Dispatch from the desert #9
begin transmission:
26Oct04-Tuesday-1852
October has always been my favorite month. Halloween my favorite holiday. I’ve always loved the fall temperatures, the jack-o-lanterns on the front porches, witches and skeletons and vampires and Frankenstein’s monsters. The sudden costume industry that thrives around the malls. Every shop in existence suddenly becomes a candy shop. Candy just somehow tastes better around Halloween.
But this year I am not seeing the decorations or the fall temperatures. The base has put up black and orange paper party products (P3s) around the chow hall and there is the occasional inflatable jack-o-lantern seen in the hospital (most decorations around the hospital are for the Red Sox, not Halloween). But the decorations seem mockeries to me of my favorite time of year.
I’m not complaining. I came here knowing I would be gone for the holidays. And for most of them, I really don’t care. Thanksgiving means little to me, and Christmas just usually pisses me off with it’s Hallmark bullshit starting in July. But Halloween was always a good time for me. The time when the spirits seemed closer to the living world.
The Hunts will be having their annual Dia De Los Muertos party, Casey, my adopted niece, will be scouring the neighborhood for loot, Dillon, my little brother, will be…well I don’t know what he’ll be doing. He’d better be practicing the drums so I can hear some rock and roll when I get back. And I’ll be working in the Hospital during the month of Ramadan. It all seems so surreal. But surreal in a pleasant, almost magical realism kind of way.
Halloween is also, by the way, about the midway point of my deployment. I can’t believe I’m already halfway through this. Time is just flying by.
But the really scary thing this year isn’t the witches and goblins, or the spooky legends of ghosts and hauntings. This year, the real fear is the presidential election.
The good news: Either George Bush or John Kerry is going to lose.
The bad news: The other one is going to win.
Given the choice, I’d choose Kerry, though that’s not who I voted for. Kerry hasn’t impressed me. In the few shots I managed to pick up on the net from the debates, both candidates pissed me off in that neither of them would fucking answer a question. They would only talk around it and attack each other. Fallacy after fallacy flung around in a natural instinctive reflex the same way we would pull our hands away from a stove we hadn’t realized was on. They don’t even know how full of shit they both are.
But between the two, Bush has lied to me. Bush has used the power at his command to start wars and take unnecessary lives. Bush and Kerry are both dipshits in my eyes, but Bush is an evil dipshit, Kerry is just a Botox dipshit. If we must choose between the evil of two lessers, I choose the one who can pronounce the word Nuclear.
Still, we do not live in a 2 party system. We can vote for whoever we please.
From what little I’ve managed to gather about Colorado’s recent electoral rules, the votes towards Kerry now actually matter. Somebody please correct me of I’m wrong, but suddenly Colorado became one of the states the candidates care about, which is at least a step in the right direction.
The electoral college system was a brilliant idea at a time when the majority of voters were so far removed from Washington that they may not even know who the candidates were. In the 1800s a rural farmer in the middle of nowhere didn’t have the time or money to hop a train out to a city on the east coast where a candidate might be speaking. But today we have communication. Today we have the internet, the fucking IQ draining TV set, telephones, radio and international broadcasts. Today, nearly no voter is so isolated that they can’t make an informed decision on who they want to be the president. I’m on the edge of the Arabian Desert, just a few miles from the Persian Gulf, with camel spiders and scorpions scuttling around with the cats and mice and the Army guys, and even I can hop on the internet and make an informed decision on who I want to vote for. I vote to have the electoral college dismantled. Make them get real jobs. Didn’t the last election teach us anything?
Some fun things to look at if you are of a mind to:
Go to www.scottmccloud.com Click on the blog link and look for the entry talking about Alex Ross’s new cover for the Village Voice. Or go get a copy of it yourself. Alex Ross is by far my favorite comic artist and has made an awesome political painting. I have placed it as the background desktop for all the computers in the hospital. Which around here is enough reason to have me tried as a terrorist. But I are a Clever Ninja Jedi Monkey, and I is not caught doing it.
Read the blog of Science Fiction Cyberpunk guru William Gibson. He has started blogging again out of fear of the outcome of this election: www.williamgibsonbooks.com He says things so fucking elegantly it makes me want to puke.
And speaking of puking…I was really fucking sick the other day. So sick that I had bruises over my eyes because I was vomiting so forcefully that the capillaries around my eyes burst. I spent 24 hours in a blur of not sleeping, but not fully conscious, during which I managed to stumble to the hospital and have a friend put a line in me. The neighbors in the cell next to mine could hear me mumbling and ranting in a half conscious daze. They took notes, here is apparently some of the things I was raving about:
In the future, they’ll have designer sperm. The fashion industry will be the financial backers of nanotechnology, and our sperm will have little sunglasses on them and nike swooshes.
They’ll bring back Churchill, the last lion. And they’ll ask him how to stop the war in Iraq, and he’ll say that Iraq isn’t the enemy, the United States is.
They have found more children recently raised by wild animals, they found a boy in Africa raised by wild dogs, and another raised by monkeys. Can I volunteer to have my child raised by them? I want my child to have instincts that the rest of us don’t have. In the future, what little instincts we have will be stomped out by the Department of Homeland Defense.
A nurse I work with claims that smoking gives him stronger lungs. He can win the swimming competition because his lungs are used to only working at limited capacity. He chain smokes between patients. He is another one of those guys who says “we all die, I just choose how I’m going to die.” I say “Yes, that’s true. I choose not to die a slow and painful death of chronic asphyxiation.”
Jen once told me that Ketamine makes you feel like you just did a back flip out of your body. If I was taking a dog sedative, I’d want to get the fuck out of my body as well.
Blood in the vomit can be a sign of an active bleed in the digestive tract. What does it mean if you have vomit in your blood? It means that your stomach and your heart have switched roles. That’s why Gluttony is one of the 7 deadly sins, the priests can find no heart when they listen to the chest with their deity inspired stethoscopes.
I want to be George Seldes when I grow up, but my father never corresponded with Trotsky when I was a kid.
The word “Mobb” originally came from the term “The Mobility” which were the crowd in London who would crowd around watching a fire burn a house down just to see it, while impeding the progress of the actual Fire Brigade who were trying to stop it.
In a strictly monadological sense, if I could see all the perspectives relating to the bratwurst I ingested earlier in the evening, I would have known that it was going to kick my ass later and I wouldn’t have eaten it. Damn it Liebniz, where are you when I need you?
Feeling better now.
I apologized to my neighbors. They thought it was really funny. Then they asked me what the big words meant.
I’ve got to get thicker walls around here.
You have never been to a foreign country until you’ve been sick in one.
So anyway, that’s what I’m up to at this point. I’ve received awesome care packages lately, and am hoping for more.
As of today around noon my time (about 3AM Denver time) I have officially applied to medical school. All the conventional wisdom I have read by the experts was that one should apply to about 5-7 schools to ensure you have a good chance of getting in.
I applied to 17.
What the hell.
Happy Halloween everyone. Be good. And if you can’t be good, be good at it.
end transmission
26Oct04-Tuesday-1852
October has always been my favorite month. Halloween my favorite holiday. I’ve always loved the fall temperatures, the jack-o-lanterns on the front porches, witches and skeletons and vampires and Frankenstein’s monsters. The sudden costume industry that thrives around the malls. Every shop in existence suddenly becomes a candy shop. Candy just somehow tastes better around Halloween.
But this year I am not seeing the decorations or the fall temperatures. The base has put up black and orange paper party products (P3s) around the chow hall and there is the occasional inflatable jack-o-lantern seen in the hospital (most decorations around the hospital are for the Red Sox, not Halloween). But the decorations seem mockeries to me of my favorite time of year.
I’m not complaining. I came here knowing I would be gone for the holidays. And for most of them, I really don’t care. Thanksgiving means little to me, and Christmas just usually pisses me off with it’s Hallmark bullshit starting in July. But Halloween was always a good time for me. The time when the spirits seemed closer to the living world.
The Hunts will be having their annual Dia De Los Muertos party, Casey, my adopted niece, will be scouring the neighborhood for loot, Dillon, my little brother, will be…well I don’t know what he’ll be doing. He’d better be practicing the drums so I can hear some rock and roll when I get back. And I’ll be working in the Hospital during the month of Ramadan. It all seems so surreal. But surreal in a pleasant, almost magical realism kind of way.
Halloween is also, by the way, about the midway point of my deployment. I can’t believe I’m already halfway through this. Time is just flying by.
But the really scary thing this year isn’t the witches and goblins, or the spooky legends of ghosts and hauntings. This year, the real fear is the presidential election.
The good news: Either George Bush or John Kerry is going to lose.
The bad news: The other one is going to win.
Given the choice, I’d choose Kerry, though that’s not who I voted for. Kerry hasn’t impressed me. In the few shots I managed to pick up on the net from the debates, both candidates pissed me off in that neither of them would fucking answer a question. They would only talk around it and attack each other. Fallacy after fallacy flung around in a natural instinctive reflex the same way we would pull our hands away from a stove we hadn’t realized was on. They don’t even know how full of shit they both are.
But between the two, Bush has lied to me. Bush has used the power at his command to start wars and take unnecessary lives. Bush and Kerry are both dipshits in my eyes, but Bush is an evil dipshit, Kerry is just a Botox dipshit. If we must choose between the evil of two lessers, I choose the one who can pronounce the word Nuclear.
Still, we do not live in a 2 party system. We can vote for whoever we please.
From what little I’ve managed to gather about Colorado’s recent electoral rules, the votes towards Kerry now actually matter. Somebody please correct me of I’m wrong, but suddenly Colorado became one of the states the candidates care about, which is at least a step in the right direction.
The electoral college system was a brilliant idea at a time when the majority of voters were so far removed from Washington that they may not even know who the candidates were. In the 1800s a rural farmer in the middle of nowhere didn’t have the time or money to hop a train out to a city on the east coast where a candidate might be speaking. But today we have communication. Today we have the internet, the fucking IQ draining TV set, telephones, radio and international broadcasts. Today, nearly no voter is so isolated that they can’t make an informed decision on who they want to be the president. I’m on the edge of the Arabian Desert, just a few miles from the Persian Gulf, with camel spiders and scorpions scuttling around with the cats and mice and the Army guys, and even I can hop on the internet and make an informed decision on who I want to vote for. I vote to have the electoral college dismantled. Make them get real jobs. Didn’t the last election teach us anything?
Some fun things to look at if you are of a mind to:
Go to www.scottmccloud.com Click on the blog link and look for the entry talking about Alex Ross’s new cover for the Village Voice. Or go get a copy of it yourself. Alex Ross is by far my favorite comic artist and has made an awesome political painting. I have placed it as the background desktop for all the computers in the hospital. Which around here is enough reason to have me tried as a terrorist. But I are a Clever Ninja Jedi Monkey, and I is not caught doing it.
Read the blog of Science Fiction Cyberpunk guru William Gibson. He has started blogging again out of fear of the outcome of this election: www.williamgibsonbooks.com He says things so fucking elegantly it makes me want to puke.
And speaking of puking…I was really fucking sick the other day. So sick that I had bruises over my eyes because I was vomiting so forcefully that the capillaries around my eyes burst. I spent 24 hours in a blur of not sleeping, but not fully conscious, during which I managed to stumble to the hospital and have a friend put a line in me. The neighbors in the cell next to mine could hear me mumbling and ranting in a half conscious daze. They took notes, here is apparently some of the things I was raving about:
In the future, they’ll have designer sperm. The fashion industry will be the financial backers of nanotechnology, and our sperm will have little sunglasses on them and nike swooshes.
They’ll bring back Churchill, the last lion. And they’ll ask him how to stop the war in Iraq, and he’ll say that Iraq isn’t the enemy, the United States is.
They have found more children recently raised by wild animals, they found a boy in Africa raised by wild dogs, and another raised by monkeys. Can I volunteer to have my child raised by them? I want my child to have instincts that the rest of us don’t have. In the future, what little instincts we have will be stomped out by the Department of Homeland Defense.
A nurse I work with claims that smoking gives him stronger lungs. He can win the swimming competition because his lungs are used to only working at limited capacity. He chain smokes between patients. He is another one of those guys who says “we all die, I just choose how I’m going to die.” I say “Yes, that’s true. I choose not to die a slow and painful death of chronic asphyxiation.”
Jen once told me that Ketamine makes you feel like you just did a back flip out of your body. If I was taking a dog sedative, I’d want to get the fuck out of my body as well.
Blood in the vomit can be a sign of an active bleed in the digestive tract. What does it mean if you have vomit in your blood? It means that your stomach and your heart have switched roles. That’s why Gluttony is one of the 7 deadly sins, the priests can find no heart when they listen to the chest with their deity inspired stethoscopes.
I want to be George Seldes when I grow up, but my father never corresponded with Trotsky when I was a kid.
The word “Mobb” originally came from the term “The Mobility” which were the crowd in London who would crowd around watching a fire burn a house down just to see it, while impeding the progress of the actual Fire Brigade who were trying to stop it.
In a strictly monadological sense, if I could see all the perspectives relating to the bratwurst I ingested earlier in the evening, I would have known that it was going to kick my ass later and I wouldn’t have eaten it. Damn it Liebniz, where are you when I need you?
Feeling better now.
I apologized to my neighbors. They thought it was really funny. Then they asked me what the big words meant.
I’ve got to get thicker walls around here.
You have never been to a foreign country until you’ve been sick in one.
So anyway, that’s what I’m up to at this point. I’ve received awesome care packages lately, and am hoping for more.
As of today around noon my time (about 3AM Denver time) I have officially applied to medical school. All the conventional wisdom I have read by the experts was that one should apply to about 5-7 schools to ensure you have a good chance of getting in.
I applied to 17.
What the hell.
Happy Halloween everyone. Be good. And if you can’t be good, be good at it.
end transmission