Two coworkers were robbed last night at gunpoint. If I had stuck around for five minutes, it would have been three. In fact, the suspicion is going around that the moment I left marked when the robber decided to come around. Two people are manageable. Three isn't. One of the guys was an ex marine. You look at him you see that he had his really dark days, mischievous and all, but now when I see him smile, all I see is a rictus grin: the kind of smile where all you see is a great big ball of hurt and recovery and hurt.
So I went out with him tonight. We went to a bar and had a few beers. Budweiser, apparently, even though three beers cost ten bucks. Jesus that's expensive for pee water. He kept joking, being all intense, saying how his rage has been boiling all day. He didn't work today; he had the day off to recover from the craziness.
So he talked about Iraq. He talked about how some suicide bomber blew himself up and the soldiers were kicking around his loose limbs. One soldier found the guy's head and decided to wear his face a la Hannibal Lector. He talked about how all the soldiers did it, to destroy the enemy's morale. How one guy walked around with his dick tucked in, joking about, "would you fuck me? I'd fuck me."
"It was kind of funny at the time. But then I came back to America." "That shit followed you home, didn't it?" I asked. He nodded and shook his head as if he were shaking the memory out. "I stayed awake for three days at a time. I couldn't sleep. No amount of Captain Morgan could make me sleep that off. Sometimes it's not the shit they do to us. Sometimes it's what we do to ourselves. And right now, all I can think about is bathing in the blood of that fucker that stole my stuff. All I can think about is when the police come, I'm wearing his face." He smiles his rictus. Friends laugh because it's from a movie, because it's so ridiculous. But that shit happened to him. One of his friends says, "You did what you had to to survive. It was him or you, you know? I'd do it a million times over." But that's not it. It's not it at all. "Last night you did the right thing," I said to him. He nodded and drank his beer. "You want to do a bunch of stuff. You don't need to do anything." Then his friend walked away and he looked at me and almost cried. "It's tearing me up inside. It's just tearing me the fuck up. And I know you feel guilty about it because you weren't there. It's not right, man. This isn't right. I shouldn't feel so angry." His friends return and he's back to joking about riding high and hard, how "somebody gonna die tonight." Playing, possibly. He wanted to pull the fire alarm at the apartment complex and watch the people leave, gun in his lap, and if the guy walked out he was going to kill him on the sidewalk. Yeah. Violence begets violence. Even if we don't want it to. It makes us violent, inherently. He didn't want a woman tonight. He didn't want pisswater beer. He wanted violence. I hope he doesn't. I'm glad I went out with them. But it makes me wonder… It's alright over there, in war, to do those things--and the other things he talked about. It's alright to fucking wear a person's face, skin and all, over yours. Here, you'd be considered a monster, an inhuman creature that's discarded the last vestiges of himself in the name of violence. Of course, my coworker hasn't done anything. He didn't initiate. He hasn't killed the thief, or a bystander, or anyone else. Talking about it is one thing. It's healthy. Planning it, on the other hand, isn't.
I don't know what I'm doing with myself these days. It's all a haze of unstable blood sugar and plans for the future. I wish I wasn't diabetic. I wish I still had the same vim from college, from wherever that was.
Aspen continues to plan her trip to see me. I'm so very excited. I also know it'll pass by so quick, it'll hardly have happened at all. And after that? She plans on coming again in January, but I don't for a second believe she'll come for only me, like this trip. If she does, I'll be the happiest person in the world. If she doesn't, I'll only be slightly less happy. Perhaps I'll get to meet her family then. Or some of them. Perhaps. Yet I talk about January and December, when the current bills are so intimidating I don't know what to do.
Pay them as best as I can and pray, I think.
No writing for about a month now. Too much emotion. Too many life questions I'm trying to work out. In fact, this is the first journal entry I've written in a long while. It feels good to write.
I'll spend the rest of the evening reading. Because I do too little of it, and my brother let me borrow books.
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