seem to think much more alike in terms of the individual's value as a resource for his or her family and vice versa. My father's illness was the monkey wrench in the health of the entire family system, and despite it, he made serious sacrifices in remaining the provider he was. He cared, and my mom, like my sister and I, was a second-hand victim of the disease. The nuances of all the subtle interplays in our family were a lifelong experience that could probably account for our more cerebral take on everything.)

So my father didn't want me to be a freeloader. He wanted me to have a job. If I were to move out, which I desperately wanted to do, I would need a job. If I wanted to go to college I would need a job, and I would need a job to buy performance and recording gear. There is nothing uncommon or noteworthy about any of this -- when I got out of the service, the first thing I needed to do, regardless of what I may have chosen to do for the rest of my life, was to get a job. I thought jobs were the only way to make a living.

So I put myself in job-mode. In resume mode. False-optimism mode. I felt I needed to cultivate that certain momentum, to be able to upsell myself to anyone at a moment's notice; be able to switch into cheery, fake-Bryan and temporarily forget about the things I cared about most because those things had never gotten me jobs before. And what’s more: I even had a decent job history for a 21-year--old. I was primed to hit the ground running.

From the ages of 16-18 I had worked my way into managing a few shifts a week at a local pizzeria -- which is impressive for someone who's not allowed to vote, buy cigarettes or alcohol, or be granted a status deserving of full human rights.

Then after High School I got a day-job in the admin department of a temp agency -- the sort you see on craigslist ads demanding "5 years experience or more, " which is total crap: a family friend needed someone to fill in for her while she recovered from a hysterectomy, and after failing to train four, more qualified individuals than myself, she turned to me as a last resort. I learned the job in 3 days. The agency liked me so much they wanted me to stay on. I handled payroll and a huge temporary employee database. It was unnerving to see people in their thirties and forties lining up and applying to be placed by this company, while I, a 6'2" bean pole in an old suit of his father's, sat in the middle of the office, bobbing his head to Korn songs; the would-be processer of their incomes. I could practically smell their frustration, and speaking of frustration, it'd be 9 years before I had a job as good or high-paying as that again.

These, of course, were followed by my military escapades - and even those weren't so bad, I thought, from the view of a prospective employer. The ability to learn a third language demonstrated a level of cognition that any company can benefit from, and the exacting demands of marine culture also cultivated an ability to comply with the most ridiculous of requests, a trait I have observed to be in high demand no matter where you are working (though employers do not generally appreciate this observation during interviews).

And despite all that; despite everything I've been building up to thus far; despite all my plans and mental efforts, the first thing I actually did when I got home was catch the worst flu of my life. A sweaty, feverish, hallucination- inducing period of weeks that changed the way I thought about myself forever afterward.

Most are familiar with the headaches, fatigue, and drowsiness associated with a strong flu. The alternating sweats and chills, the harshness of the throat and the pained labor it takes just to swallow. There is coughing, sneezing, a risk of pneumonia, and congestion, which forces one to breathe through the mouth; particulates in the air grazing at the insides of the neck as if a coarse sandpaper; scraping and drying, scraping and drying, making swallowing all the more difficult. And there is the infuriating necessity to drink pint after pint of water, only to sweat it by the quart and piss it by the gallon, each drop taxing hydration, and thereby the level of pain in the skull, all the more.

Illness is a sudden, emergency expense incurred against the economy of the body; usually such a one as its inhabitants -- cells, organs, proteins and the like -- had not adequately planned for, which must be paid in the oldest of currencies, energy itself. One finds a range of financial options available to him or her in the fight against this debt; he could conserve, using all of his resources to draw down the principle until it's completely gone, or she might make smaller payments, using what's left to attend to daily necessities, taking the illness with her, and for a longer period of time. In both cases, the illness propagates in the body, much the way interest propagates a balance. Sometimes energy has already been devoted to a cure, and access to this effort can be purchased with more abstracted currencies, while disease, for its part, investigates loopholes around these efforts, much like a corporation's evolution in the tax climate. Sometimes these assistance programs aren't effective enough against an ever-changing foe. Occasionally they even help make it more of a nuisance.

And I don't know how much of our bodies' strategies are due, collectively, to will, or conscious choice. When I get sick, I can't do much of anything but lay down and just hope I get better before I lose the will to live altogether. Fighting lethargy is bad enough of a struggle all its own; the last thing my system needs is a flu, or a cold, or even a headache to tax my strength of character even more.

But this flu was especially memorable. Its untimely arrival at such a happy point in my life forecast a dark cloud on the future of my endeavors, and its duration bordered nigh on ridiculousness: while under its effects I read the Dune series in a single sitting. The whole damned, bizarre series. I took breaks; expansive, leisurely breaks, to eat, drink, use the bathroom, and access my media library, not to mention sleep, which I spent more than half of my time doing, so I thought I'd recover before the end of the first book. It happened to be a--book that was just sitting there. But I didn't. I just stayed sick. For weeks.

And I had fever dreams. Waking ones.

I. Auditory

I was three-fourths into Dune Messiah when the first one happened. I had been sleeping on a couch in the basement rather than my bedroom, possibly as a means to force myself to get up more often, in the hopes it might trick me into feeling better. Maybe I was simply tired of my room for scenery, but I had been napping when something woke me up. Before I opened my eyes I realized there was a song in the air. A choral arrangement of a sort.

In my memory I see the singers as a choir of nuns. In my memory there is a jovial, old fashioned quality to the voices, an emphatic zeal, a distinctly goose-like annunciation to the syllables in the tune, and other things which remind me of singers at a church. But when I attempt to recall the tune itself, I remember quite distinctly that there was no tune -- in fact, the words were chanted in a whisper. And the chanters were smiling -- you can really tell when a person is smiling, the upturned corners of the lips affect the formants in the words -- and it seemed they were smiling because they were playing with me on a sort of intellectual level. As if the chanters knew they had woken me up, and knew that they weren't really there.

These whispery voices numbered perhaps a dozen or so. They were feminine -- nunly, as I said -- and surprisingly seductive, a quality which shifted my thoughts from nuns to witches. But not your wart-y, old, gray witches -if that's what you were imagining -- these were auburn, golden, and black-haired; young and beautiful; keeping in mind that I could only glean this information from the quality of their whispers. They were also hooded, I think; their words were direct but muted, and this made me think about the similarities between nuns and witches, and there are plenty of superficial ones.

But stranger than the voices was the message. Stranger still, to me, that their words were intelligible. In dreams, sometimes, the more you pay attention, the less you understand. Here, I could focus in on what was said, listen to it, understand it, and even write it down. And I did. It's the reason I can remember the event at all. I had forgotten it, like a dream, until I saw the words I'd scribbled on a napkin on the couch-side coffee table:

Whine is whine,

is wit with wine.

My task at transcription had been easy. The orators had repeated the phrase like a Mandela. And it was all just so zany. To an observer it would have appeared that I opened my eyes, sat up briefly after a minute or two, wrote a few lines of verse, then laid back down and fell asleep again. Exhaustion fought curiosity, and, satisfied I could investigate the message when I was better, I listened to the girls until I lost consciousness. I suppose whispery voices would prompt most to investigate. I didn't feel the slightest bit of alarm.

Later, when I first pondered the verse, my first questions concerned of plagiarism. Honestly; I thought they were cool lines and of using them in a song or something. And I wondered who the author of the lines was. Me? My sub-conscious? Had I heard them before and unwittingly ripped them off? I knew the voices had been imaginary, so I decided that if I had hallucinated them I had also hallucinated the words themselves, which had a word-salad quality to them while retaining some ambiguity of meaning.

And I found the meaning interesting as well.

The voices were womens', so I considered it as coming from the feminine perspective (or my projection of the feminine perspective), and I considered the first line. I considered what whining meant in the context of my life experience. Whine is whine, as they had said.

Obviously the definition of whining points to a child-like, immature protest, or a complaint, especially when done in a whiny voice -- the high pitched wail parents are so fond of -- but society has largely drifted to using it to describe almost any form of criticism at all. Now, I had often griped about the marine corps while I was enlisted. My ex-fiancée had even once accused me of blaming all of my life's problems on the marine corps, so I was interested in seeing whether these problems would follow me into civilian life or not (they didn't). But she wasn't the only woman to offer counter-opinions to my criticisms.

Other women were fond of telling me that the only person who could change my situation was me. And I actually really liked hearing that advice -- it was empowering, and it usually got me thinking in a more action-oriented way -- but it was also dehumanizing in the sense that it was a polite way of dismissing what I considered to be a serious conversation about satisfaction, happiness, dignity, and how those ideas might apply to institutional procedure.

Sometimes I would retort.

"You mean to say that I need to find my own solution to my problems," I might say. And they would nod approvingly. "And if my problem is my enlistment, it's my responsibility to find a way to terminate it."

At this point the nodding would stop abruptly -- always -- and I would hear something along the lines of, "No, you need to change your perspective."

My perspective, I wondered? Surrender my will to the status quo? That always struck me as a very un-feminine, pre-feminist notion. And that, I suppose, was the core of my issue; where does society draw the line between a happy society and a happy individual? What is sacrificed first? Why? Would slaves have been happier changing their perspective? What if America were asked to 'change its perspective' on the causes of and solutions to terrorism? Should I have asked my critics to change their perspective on my perspective? Would they have done it?

Or let's apply the idea to crime. Tell the rape victim to change his *or* her perspective on the acts forced upon them. Or the families of a murder victim to change theirs. Or how about all the arson victims? No one's asking - them to change their perspective because it's a completely untenable request.

This hallucination isolated a clearly embedded association in my psyche, one that I had somehow picked up as a young adult, which said, essentially, that most women do not want to listen to my point of view. I had developed a perception that women objectified me as a man who shouldn't talk, only shut up or change his perspective. And I resented that. The hallucination actually helped me identify this pattern of thought. Was it true? Hard to say. Either way I developed a compromise with it. Perhaps a repudiation should have been in order but I thought a repudiation would be to deny the perspective altogether, or in other words, make the same mistake. I also considered that I might be so different from other men that women might have a hard time placing me, which could understandably cause some confused emotions. Also, because I had met so few women who seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to me, I thought I could very well end up in a relationship with someone who just wasn't talkative.

The second line threw that whole train of thought for a loop. The phrase acquired compounded ambiguity with the addition of that second line, 'is wit with wine.' To express the sentence mathematically, I could perceive it two different ways.

The first was 'wit + wine = whine', meaning that wittiness or cleverness can become a burden with the addition of alcohol. A smart, funny man may lose his composure while drunk and become a bore, or even a nuisance, to his friends, wife, coworkers, or whatever combination of the three; and this did match the attitude of the domineering-woman archetype sitting in my psyche. Perhaps she was the female projecting of all the authoritarian institutions in my life, or maybe I had grown up believing that women have certain expectations of men, and was realizing, as I became an adult myself, that I didn't live up to them. My growing disenfranchisement with American culture was a strong indicator that I could never be the prince charming type, the superman type, the boy-next-door type, or others, and this foretold a lonely future for yours truly.

Now, because English can use the same phrase to say 'whine + wine = wit', I couldn't help but rethink the whole idea of whining and wittiness, or of the line between criticism and humor. Comedians traversed this line all the time, sometimes masterfully, I wasn't one myself, but perhaps I could draw inspiration from how they noticed things, and, basically, complained about them without coming across as naggers. I considered the confidence in the delivery, for instance. I considered the emotional distance from the problems they talked about or made fun of, the muted, sedated, analytical mind behind the face of the comic. I recognized that mind.

I realized that the same phrase, "whine is whine, is wit with wine," could either make me feel guilty for being critical of all the "little injustices" that added up in my life and the lives of others, or it could make me feel empowered to say something meaningful, if not even funny, about them. I settled on the latter interpretation. For the hecklers out there, I even created a hybrid rule to satisfy my solution to both interpretations: Where action is possible, talk is cheap. Where action is impossible, whining is okay, but do it with wit. And plenty of wine.

For whatever reason I felt that I had answered the 'riddle' of this hallucination correctly. The chanting girls had given me a message that could either haunt me or help me. I think the 'nunly' interpretation would have been the guilt-ridden, haunting one, while the 'witch-y' interpretation was the one I settled on. My solution was a pragmatic appeasement to both points of view. In the good-evil paradigm, my answer was none-of-the-above, which from good's perspective is still evil and from evil's perspective is just plain baffling -all of the 'damnation' for a fraction of the 'fun' -- but to me, it's satisfying.

II. Visual

I had made some headway into God Emporor of Dune, to give the reader some semblance of a time reference with the above, and I was sleepy. I was sweating a lot. I was beginning to feel very bored with my flu, or whatever it was. On the bright side, I had been able to set up my computer and browse the internet. Of late I had discovered a collaborating network of British musicians who shared some of their work on a curious website whose name I no longer remember. 'Musician' is a loose term; I considered them to be musicians of a very high and abstracted order, but the layperson would almost certainly think that their art was merely noise -- the organizing theme of the network was that music required no melody, no beat, no rhythm; no order at all, so it was very strange. It was not even dreamlike. It was pre-dreamlike; hypnagogic, even scary. I dubbed it electrotrash. I even tried experimenting with the style a few times, but I had trouble going that far out of the box.

One of the mp3s was so large my computer had enormous -trouble streaming it. The website had no accompanying text, but the file name implied that it had come from a sort of live concert. I could not imagine going to an electrotrash concert. That was something I could see myself enjoying very much. The artists all knew each other; I had an image of electrotrash as a tiny movement, restricted to a single city, county, townfolk, or whatever. I wished I could meet them. At present I was stuck in my parent’s basement, cashless and sick.

My computer had been buffering every few seconds trying to play the song, so I had paused the track prior. I believe it was an hour and fifteen minutes long. Finding the file ready at present, I decided I would lay down and listen to the whole thing.

Various medias have captured the mood I was to hear. Authors of such have largely been Japanese -- leading to a personal theory that the combination of overcrowding and technology in Japan has produced a higher instance of a certain kind of mind with which I identify. Japanese movies, television shows, and books often depict protagonists experiencing intense depression and paranoias, often involving superstitious projections. They make me feel like I am not alone. I have not seen many of these kinds of protagonists in English-speaking media.

But I was hearing the same sort of mood in this electrotrash. It was welcoming. And frightening. Calming and scary at the same time. Boring and intense. Sleep inducing as well as awakening. When I am around a girl I like it is a bit like that. There is a simultaneous alienness and a feeling of being at home. It has a very sedative quality on me. When I ponder the alien feeling I am struck with an intense interest in even the most mundane of activities the girl may participate in -- almost as if I were gathering information for a report to my home planet.

(The humans have a day called an 'errand' day. It is a different day of the week for each human. These errand days have a quality which the humans call 'boring' and is a source of embarrassment to them, since they feel responsible for maintaining an opposite quality of 'fun' when engaged with other humans, particularly members of the opposite gender; even more so when there is a mutual physical attraction. While participating in an errand day, a human can expect to travel longer distances than usual. In many respects, an errand day is indistinguishable from other days. Services and goods are bartered. Longer and more frequent occurrences of what are known as 'awkward silences' are witnessed to arise, but more subtle and intimate chances for humor occur as well. It is the author's opinion that the errand day is underutilized as a tool for socialization; even as a tool for facilitation of the thing they call romance...)

And, of course, when I ponder the home feeling I feel awash in security.

This music sparked the same. Fascination and calm. But it also had a terrifying quality that fed back into my fascination; for what, exactly, was terrifying about it? Why was it scary? Did it dial into a preconscious portion of my brain, frightening and exhilarating it? Rock and Roll in the 70s sounded like the devil's music to the old ears of its day, terrifying them in some fashion, and it went on and on like that through the decades. Today what has become termed classic rock is actually the post-modern era's folk music. Newer, stranger things adopt the banner of 'devilry,' although really there has never been a such devil's music in any time. Music is sort of a recent arrival on the human scene. I think it does dial into a preconscious portion of the brain, and freaks the crap out of it. If readers imagined suspending disbelief at a concert the way one might at a movie, they would find that the music has a magnified impact. Maybe that's why music is better "when you're high." The less frame of reference one has, the more music will intimidate.

For whatever reason, this recorded performance triggered or awakened that childhood part of me, the 'haunted house' feeling. The projected presence which used to cause it, my as-yet-unnamed tormentor, hung in the darkness of my room as a palpable danger. My eyes had already been shut for a quarter of an hour, as I lay listening to that demented and beautiful piece, and presently I found myself thinking of when I should open them. I wondered about the precise moment I would choose to confront the fear. An arbitrary one passed, of course, and, also of course, I found my room to be dark and empty as it had been before.

And then a curious thing happened. The fear decided to fight back.

Precisely at the moment I scanned my open closet, of all the painful cliche's, I hallucinated a giant hand; a six foot tall, dark, grey-orange hand, of the same 2-dimensional, shadowy quality that a sunspot has, and no sooner did I see it than it grew larger as if approaching me, which was so wholly unexpected and terrifying that I shut my eyes before I could even think.

That left me laying awkwardly with my eyes shut again. It was stupid closing my eyes, I thought. Had it been real it would have 'mauled' me anyway closing my eyes just made me blind as well as defenseless. What would I have seen if could have kept them open? I knew the hand hadn't actually been there. I missed out on something. The fear was still there, but it was just fear at nothing-- fear like at a scary movie. Open your eyes, I thought to myself. I disobeyed. Just open them. You'll see there's nothing there. Or better, you'll see something *is* there, something which could answer some questions about this fear you recognize every time you experience it but ignore every other moment. Just open them. I put up much more resistance than I expected.

I opened my eyes. There was nothing there.

The song continued to play but I didn't much feel like listening to it anymore. I felt really weak and tired; the flu was re-exerting itself, and sitting up was labored. My erratic screensaver shuffled its images at breakneck speed, the flickering suddenly agitating me. A lot of things were agitating me in that instant. I forced myself up and turned everything off. The fear was still there but it had become a nuisance. I locked my bedroom doors to appease it and tried to fall asleep. Eventually I succeeded.

III. A Delusional Insight

After I got better, I took a thorough shower. To the conspicuously clean reader: I had showered while I was sick, but it wasn't the same. This was to be the grandest shower I would undertake for months to come; a symbolic cleansing to mark my triumph against disease. An embarkment, a treat, a reward. Now my blood vessels would feel as clean as my skin, as would my nose, my throat, my lymph nodes, my lungs, my kidneys, my muscles, and whatever else one could imagine feels organically invaded throughout a bout of sickness.

And it was great as all that and more.

I would not really deign to mention it, however, were it not for a very unusual observation as I washed. I noticed that my hands were different. But I could not really discern what made them different. It were as if they had somehow been removed and replaced in the intervening weeks with what appeared to be a perfect imitation of the originals, except for the feeling of newness and strangeness. It was a difference that might have gone unnoticed were it not for the familiarity I had acquired with them as a musician.

And they really did seem different. Smaller, perhaps, or maybe longer and slightly more slender. Or did they seem younger? Softer? I checked for familiar scars and found them intact -- especially the long one on my left hand; I had accidentally sliced it open once. The hair on the back of my hand also seemed different but I could not ascertain how. I thought about how strange I might appear, standing in the shower staring at my hands. It was a waste of water, time, and brain-power.

So I finished and dried off, in the process noticing my hands again, sitting to ponder this perception of difference. It was like that Peanuts comic, "I've become aware of my tongue!" Every time an activity drew attention to my hands, I remembered the difference. My inner monologue said that this was ridiculous. And what would it mean, anyway? That my hands were someone else's? That the originals were on display somewhere? That aliens were up to something involving my hands? All preposterous. A tremendous waste of time. I was beginning to think that flu had really scrambled my brain.

A memory came to my awareness.

I remembered sitting on my parents' computer a year or two prior. It must have been during one of my leaves; when I would visit home. Perhaps it was when my father's liver failed in 2001. I had spent nearly two months looking into candidacy for live liver donation. They take half of a healthy liver, transplanting it into the sick or dying patient, and each half regenerates, both in the donor and the patient, to around 80% of the original liver size.

As it turned out, my liver has some abnormalities, including the addition of an extra arterial vein. I was a genetic match for my father, but my liver would not plug into his vascular system, I guess. That, or the doctor wasn't being straightforward. Perhaps my dad didn't want me to make so large a sacrifice and asked him to make a suitably vague excuse. When the subjective experience of two entirely different realities are the same, do you live in both at the same time?

In my free time I had been dorking around the internet. I must have been 19 years old. I was searching for first-hand accounts by family members of those afflicted with various forms of schizophrenia -- I was curious about how my grandmother's symptoms may have appeared to others. There was a small window of risk still open for me to exhibit signs of my own -- onset was rare in adulthood but not for younger adults -- and, I suppose, I just wondered what it might look like if it happened to me. I wondered what sorts of things I might need to look out for.

The only such account I found was written by the mother of a boy who developed, I think, a catatonic form of schizophrenia as he progressed from boy to teen to adult. His mother was very racked with conflicting and confused emotions which came through her prose as she detailed his decline in function. In my mind I thank her for writing the story because it helped me. I think that was what she had in mind -- not helping me specifically -- but giving others a potential for help, no matter how vague or unspecific. My own blog owes its existence in part to inspiration from her desire to share.

The boy's decline in function began to occur when he noticed a difference in his hands. It was a difference that the mother could not identify, a difference that existed purely in the boy's mind. Apparently the boy became very concerned with this difference; he could spend hours observing his hands, was distracted from tasks by his hands, and generally became infatuated with them. I don't quite remember the sequence of events or how they panned out, except that the boy was never the same again. Mostly I remember the phrase he was said to utter.

"These hands aren't mine."

And I remembered that because the same words flashed through my head after my shower, as I sat looking at my damn hands. I immediately recalled the boy, his mother, and that I had read her story.

I think I said, "holy shit."

Thought

One of the first things I noticed about prison is how much I preferred it to all of my previous jobs. I've been a bag boy, a pizza cook, a payroll supervisor, an Arabic cryptologic linguist, an operations assistant, a barista, a deli-cook, a delivery-boy, a restaurant manager, and an accounts payable clerk.

At first I though I was unsuited to my occupations in some way or that prison life was somehow more dignified than paycheck-to-paycheck living (I still think so). But lately I've been wondering if my happiness isn't due to an absence of money concerns. Now that I don't need it as much, I'm realizing that I really hate money and how it makes people behave.

Free from its effects, all of my bundled nerves are slowly unwinding, releasing little jolts of unexpected relaxation. I am learning that my body has a sort of proto-mind and something like a personality of its own. I wonder what it's been thinking about me all my life. I am losing all of my "stress fat." I had no idea I was so naturally thin. My muscles are becoming shapely and I'm hardly doing anything.

Money makes people forget that life is pleasurable.

Pillow Talk

"I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man's room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no backs, only what they wish to present to you. What had I done? What animal had I delivered into her? I had been speaking to her I think for over an hour. Had I been her demon lover?"

-- The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

I used to share what I think of as my strange thoughts with the woman I was engaged to. I had never had someone to talk about them with. I hadn't trusted many people before.

She was the sort of woman who is constantly surrounded by suitors disguised as shining knights. She knew the gnawing pain that comes with the constant discovery and rediscovery of her friends as mere competitors in what could be considered a game for her romantic affection; of catching nearly all she knew in lie after desperate lie. Many women lead such lives -- some crave the attention, others may be oblivious to it, and many more, I suspect despise it.

I don't know if I was really any different from the suitors at my core, but she chose me, surprising myself and others; perhaps even surprising herself. As an oddity among my peers, I appeal to a certain type of mind. I was also prudish, tended towards blunt honesty, and was perhaps a touch more naive than the average 20-year-old, which some may consider charming. I accidentally met a criteria she had independently developed for the perfect mate -- he had to possess musical ability, speak three languages, and to look dignified while brushing his teeth (she called it 'looking sexy' but it's hard to believe someone could ascribe that to me).

I loved her because of her flaws. She seemed more human than human to me. She had a very ungraceful gait due to over-sized feet, and was easy to talk to. She was not afraid to shave her head -- to cast off the traditional gender logic. She appreciated art and music as voraciously as I, although our tastes were markedly different -- that was okay. Such subtle differences serve to broaden horizons. It is good to spend time with people who are not like yourself. Better still to fall in love with such people. At least, that's the way I used to see it.

She also said the damnedest things. The damnedest things any woman had ever told me before.

She said that when she imagined her guy friends jerking off to pictures of her that she felt disgusted, but not when she imagined me doing it. That was her way of letting me know she was interested in me.

She invited me to watch animal sex specials on television when we were alone in our hotel room, which, back then, merely served to make me blush and unable to speak.

She said once that Wayne Coyne's beard reminded her of ass-hair.

She was incredibly candid -- which was alluring to me. She was ridiculous as she was flattering. New and refreshing. Her attitude made my negative self-perception melt away. She was also funny, smart, and thoughtful. And despite her awkwardness, very pretty.

As is traditional with an isolated Christian upbringing, I had denied my sexuality pretty thoroughly, with but a handful of lapses, and it had never even occurred to me that women could enjoy sex until my conversations with her seemed to indicate otherwise. I had that Victorian, or perhaps, neo-puritan notion of sex as some kind of chore -- one which women begrudgingly obliged their lovers for the sake of a relationship or to produce children. It's an old notion; an oft-harmful one, but it is ingrained into thousands of minds every day. Loneliness produced a false confirmation bias in myself. I suppose I thought that women would be more overt if they actually enjoyed male (re: my) company, and since they weren't, it seemed to me they didn't.

It's embarrassing to admit, but I have often resorted to faith in order to reverse this Victorian conditioning. It is hypocritical -- for an atheist to deny his nagging suspicion that he is a hideous unlovable creature merely because people say he is not -- to pretend to believe that his loneliness is somehow his own fault. That he sabotages his own life and doesn't realize it -- a self-fulfilling prophesy; a demon all over again; hideous and unlovable -- apparently only to himself. And yet he does love himself. It is the others who give him a wide berth. Why?

We shared many places, her and I. It was a long-distance relationship. She lived successively in Wisconsin, China & Chicago; I, in California, Texas & Hawaii. We talked on the phone, we IM'ed, wrote thousands of emails, texted, and planned romantic liaisons around my leave times and long weekends. We never had a house or apartment of our own. Instead, we had hotel rooms; guest bedrooms; diners in towns neither of us knew. Rented or borrowed cars. Our entire relationship had the auspice of impermanence. It loomed on the horizon as a raincloud does. We clutched together for as long as we could bear the pain of the distance. Being less skilled in the art of loneliness, she couldn't last as long as I. It is not an intentionally practiced skill. Not typically. Particularly among the young.

But I especially appreciated how readily she accepted and respected my mind. My thoughts. In hindsight I realize she regarded me as something like a work of art. My friends and family have said that she would constantly steal glances at me when I wasn't looking, as if to confirm that I was really there. She told me that I became more and more beautiful to her. She had an overwhelmingly positive effect on me. She quelled the hatred I felt as a teenager. Snuffed it right out like a candle. She knew just what to do -- as if to arrive and simply ask, "no one's done anything about this burning fire here?" And then swallowed it whole. She softened me forever, an effect which lasted even after we stopped communicating. I would probably have not become a Pacifist if it weren't for her influence -- ironic because she did not believe in Pacifism herself. Her influence on me may have even made us less compatible in the long run. I believe she liked the angry me.

Regardless, we were engaged. When she returned from China she brought me two gifts -- a tiny jade mouse and a wedding band. Since we didn't know my size I sent her a piece of string that I had tied around my ring finger. She, then, stuck a rolled piece of paper through the hoop of string and used it as a guide for the jeweler.

And I used to share my strange thoughts with her.

Spending listless hours together, as I believe most couples do, we bathed in each other's warmth against the night air, sharing quirks or personal revelations, nude or near nude, half in dream. We helped one another understand those threads of humanity; how they interweave, unravel, or sometimes cut and fray. We laughed. We enjoyed each other's company. Inspired one another. Critiqued one another's work, ideas, and philosophies.

She once told me about a theory she developed, wherein the sum of one's personality could be described in terms of three colors; no more, no less. I was blue, green and brown -- the colors of a forest meadow; she, yellow, white and green -- perhaps with some red, but that would have violated the 'three' rule. I had a similar habit of assigning colors to people but I usually just chose one per person. I have found that some of my friends do the same. Do you, reader?

I described to her a feeling I would sometimes get whenever a stranger flashed me a knowing smile. I tended (or perhaps, pretended) to wonder if the person was really a time-traveler from the future, desirous of catching a glimpse of me from the era before I became...whatever it is I thought I would become. A rock star, I suppose. I suppressed such thoughts, meaning that I did not act on them or acknowledge them publicly when they arose, but they arose. A kind of delusion of grandeur -- as if I thought I were a temporal tourist destination.

I described how it was becoming harder and harder for me to believe in free will. I didn't understand how a future could exist without the present - its past -- being as unchangeable as our own past. I often felt distracted by how each of my actions were limited by their preceding moments and constricted to their future ones; how everything I did was already being done as I was doing it. My prophetic deja vus complicated this; when I tried to change the events of my dreams as I re-lived them I found myself merely confirming the dream-wherein-I-tried-to-change-the-dream, remembering the attempt itself, feeling tricked by my apparently (and uselessly) psychic subconscious, not quite believing what I was experiencing.

I described how I sometimes pretended that eye-contact caused people to suddenly and instantly switch souls.

Strolling down a corridor at work, I might accidentally catch someone's eye. I might wonder to myself what their life might be like compared to mine, and I'd pretend our eye-contact provided an answer. I used to avoid unnecessary eye-contact. I still avoid smelling people I don't enjoy talking to.

"Wouldn't you remember if you switched bodies with people all the time?" she asked. Everyone asks. Her smile and her eyes suggested the words, 'you silly, silly man.' I loved that expression of hers.

But see, my crazy hat is just as smart as the rest of me; it knows that memories are stored in the body, not the soul. The switch is so instantaneous and complete that you do not even notice. At most you feel a slight rush of excitement, of fear, or anxiety. Eye contact can cause funny behavior in people. Why should that be so? Some people are a joy to make eye contact with; others, not so much. Friends and lovers, making eye-contact often, feel intimate and at home with one another. Some people never make eye-contact with you. You can tell from a distance that you do not want them to.

Such thoughts led to others.

Considering the atrocities in Rwanda I had heard about -- was it Rwanda? I cannot remember. Abstracting the concept of the soul. I didn't know if I believed in heaven or hell anymore. My Christianity was a tattered rag, though the phrase 'God is dead and no one cares' could still make my stomach turn, depending on my mood (or how 'screwed' I was feeling). I was specifically concerned with hell. I hadn't pondered eternity often, but I couldn't believe that any punishment could deservingly last forever. If Hitler, to beat a dead metaphor, suffered 15 million lifetimes of torment for his crimes, that would not have put a dent on eternity, and I could not believe in a God that would condemn any thinking entity to such a place. It was literally the most brutal act I could imagine. I would have rather gone to hell myself than exist in heaven with such a monster.

But did that make me more forgiving than God? Me, the lethargic wraith? The demon in human clothing? The man whose brain chemistry locked him in Dante's outermost layer of sombre, tranquil hell? The one reserved for philosophers? Diet hell? Hell lite?

I couldn't get a certain image out of my mind.

I'm beginning to realize that we -- humans that is -- tend to use self-delusion to reconcile our ideals to the apparent reality of our world. I, for instance (and I suspect that I'm not alone in this) hold an ideal that most people are gentle-natured, fair, rational in their own way, and diplomatic. Even people who espouse violence as a solution to their lives' problems are violent only seldomly. When exceptions arise, they are punished with zeal. When they can't be, it seems people hope that someone, or something else, will do it for them.

Being no exception then, I taxed my mind in the following way: I wanted to rationalize my desire for an alternative to hell as a means for 'cosmic justice' while at the same time accounting for the brutal stories one inevitably hears of -- of genocide, of serial murder, of mass rape; forms of coercion -- or in the cases I'd been hearing about, all of the above -- of guerrilla soldiers descending upon villages in the night and mutilating those they find, stripping them of the flesh in their breast; cutting their faces, genitals, I mean, what was the point? They were irrevocably disturbed! Such soldiers are often drugged against their will and conscripted into military service as children. Did they believe they were punishing these innocents for the crime of escaping guerrilla servitude? Where do the madmen come from who create such armies, and what made them mad?

Why did I find it necessary to create a concept of cosmic justice? To cope with feelings of powerlessness, perhaps? Impotence to rid the world of wrong? Of unnecessary suffering? I don't know. I still felt that no one deserved hell, not even the very worst of us. Hitler, Stalin, Bin Laden, etc. Charles Manson.

You get the idea.

But what could people accept in hell's place? What could I accept in hell's place? These paragraphs crossed my mind one spent night.

I considered reincarnation. In the past I had pondered reincarnation as a possible explanation for my sadness. I wondered if I were being punished for a forgotten misdeed from a past life, or, perhaps, an accumulation of past lives. I often asked myself what sort of action would deserve such an all-pervading malaise. I really had no gauge for comparison. A recollection of the misdeed may have helped but I considered that part of the 'punishment', may in fact have been an oblivious nature to the scope of my deeds in the first place.

I also considered my confusion about time and free will. It is widely accepted, for instance, that time is non-linear. Past doesn't necessarily come before present, which doesn't necessarily come before future. Could reincarnations also be non-linear, I wondered? Could a person live a life into the future, then the past, then the present -- or for that matter, multiple lives at the same time?

My thoughts were still with the village women; the maimed victims left for dead, and of their mind-altered attackers. And of non-linear reincarnation. I thought, in that instance, that a fair justice would be for the attacker to reincarnate as his own victim -- or victims, one at a time -- after his death. And after that thought, it was only a small stretch to consider another and ancient thought; a vastly popular thought, but as alien a one to me at the time: What if there was only one consciousness? What if this consciousness lived every single life that has ever lived? Experienced every pain, every sorrow; perpetuated every crime and suffered as every victim? But more than that -- experienced every joy, wrote every song, sang it, sold it, bought it, experienced it anew time and time again (perhaps even remembering, in some mysterious way) -- and every book, every painting, every meal, every conversation, every single idea -- buildings, humans, animals, insects, rocks, gems, dirt, trees, water, air -- every aspect of the cosmos -- everything would be accounted for by such experience.

It was God's own worldview.

Was that what the soul truly was? God's direct experience of human life? Of any life? Fractions of God's awareness? Now there was a heretical idea. It reminded me of what I had heard about Eastern religion -- not that I had heard much -- and the doors to my mind felt blown right off their hinges.

It was different from any religious idea I'd ever encountered. It made the whole concept of heaven and hell seem like a children's game. For a few moments I didn't quite realize what I was suggesting to myself. A kind of justice that wasn't just balanced, but which had a kind of beauty. It had always seemed somewhat aloof to me that God would make all of these creatures and allow such strange and horrible things to happen to them -- then blame it on ancestral sin, greater purposes; what have you.

But if the 'witness' -- the me that experiences myself, the you that experiences yourself -- was not really "us" at all; but something altogether different...if God himself personally witnessed and experienced every life that ever happened, he'd be paying for his own mistakes, so to speak. That was much more sacrificial than anything Jesus purportedly did -- or was it the same story? The same ideology?

And as an omniscient mind, he would necessarily know what he was getting into. Did that void the sacrificial aspect? Perhaps the victim reincarnated as her attacker -- was that how God learned to forgive...himself? I liked that idea. Did he intentionally forget in order to re-learn? Did the joy of discovery serve a greater function than the discovery itself? Was that part of the mystery of life?

I conceived an entirely different mental image of God from the one I had always known. I saw a vast intelligence - unmatched, unparallelled - and completely alone. I could see him traveling backwards, forwards, even 'sideways' in time in order to interact with himself. Could he cut himself into pieces? Divide infinity in half and you have two measures of infinity. Could he do that infinite times? Would he wipe his own memory, reprogram himself -- what would such a thing even spend its time doing?

Would he spend an eternity in hell to prove a point? Would he role-play as the devil to give himself something to do? I shared these ideas with her as well.

It's sort of sad -- I really liked those ideas of mine, but eventually I decided they were mad. Christians don't want to hear them, atheists didn't want to hear them, and agnostics liked them but could only shrug their shoulders at them. And that was it. Life moved on. I had more pressing concerns.

I considered that I might have the sort of mind that could start a cult -- and I feared myself. Cult leaders have always been madmen. Horrible, corrupted, manipulators of the lost. A part of me felt like it could be easy to do. Somehow this shifted my perspective on religion. I felt like I had gained a profound insight into what God might really be -- and I could see pieces of it in other religions. These are the aspects which coerce people into behaving in ways they might never otherwise behave. The corrupted aspects, the hypocritical aspects. The power-hungry aspects.

And I learned to hate power. To hate coercion. To hate deception.

I thought, perhaps, that this inner voice of mine was a shadow of my paternal grandmother's schizophrenia. It was a relief to feel like I could brush it aside. Dismiss it. Keep from publicly acknowledging it.

Lava cools and creates a surface shell. It is safe to touch. Inside is another story.

Thought - Spirit of Nonconvention

A year and a month (and a day and an hour) before I was sentenced, the fates, as I have termed them, told me that I was a spirit of nonconvention. They gave my life a grade: C+. Sometime later that night, I died in my car. Later still, a convulsion revived me. I could tell by Orion's new position in the sky that between 2 and 3 hours had passed since I'd last closed my eyes.

52 Reasons to Buy My Music - #s 5, 6 and 7

5. Ghandi probably would have bought my music.

6. My best friend is gay and we totally got trashed at a gay bar the night before I went away. It'd be sort of cool if gay bars nationwide picked one of my songs and closed the night with it every July 30th.

7. I really wish I could participate in some way towards making Denver a greater cultural contributor -- it needs bolder and more eccentric artists of every variety.

Exodus II

My non-judicial hearing occurred September 11, 2003; no mere coincidence. The acting CO for the 1st Radio Battalion made every effort he could to insinuate that the money I'd spent acquiring marijuana had fallen directly into terrorist hands. I didn't feel the need to point out how stupid that sounded considering the facts; after all, I had heard dumber things fall out of the mouths of officers (as they tend to), and I wanted to play up the perception of my captors. I thought it would increase my likelihood for a successful expulsion.

I had turned myself in for drug abuse two months prior. After a weekend pot-binge, I asked to speak privately with my platoon Sergeant. We went outside to a stairwell which served a dual purpose as a smoking area. I lit a cigarette and pondered how I should begin to unravel my career as a Marine linguist. I still had a chance to take the easy way out. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and nothing would happen; I was certain of that -- in two and a half years I had only been drug tested once. A knot of anticipation grew in my stomach. I had to say something. Why was I so afraid of freedom? Was it because I couldn't believe it was actually within my grasp?

Fortunately, he broke the silence first. That made it easier.

"So, Day. What's up?"

I'd actually known the guy for a long time. He learned Persian-Farsi at the same language school I learned Arabic, the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He was in charge of my platoon then, as well. We'd seen each other drunk, played guitar together. He organized a few parties that would have gotten a lot of people in trouble if it weren't for "unit cohesion." I'd been drinking at his house only weeks prior, met his wife, played The Rain Song for the two of them on his guitar. That made it easier, too. Coincidences, right?

"I've been smoking pot." I told him. I said it. Now, things could never be the same, or so I thought.

"Oh," he said. Or would they? "What do you want me to do about it?" The lines between coworker, boss, and friend are confusing at times. I must have thought; god damn it, I have the only cool Sergeant in the whole damn battalion.

I answered with a question of my own. "Well, what are you supposed to do about it?"

He replied with a grin, "tell someone, I guess."

"Do that. Please."

There was an awkward period of silence. It wasn't painfully awkward; maybe a few seconds passed while he processed what I was asking him to do. "You're serious? You're really doing this?" I think I smiled. He and I had had many heated debates over my growing inability to perform military duties, my disenfranchisement, my disbelief in the war, the disgust I felt towards some of my peers' vehement enthusiasm for "killing ragheads," not to mention my growing belief in Pacifism, which he insisted was only an act due to my lack of religious conviction.

Suddenly he said, "well, I'll miss 'ya." Then we shook hands. "This is going to cause a shitstorm. You're serious about this?"

"Yes," I told him. It was nice having someone who understood me nearby, then. I think I thanked him. I can't remember.

He walked down the stairwell and I watched as he crossed a large, grassy field, then disappeared into a building 200 yards away. I lazily finished my cigarette. Afterwards, I sat in his office, waiting for the phone call I knew would arrive at any minute. When it did, I was calm, ready, collected. I stayed that way till I left.

The hearing really was a strange affair. Without intending to, I had picked the perfect time to turn myself in, as my battalion was in the midst of a change of command. In the interim period, my platoon Sergeant was the acting platoon commander, the platoon commander was the acting company 1st Sergeant, and the company 1st Sergeant was the acting Battalion Sergeant Major. To the layperson: my immediate supervisors were filling in for their bosses' jobs in the short period that existed between the old bosses leaving and the new bosses arriving. I don't think it's usually done that way but it worked to my advantage.

Here's how: marijuana use isn't considered as serious a deal as it used to be, mainly because too many people are caught using it -- it would affect troop strength too significantly to kick out everyone who used it. In my case, my supervisors all knew, more or less tacitly, my situation and why I wanted out of the military. I believe they did everything in their ability to help me get out (either that or they really thought I was bad for the Corps; in either case I agree with their judgment). This suspicion of mine is due, in part to the fact that the base drug and alcohol counselors had never heard of me and hinted at an "under-the-table" process when I talked to them (whatever that could mean), and because, compared to other drug offenders, my status remained relatively high among staff until I was discharged. While never publicly acknowledged, I detected an air of respect from my supervisors. (It's mutual.) I even stole a portrait of my company 1st Sergeant (and named a song after him) in order to remember my gratitude.

The hearing was strange because the new command was all in place by the time it occurred. The Sergeant Major that presided was a gigantic black man with arms the size of thighs. He was a whole head shorter than me but could have probably thrown me twenty feet if he felt so inclined. The commanding officer who acted as a judge-of-sorts, was old, grey, and inexplicably snakelike. There were six or seven others in the room; four I had never seen before, all high ranking, and 2 or 3 from my own command. I don't remember many details. Long paragraphs were read aloud, and I felt simultaneously eager and bored. I also remember having to fart, a most untimely predicament for such environments. That made me seem impatient when I really wasn't.

The new guard seemed to have the impression that I had smoked the pot for its own sake, so they made a big deal about lost futures and missed opportunities, all for the sake of a moment's high. It suddenly dawned on me that this may have been an image concocted by my superiors in order to facilitate a speedier discharge. They remained silent throughout the proceeding. Finally the officer/judge-faker asked me if the pot had been any good.

I thought; what a weird question to ask. Inappropriate, even.

I had smoked it at a beach on base. MCBH (Marine Corps Base Hawaii) has a host of wonderful beaches that I used to explore. If you stand still for a few minutes, huge crabs emerge from nooks and crannies in rock formations. I would swim for hours, gloomily, chasing my own fear and pushing myself further and further out to sea. I had once found a Connecticut coin from the 18th century hidden in a crevasse of lava-rock, only to lose it when I slipped on another formation on the beach. Coral structures have claimed small pieces of my thumb and back. I chased fish, and found myself surrounded by schools of them at times. The waters have both coddled me and dragged me over rocks. The ocean seems to have its own personality at times. The beach became my friend. I never saw any sharks, dolphins, whales, or sea turtles; or anything larger than a foot, but they may have been nearby. While swimming, I always felt as if observed.

That evening, I didn't swim. I smoked as much as I thought I would need to in order to inundate my system, then felt surprise at just how potent the stuff was. Oh, it was potent. I don't actually enjoy pot very much, but the body high soon gave way to that hazy dopey-ness and a mild cheer. My eye-lids grew heavy although I wasn't tired, and each time I blinked my perception of the world became as one giant, real-life cartoon. It was so unusual that I felt compelled to observe the effect more, and, as a consequence, I ended up walking around with my eyes closed more than open.

When I observed my own body with eyes closed, I became a pudgy, cartoon Hawaiian girl in a purple tube top, yellow flower-print shorts, and sandals. That was also quite unusual. Eyes open; tall thin marine. Eyes closed; short pudgy girl. Eyes open; a night-time stroll through a street on base. Eyes closed; a day-time stroll through cartoon Hawaii. The cartoonyness lasted about half an hour. The man-girl duality lasted several more.

About halfway to my barracks I noticed a group of leaves following me. It was really quite bizarre; they were dry, fall leaves which I could hear dragging in the wind behind me. When I stopped to turn and catch them in the act they would slow to a stop. Resuming my walk, they picked up after me. It really was something out of Alice in Wonderland. I felt ridiculous; I knew full well the leaves couldn't possibly be following me, and yet they persisted. It was too silly. Start, stop. Start, stop. I varied the pattern of my steps to thwart the apparent causality and each time it thwarted me back. What stupidity; I was beside myself with dualistic fantasy. But it was also fun. It was as if I were playing with nature itself, stupid as that may sound to the reader.

In a last ditch effort to shake the leaves from my trail, I burst into a run. The wind picked up in that exact moment, chasing after me with several fists full of leaves. I almost panicked, but I had a smirk on my face the whole time. After a hundred yards or so I stopped on a dime and turned to fact what I was beginning to perceive as a kind of ghost. The leaves tumbled to a stop (they really did), and I stared into the void, slightly bewildered. I couldn't see anything to account for the movement, except the pile of leaves itself. I was a little carried away -- I made a menacing stomp, and some of the leaves bounded backwards, as if startled. I giggled to myself. I was seriously high and it dawned on me then; and not for the first time that evening.

So when the commanding officer of my battalion asked me that day if the pot had been any good, I couldn't exactly lie to him. They had a field day with my answer. They hated me for that. The Sergeant Major's composure completely unraveled. My command was sweating and fidgeting. The room palpably darkened. I guess they thought I wouldn't answer. So why did he ask? What a creepy man.

I was demoted, twice, and given something like 3 months of extra duty with restriction. I was the lowest ranking person on Oahu. I took a sort of pride in that. My coworkers loved me; some nights they smuggled me off base, took me to beach parties or strip clubs, and always had me back in time to report for more extra duty, which included lawn mowing, bathroom cleaning, garbage sorting, weed pulling, shrubbery-cutting, sprinkler repair, dusting, mopping, and I can't even remember what else. I had 12 hour workdays, was only allowed to wear my camouflage uniform, and had a rigid check-in schedule.

But I was also given unique and unprecedented privileges. I reported directly to our new company first Sergeant, which meant I didn't really have anyone watching over me all day. I was exempted from almost all of my daily duties, having lost my security clearance and no longer being a training priority (although a loophole made me have to spend a week re-qualifying on the rifle range, anyway). And rather than being in a traditional platoon, I was attached to a strange squad of Sergeants and Staff-Sergeants, which somehow ended up being a much more relaxed environment than it sounds.

Usually, I was on phone-watch duty, which meant I sat by the phone in case someone important called, surfing the Internet.

Two days before Thanksgiving, I was called into the First Sergeant's office. A respectable Gunnery Sergeant was holding the job; I really liked the guy. "Day," he said. "I just got a phone call. You're really going to like this." I thought I might, but I didn't know what he was going to say; and I didn't know how much I would until he actually said it. "We have 48 hours to get you the fuck out of the Marine Corps." He said it exactly like that. And he was smiling.

It was one of those moments; I was excited, he knew I was excited. I knew he knew I was excited, he knew I knew that, etc.

I almost kissed the girl, the married, Mormon girl that I'd been harboring a crush on, in the hallway just outside his office.

Somewhere in the Marine Corps files is an order stating that I can never set foot on MCBH again. I'll never find that coin. Fair enough.

Thought

People like to say that men think about sex a lot. Sex is great and all, but I fantasize about other things more often; things that other people would probably consider incredibly boring, like sharing naps on the carpet in an window's sunlight, folding clothes that aren't mine, the silence of a shared chore; the sound of someone sleeping next to me. Moments such as these are much harder to come by than sex is. I have longed for them since childhood. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one; but with as many people as there are that's a laughable thought. Where are the others? My loneliness caused me unbearable pain. But society's message is clear as day: I deserve not love, but Prozac. At least Prozac comes in daily increments.

Exodus I

I've mentioned it in a few places; I got kicked out of the marines for smoking pot. I put off canceling my contract in such a manner for a very, very long time, considering the measure as a drastic, last of last resorts. I kept hoping that another opportunity would present itself, and it never did. I wanted out the day I found out I wouldn't learn the language of my choice. I had entertained notions at first that I had a sort of dual intention of serving the country and of learning Japanese, but the disappointment revealed to me, quite clearly, that I had never had an interest in being a marine for its own sake or in fulfilling any perceived duty. For me, the marine corps was a means to an end.

I think, perhaps, that in studying another foreign language I was trying to increase my options for successfully leaving the country and starting a life somewhere new after an honest go at the rock star dream. I entertained notions of returning to Germany but my language and education had atrophied (plus I was broke). I always find myself thinking of my disillusionment with the U.S. as a new phenomenon, brought about by new facts or situations, but no matter how far back I remember, the disillusionment remains. Perhaps I was also giving the marine corps a chance to prove my perceptions wrong.

I also never quite understood college in America; it's financial and scholastic requisites were unavailable to me, and I could never figure out how a person could be expected to work full time while going to school full time -- especially when jobs for high school graduates scarcely paid for housing and food. Presumably I would have had to work several jobs while going to school. I was already drowning in lethargy, existential crises, cruel depression and suicidal urge as a high school student; I honestly thought college might kill me.

While most consider the marine corps to be a tough gig, it's actually pretty simple, and my expectations in day-to-day living were accurate. The rules are easy; you don't have to worry about money or paperwork, and the American school system teaches the basics exhaustively: 1) pretend you are stupid, 2) do what you are told, whether it makes sense or not, 3) observe others and do not stand out, 4) appeal to the perceptions of those in authority, and 5) demonstrate physical prowess (a basic physical regimen will assure you do not make a fool of yourself).

While the prospect of subjecting myself to those rules for another five years was not particularly appealing (the length of the language school required an extra year of service), the disciplinary lifestyle appealed to me somewhat, and I liked the idea of leaving the marines in shape, debt free, and tri-lingual in English, German and Japanese. I knew adults who had gone to college to study Germany who were not a match for my childhood vocabulary so I figured that by the time I was finished, my experience would speak for itself and I wouldn't need a degree.

As for wanting to be a rock star, you don't need a degree for that either (and Weezer isn't a good band).

So those are a few more of my motivations for joining. At times a reader may find herself asking, "why did he join, again?" Or himself wondering, "what was he thinking?" Well, there you go. I was 17 when I pledged to join. What sort of life-altering decisions did you make in high school?

But I'm glad they kicked me out for pot. I feared I might have had to find something more dangerous, like coke or heroin. I took a gamble on pot and it paid off. I don't know why service members can't just cancel their enlistments at will. Presumably the logistical challenges of treating service members fairly, honestly, and with dignity is insurmountable, and the risk of losing our armed forces in the face of an unwise or unpopular attack would be pretty high. But is that so horrible? Isn't that exactly the way it should be in a free society?

I felt at the end of my rope. I had orders to Iraq. My ex-fiancee had left me. I was losing my mind and had been demonizing my peers and superiors for years. I didn't like where my mind was going. I have dozens of anecdotal military stories which document a steady decline in my fitness to serve. I was not the only one. There are countless anti-hero circles in the armed services. Their members are ticking time bombs. They have temporarily forgotten who they are, what they want in life, how to get it; what right and wrong even mean to them; and I was stuck right there with them.

I suppose I'm giving mixed reviews of my military experience. When I say that the "gig" of being a marine was easy, I mean that ironing, shaving, cleanliness, fitness, drill, uniform maintenance and marksmanship are all easy enough to maintain to a point, even if I don't prefer much of that in my personal life. I might have even toughed-out my contract if it weren't for the invasion of Iraq. When the U.S. went ahead without support from France, or more importantly to me, Germany, my heart told me that something was drastically wrong. I trusted Germany, having spent my entire childhood there. I felt despicably dirty; morally compelled not to participate the day the first invasion began. I started working up the courage to do something about my supposed involvement, although I wasn't sure what.

A comical role-reversal provided my key to escape while assigned to Hawaii.

I had been on a personal mission all afternoon. It isn't easy for an obvious square, out of his element, to find drugs; of any variety, but I thought I knew the sort of person I was looking for. In high school, everyone I knew smoked pot. Some even did LSD, mushrooms, ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines. I was at a local mall, stalking the halls, keeping an eye out for the oft-parodied, proverbial, cool kid.

People dress differently in Hawaii than they do in Colorado, so I had to rely on more subtle clues, such as age, level of hygiene, a certain kind of confidence, and a bravado that personally irritated me but seemed par for coolness. What I found were doughy, middle-aged, depressed white tourists and tired, defeated-looking Hawaiians (snapshots of America can be quite revealing), peppered with Chinese and Japanese retirees. I walked in circles for close to an hour and a half, even stopped by the guitar shop (there's always a pot-head -- although of a different variety than the cool kid -- at a guitar shop), with no luck. I became depressed, which prompted a retreat to one of my favorite creature comforts at the time; my ritual cigarette break.

Soon I was standing mere paces away from a bench outside, staring into the distance, gently rolling my lit cigarette in my right hand. The weather in Hawaii is really something. The wind is just right, there are never any bugs or mosquitoes hitting you, and two-to-three minute rain showers arrive like clockwork every 25 minutes or so. The tap water is the best in the nation. It's becoming a big, sprawling suburb, though. Sad, really.

I pondered giving up my search, or at least waiting til the following Friday to try again. I knew pot was everywhere; that was the frustrating part. Chances were all those fat, middle-aged people I'd been overlooking were higher than I'd ever been or would ever be. Pot is everyone's secret. Children smoke it behind their parent's backs and parents do it behind their childrens'. I pondered that, too. Maybe I could ask another marine, I thought. I decided I would keep looking until the mall closed.

Before I finished my break and began my resolve anew, a small voice encroached upon mine ears. A young girl, who had been sitting at the bench, watching me, asked if I would bum her a smoke. She spoke in that pigeon-y Hawaiian accent. I can't do it justice in writing so I must ask you to use your imagination. She was obviously too young to be smoking, looking anywhere between 12 and 15 years old, but as I'd just been looking to score all afternoon I figured I shouldn't play morality police. I gave her a cigarette and walked away without saying much. Teenage girls put me off somewhat; they're adult enough to flirt at me sometimes and for a weird tension to permeate the air, but too childish all the same. I'm beginning to feel the same way about women in their early twenties. I suppose there could be exceptions but in the former case they're illegal and in the latter, well, they seem to prefer men who are richer than me, older than me, or parodies of masculinity. It drives me nuts sometimes.

As I walked away, an even smaller voice spoke to me. It was my conscience, my spirit guide, Belfast, fate -- something; that part of me that is more fleeting than the rest -- that told me that she could be the person I'd been looking for all afternoon. I had been flipping coins since the breakup with my fiancee to help combat indecisiveness, and I consulted one then. It bolstered my decision, and I turned to re-approach the girl, at which point she asked if she could borrow my lighter.

That made me feel even less comfortable -- smokers generally carry their own lighting utensils, and a suspicion that she had only bummed the smoke as a pretense for talking to me began to boil in my mind. Then again, she might have taken me for some sort of teen-chasing creep -- an easy target for a young girl bent on finding cigarettes, alcohol, whatever. Or she might have just wanted a cigarette and needed a lighter. My mind often races with plots and suspicions, much less so these days, but especially when under stress. I inherited that from my dad's side of the family. A frustrating thing about my father was that his suspicions were always startlingly accurate without the slightest bit of proof to back them up. My difficulty lies in discerning between dozens of contradictory suspicions, a decidedly less useful skill.

But I pushed all that aside. I had more pressing issues -- my life, sanity, and livelihood were in serious danger. The pulse of the nation was becoming very weird and disturbing to me. I felt it was making me weird and disturbing. I swallowed my neurosis and asked, calmly, as she lit the cigarette I'd given her, whether she knew where I could find some pot.

Her reaction was endearing; she almost, *almost* looked like she might choke as she inhaled the first drag. My question had caught her off guard. Then she looked right-to-left, as if to check for eavesdroppers, leaned toward me, and whispered, "follow me."

She let me to some of her friends, and they sold me pot. They were all 14 years old; I don't remember asking their ages, I was so happy I gave them a hundred dollars. This role reversal of children selling pot to an adult (a marine, no less) is really an indicator for the parody the was on drugs has become. America is the poster child for aspiring laughing stocks the world over. Waste of time and money.

But it worked. By goodness, it worked. Those kids may have saved my life. They were greater heroes and national treasures to me than my own peers. I hope their futures are bright.