On Blogging
Nothing much to say, but I thought you must all be sitting in breathless anticipation of my saying it. How pretentious am I? OH!!! Yes I do, Smallville season V is out here and I am so buying it. I would have it now (yesterday) but I was haggling a guy and found someone who would save me three dollars if I waited until today so that he could go to Baghdad and get a copy for me. Then he was not back by the time I went in and so I have to wait another day. This to save $3 but also to make the point to the other guy. He has the best DVD sets but he does not negotiate enough because he knows another soldier will buy what I do not. Little does he know that better pricing and I would clear him out. Box DVD sets are at a much lower rate here. Wish I had a thriving website from which to resell them (hint hint hint).
That which is not given
O.K.; before I begin let me get my stance clear lest others misread or choose not to understand. I detest the very concept of forcing yourself sexually upon an unwilling victim. I do not condone rape or sexual assault and find myself enraged by its occurence. It sickens me inside to think of someone taking something from you against your will. I hate the thought of someone being helpless and forced to endure such a horrific event.
Now; as you see I was going to discuss rape. I do not understand how a man can bring himself to force himself upon a screaming protesting woman against her will, or a frozen whimpering woman, or a woman begging him not to… GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!! It frustrates me… What about sex makes a person willing to destroy a persons sense of security and self saftey? What about a ten second orgasm (remember this is not slow protracted love making I should assume) makes all the harm you cause acceptable? Why do people want to wreak their will upon another in such a horrific fashion?
I understand rough sex with a consenting partner who enjoys it, I even understand that some women are turned on by assualt and wish to role play with their men. I have NO PROBLEM with that, it is PLAY, it involves safe words, codes to stop everything and there is no helplessness. I really don’t care WHAT you do to achieve physical pleasure if you don’t cause unwanted harm, your lives are your own to live…
*that statement is very loose and does not accurately protray my viewpoint on the matter but my views on consentual sex are not the topic of this blog*
To force yourself on someone else, to physically invade their body against their will is one of the worst violations, it does horrific things to the mind of the victim, causes severe damage to the body, and has life-long effects… In many countries a woman can not even accuse her molester because she is stigmatized as though she were herself the perpetrator. Children who are raised by victimizers often know no way out save their own deaths. I once read about a little boy whose mother’s boyfriend used him to make sexual videos with older men which were sold in such circles….
Don’t
get
me
started
on
those
who
molest
children
That man grew up, raped and killed an elderly woman and died on death row, he housed several different personalities within his body but none survived the lethal injection.
Many children who are molested disassociate… how many of the confirmed cases of DID (disassociative identity disorder which is the new term for multiple personality syndrom) show a childhood of horrific molestation? Read,”When Rabbit Howls” for a heartbreaking introduction into the world of multiple personalities, her case is not the typical one but it so illustrates the peeling layers of consciousness.
As a counselor I have to help the client before me. If she is the raped I must help her put herself back together, if he is a rapist I must help him end his compulsion. I have to work on whomever seeks my services, I had a friend/colleague to whom came a young female soldier who had been sexually assaulted by a soldier in her unit, then the male soldier himself came into receive treatment because he had sexually assaulted her.
What do you say to that? Rapists are monsters who don’t deserve counseling? If you say that then you are saying that they should not seek help, is it not a good thing if they try to stop doing what they are doing? believe it or not a lot of rapists were victims themselves, that is how perniscious a crime it is. It can completely destroy the psyche… that fact does not erase responsibility, it isn’t meant to.
But ignoring it does not make it go away.
Some victims become prominent advocates for victims too.
What am I writing to say? Why? I don’t know..
A week or so ago a man jumped out of a bunker at a woman who was walking alone and he tried to drag her back into the bunker with him. I have no idea how he knew she was a woman or if he even cared, it was pitch black. She managed to fight her way free and ran away. Rape of a man too is a frightening thing… people forget that men rape men too… women can rape men with threats or coercion but I think that the most traumatic is being raped by another man. It is almost encouraged in our prison system according to repeated accounts.
As a form of organized punishment we place men in cages for years at a time and let other men brutalize them day and night, let their fellow prisoners force them to commit horrific sexual acts, send them to the infirmary time and again.. Then one day they have finished their time in hell and can be released upon the public. We expect them to be men now? not animals? Expect them to live among us peacefully? Cause no harm, abide by the “Social Contract” Rousseau lauded?
GRRRRRRRR
No sense whatsoever of the bounds of proper punctuation in a long and rambling blog bouncing from rape to institutionalism… In my line of work we call this flight of ideas *shrugs*.
I think you should ask for a refund
The end point is that rape is bad. Sexual assault is bad. Hurting someone is bad. Your personal freedoms end at the boundary of your skin. Don’t hurt people. Don’t hurt women. Being in prison does not have to make you behave homosexually or brutally.
!!!!!!!!!!STOP IT!!!!!!!!!!
Please.
(that was addressed to humanity in general)
(and just think; I’m actually supposed to counsel others)
Dark Places
Have you ever been alone in the dark… in the real dark where obstacles in front of you pose real danger, where no light exists to turn on when you realize how difficult it is and change your mind? No moon penetrates the night sky to guide you to safety; have you been in a dark so intense that you are essentially at the very edge of blind?
Our FOB was once a blackout FOB, lights were restricted so that the insurgents who were dropping mortar shells on us by the bucketload EVERY SINGLE DAY, could not find us, that is sarcasm for the non-Army types, because our FOB was not moving and we are near a major route with convoys coming in and going out every day
-i.e. they already know where we are-.
Every night I stumble through the dark, (it is not blacked out by rule anymore but no lights have been emplaced so it is pitch black in a country without a moon). I strain to see just a little change in the texture of the darkness signifying that I am seeing the night sky by what few stars the dust does not obscure, this to contrast against the darkness of the obstacles around me. Moths navigate by moving towards a light source because they know that if they are seeing the light there is nothing between them and the light source in a straight vector (else there’d be no light i.e. obstacles cast shadows), little do moths know that man has evolved and makes his own lights now so the stars and moon aren’t going to be enough any more to guide them safely. Now they fly directly into fires, fry themselves on our bug zappers, burn themselves in light bulbs, and beg windows to let them pass through until they finally die.
In such a small evolutionary time moths lost their ability to move through the night without danger…
O.K., maybe I have spent most of my life alone and lost in the dark straining for just a glimpse of light by which to orient myself… Here I have huge claws of *hard, shrapnel-stopping material* (again being vague) made invisible by the night which have already bloodied me decently, inside I attempt to evade far worse wounds from much crueller and more cunning demons.
Water in sand
What do you get when you take Iraq and add rain?
………CLAY……….
lots and lots of clay
you live in clay
clay clumps in the Dining Facility
clay clumps in the showers
clay clumps in the office
clay clumps in the home/tent
clay
who would have thought that you could miss the taste of dust?
Chemical Love
sorry, I don’t know how to delete posts, this was about love and the chemical process and what is love really? Great wonderings for a combat hardened killer *shrugs*
Sloth
Extra food, today I decided that I was worth a piece of cheescake. I have spent some amount of time attempting to avoid it but I ran into that old love of mine in the chow hall tonight….. Oh how I love my cheescake, I remember when I used to work as a security guard I really had no job, I was paid to show up each day and be there. So I bought a cheescake to take with me each day and eat in its entirety, Even my 18 year old metabolism was not strong enough to stand up to that kind of an assault unfortunately. My rapidly expanding midsection convinced me to end that little joy immediately.
Years have passed and yet here I am in Iraq and KBR (bless their all-you-can-eat Dining Facility mentality) has the audacity to present cherry cheescake to me every single day three meals per day. I was foolish initially spending my time gorging, but rcently I have limited my meals to two (though four are offered) cutting down on my portions, not eating to gluttonous pain (anymore), and very few deserts perhaps once a week, I get ice cream twice each day but only two scoops and one is a sherbert…
*Moaning* Why is food so good…?
Witness my shame, how worthless…
I’m a simple man
O.K.; I told you about the whole underwear problem…. still going…. grrrr…. I just went and picked up my laundry again, why so soon you ask? Why, because I am out of underwear of course.
I bought a new pack in Kuwait, a pack of three. I am wearing one pair, and I have the light blue pair and the three from the pack… SO… Unless I left hte US with two pairs of underwear, one on body, one packed; SOMEBODY IS STEALING MY UNDERWEAR….. grrrr… who needs my underwear so badly that they would steal it from my laundry? If enough people complain about stolen laundry they are going to wind up losing their contract to do our laundry and lose a lot more money in that than my few pieces of underwear could possibly be worth.
Sorry… sometimes the little hilarious things can irk, that is what a blog is for, right?. I can’t complain because it takes food out of the mouths of their families but they are putting MORE food into their mouths (or underwear on their bottoms) by doing whatever is going on with my underwear…
When you deploy/travel as frequently as I seem to, you develop a sort of attachment to your underwear… especially if you don’t wash it *ugh* o.k.; I’ll cut the comedy routine out.
Really though; guys like me wear underwear until it no longer holds itself together, we get an understanding of it, i.e. this one lost elasticity when I gained the 80 lbs I have been lugging around, this one is faded from bleach in a pool, etc… Each has its own story and you wear each one monitoring whether or not it has developed enough holes to have completely lost its effectiveness. You recognize the difference between pairs that look similar to the casual observer, the three I have now are from the new pack, I bought sized 34″ thinking that my disguisting girth could fit into them… o.k.; I am between 34″ and 36″ and 36″ falls down while 34″ pinches *grrr* so I figured the sun would bake me to a 34″. My point though is that I NOTICE these things, most of my old stuff had already lost the elasticity war and surrendered to being overstretched until they were snug and comfortable… now I have to break in this set of newbies and recruit a fresh batch from… somewhere? Where is all of my underwear? I am a simple guy… easy enough to please, I just want my underwear back and nobody will be hurt.
By the way, if you are in a generous mood can you return my shirts too please? The Army only issues four of these cool tan ACU undershirts and I kind of need them too.
Comments
I kind of figured I had a bit more time before people found my website *shrugs* and much longer before anyone found it interesting enough to read it or leave a comment.
Since I got my first one I need to establish a policy, you notice how I don’t say names or places? You too. (you didn’t I am just making it clear for others) No names, no places too obvious, nothing linking you to me if I know you because then you can be used as an outlet to try to control my actions. It won’t work, but I would hate to have to watch the Revenge Brigade (or whichever insurgent group chose to) beheading you on Al Jazeera or wherever.
I identified my FOB and that I am a soldier and that kind of sealed the anonymity of my site. This isn’t your blog anyways, it is mine. You can make a name up if you want to however, respect that and all is good *shrugs*. What is the likelihood of me being targeted? I do like to brag about my importance and make people think that I matter enough to target me but I don’t matter really to anything or anyone in reality, so it is probably just negligibly above a 0%. HOWEVER, when it DOES happen the probability becomes a 100% so lets avoid any chance, anyone who gets to know me will learn how obsessively I try to protect people *shrugs*.
Scouts Out
I would like to take a few moments out to recognize (not by name) the Scouts who have lost their lives here in battle…
There is no finer breed of man than that which proves himself worthy to Scout, there is no tighter band of brothers, there are no stronger bonded souls. For two scouts who stepped on a pressure plated IED and the families they left behind; I weep.
Recon is a world that none know who have not lived it, the mission comes first and claims everything sometimes… even your lives… You have made us all proud.. I will honor you forever, I remember you this day
Fare well my brothers… Rest long in Fiddlers Green… you’ve earned it.
For those still in the fight; scouts never stop, I’ll see you on the high ground…
Small rants
O.K., small rants I need it out of me anyways, two rants, first; why do we always have to invade countries where the average height is 5′0″ to 5′7″? pppuuulllleeeeaaasssseee explain this to me, at the very least, on our own bases we could understand the fact that we are soldiers and some of us are full sized human beings. I am getting SICK AND TIRED of sleeping in a 5′6″ man sized cot, it would not bug me save that my legs hang off even when I scrunch up and especially then my ankles press into the cot edge painfully, now I am attempting to fit into a 5′5″ sized bed I managed to “appropriate” (scout style), I have found that by sticking my legs all the way through the bottom of the frame and letting about a foots worth of me hang out I can get my lower calves resting on the bar and the muscle (uhm.. fat…) doesn’t bruise as easily. Don’t get me started on the head bumping thing because THAT is an issue, twice now since being here (what two weeks? ) I have gone into the laundry area and smashed my head into a low hung metal air-conditioning unit. It completely covers a thin walkway between pylons hung at a 6′1″ height so that unaware morons like me (6′4″) have just enough forehead to smash into it… And who came up with the 4′1″ opening to the tent I was living in for most of my first week here?
Now, on to my primary rant.
I like many other American human beings like to have clean underpants… Clean underwear are kind of a part of what we consider good hygiene. Good hygiene keeps us from getting nasty diseases and even worse, from smelling bad. I am happy to do my part in living a hygienic life style I take my laundry to the third party nationals who wash them for us (I’m obviously being vague on purpose) expecting that I will have clean shirts and undergarments but instead I have a rapidly diminishing supply of both… Odd how that occurs..? Someone out there is wearing my underwear right now… *saluting* I wish you well with it. I guess that it should honor me that my personal effects are considered fashionable in some countries… Don’t think that I have not noticed however though… When a man buys a new package of brown underwear to supplement the diminishing supply of Army issued brown underwear he has and only has three other pairs, one striped blue pair, one light blue pair, one dark black pair… then it diminishes to one light blue pair and all brown.. less than enough brown as it is… It is kind of a tough thing to do to a man who has a two day turnaround for his laundry (no private machines we can use ourselves) and nowhere to buy fresh garments save for the internet with a ten day turnaround on average… I apologize for describing my underwear to the world, but since most of the alternate pairs I have are all gone now I’m not describing my underwear so much as someone else’s now and I don’t really have any respect for the underwear of thieves… Hmmm… They used to cut people’s hands off for theft here in Iraq… what do they cut off if they can catch you stealing men’s underpants off? Ugh, next subject, I can always buy another pair and I guess they must have needed them more than I do.
Thoughts
I am fighting NOT to get sent further back to the safest border in Iraq… But there is not much I am able to fight with, just a thought planted here, a mention stated there, show too much love for something (like front line duties) in the Army and it will take it away and give it to someone who hates it (or is terrified of it). BTW I am NOT on the front lines *salivates* not even close *groans*. I am here and here is where I am, so be it. I am trying to arrange a few trips further North… And I would LOVE to see Babylon… O.k. no geography but there is a lot of history in Iraq…
Blathering
This blog is all about blathering, I have even been called a blathering idiot before so it is appropriate for me to blather a bit when so inclined… This is my space to get out my thoughts and feelings on stupid subjects that I don’t want to stew about or to word things I wish to explore mentally… It is not for anyone else… it is not an offer to “understand me” though at times I will treat it as such.. it is just me using mine for my purposes.. No links to your websites, i will not exchange my site link for yours in a shameless attempt to grab viewers… if no one ever knows me then is it the worlds loss or my own…? Interesting question actually, perhaps we shall see.
I live life my way by my rules, take me or leave but I AM me.
Perhaps one day I will have something of substance to say but whenever I do there is no blog so maybe that is corrected in this *shrugs*
Baseball Therapy
O.K.; here I am in Iraq, this should be glamorous and daring, a dangerous mission or two here and there to make the story right correct? Nope; I am fighting a losing battle just to get the worry warts in charge to let me go outside of the wire despite the very fun sounding missions I keep getting invited to partake in End of subject because of the whole OPSEC thing, (operational Security). To make a long story short the answer is usually no and here I am in the middle of a war torn country within spitting distance of what can be referred to as the cradle of civillization and stuck within a small area unable to leave for fear of my tiniest injury Yes, I know they are only watching out for me, I even understand and respect it, they have careers to worry about I have nothing to lose by my life *shrugs* but it is MY life to use as I wish.. I may have won a battle on that front but time will tell, I want to see as much of Iraq as I can while here *hopeful*. I had only one client today so it has been pretty dull, beyond researching and studying books on psychological theory which is about all there is, well let’s not forget the dartboard though which has become a fast friend.
Today after going to see th reenlistment guy and learning a bit about my options boss lady (no need for names) was going on the internet to send an email and I knew better than to ask but I was looking at these perfect soft expensive leather baseball mitts we brought with us for clients to use (along with two balls and two bats). Up until now they have been collecting dust in my cleaning *coughs cleaning closet* errrr office yeah, that’s what they tell me that it is anyway.
So; back on thread, at the most inopportune time I say, You wanna play catch?
She looks at me the rough tough scout waiting sceptically to see where I was baiting her then sees me as serious and says with some hesitance, Well then more firmly, Yes. I had to double check my hearing of course after the initial that’s absurd gesture. It was kind of absurd but we went and played catch in front of the clinic for a good half hour, I need to involve boss man (we have three gorgeous gloves) and make that a habit for us I have never been much into sports (and tossing a baseball thirty feet back and forth isn’t a sport) but there is something about manipulating an object in concert with someone else that is just kind of zen *shrugs* Welcome to my world, welcome to Iraq.
Suicide
Why do people die? I get that there are angry people and they like to express that anger in the hopes that it wll affect others to act in accordance with their will. I can comprehend that when that fails they must express more and more anger until they are spitting hatred and rage and (assuming you lack the option of giving it up) violent action is the natural progression I get that people kill each other But why do people just die? What about us as human beings makes us kill ourselves In sixteenth century Holland suicide was acknowledged as a method of escaping from an unbearable life.. But what about this life is unbearable? heartbreak? hearts mend, hearts become strong again sometimes years later but they DO mend You only get one chance to live and if you quit anywhere midstream that is it. No take backs, no second chances, no returns Some people kill themselves to hurt others but they do so never considering that when they are DEAD, they won’t care whom they have hurt. Some are poor and hungry and starving, but these are temporal situations. Life progresses, situations change There are some things in life that a person cannot live in the face of but they are so few grrrr this ends this post because I have to go.
