penfist

stories are the bones of everything

Essays

Highlands, North Carolina

by Leave a Comment

Forty-four hundred feet above sea level. We’re sitting in comfortable plastic and aluminum chairs next to a rushing stream in a magnolia forest. Winter is coming on, the temperature mild and the fresh air mixed with our camp smoke are incredibly aromatic. They are smells I thrive on. This sun is starting to dip, and a gentle breeze is coming across the ridges all around us. Kimber, Low, Simmons, and me. We’re old men now, the only ones left from the time over there.

Baghdad. We spent a year together, in the way back. A year in which the sound of things exploding seemed more common to me then gunfire, which I don’t tend to think of as an explosion, but more of a controlled detonation. Although I have to admit, a lot of the trigger fingers in Baghdad weren’t starting controlled explosions during that year. More like panicked ones.

I think all of us knew, somehow, that this would be the last trip to Highlands. We’re old now, and we want our comfort. Plus. What happened.

Kimber was the first sergeant. Low, Simmons and me were one section in his public affairs team. Our job, reporting on the war from inside the war. I suppose it was important. But it was also a heaping helping of bullshit. We weren’t reporting from an unbiased perspective. We were mouthpieces for men who loved metrics and spin. You know the type, I’m sure. They act as talking heads on the boob tube daily, even though all that shit happens in holovision now. War isn’t the same when you’re projected right into the middle of it. It’s harder for those power mongering fucks to start wars these days. An invasion in holovision, well, you can’t control the footage that gets out of a war like that, and it shakes people up a lot more than what they got to hear and see back in 2005. I had a fucking panic attack for the first time in 20 years the first time I watched Dark Descends on Baghdad in holo. Fuck, that brought it back.

Mortar attack, Christmas, twenty o’ five. I ran for my life. Ran like I never had before in all that rattletrap bullshit gear they gave me to wear. Wished I wasn’t wearing anything but some track shoes. The ones who weren’t wearing body armor made it into the bunker precious seconds ahead of me. That fucking war movie sent me right back into the moment. Whooooop. The sound of  a mortar coming in is something you never forget after the first one lands near you. Your brain trains itself to get running the instant that whooooop starts. Cause you know more of them are coming behind and you better be inside a concrete structure quick.

I was proud when the IVAW got that Pentagon rule about showing wounded and dead troops rescinded. People need to see what the ones in charge are responsible for. On all sides of any given argument or dispute. I believed it then, and I still believe it now. It gets a lot hard to make bad decisions when the results are right there in your living room, in full holo. Those nicer units give you the smells too, and believe you me, the smells of war will make a protestor out of you. I think the Chinese incursion of 2030 had a lot to do with that policy being rescinded too, while I’m rambling. Alaska being renamed New Hainan kind of shook things up and made us take a step back when it came to being the world’s loudest blowhards.

Kimber is a human piece of shit. We’ve been doing this trip once or twice a year since we got back alive in 2005. This is the first time Kimber made it. Why?

We all hate him. Plus, he’s been incarcerated until recently, so even if we’d gone crazy and asked him to come along, he wouldn’t have been able. Couple years after the unit got back from the sandbox he got arrested for touching his stepdaughter.

No one was surprised except Kimber. Fifty shades of self-delusion and an untouchables complex that stood a foot taller than he did. This guy. Kimber. What a bull necked, hard-headed, misogynistic, crude loudmouth. Or just bully for short. Big guy. Of the kind that goes sorta soft around 30. Fat rolls around all the vitals. Running up into the neck. Enough size and muscle to push the medium size guys around still, but would go down hard if a real brawler showed up. Kimber was a real pro when it came to using verbal threats and cajoling to get things done.

He used to trade favors over there. “Hey,” he’d say, “I’ll get my guys to write a story about you, a real good one, that you can send to the fam back home. You get me some better meals.” Shit like that. He wrote himself up for a bronze star at the end of our year. It got approved. You know, connections. Fucker stayed under cover in a fortified parking garage the whole time we were there, but the commendation didn’t mention that. Bronze stars are supposed to be for folks who actually take risks and achieve something that means something. The first sergeant didn’t take any risks, and he sure as shit didn’t achieve a damn thing unless it somehow made him more comfortable or forwarded his career somehow. He spent all his time handing danger out to us, and he enjoyed the hell out of it. One week it was a story in Mosul, the next in Mamudiya. We’d come back in one piece somehow, and have to listen to his endless critiques about our shortcomings as war reporters. He liked to use massive, ripping farts as punctuation marks for the creative verbal beatdowns that flowed unceasingly out of his mouth along with foul smelling breath.

He liked to touch us inappropriately, pretending he was some sort of crossbred father/teacher/wiseman, and that he was only telling us how much we sucked because he wanted to make us better at what we did. Bop in, put an arm around your shoulder all friendly like, and start talking in a low conspiratorial voice about whatever his latest great idea to fuck us all over happened to be. By the end of our year in hell with him as the main decision maker, I lost count of how many times I’d fantasized about shooting him in the back of the head just to shut him up.

There was one guy, Escridida, who was from Guam or somewhere, I can’t remember for sure, and had a hard to understand accent. Short little guy who talked really fast and got nervous often, which made him screw up the simplest tasks. Escridida made it through the year in Baghdad. He ate a bullet about three months later. I’ve always believed it had something to do with the fact that Kimber spent a year riding his ass and mocking his accent. Truth be told, the guy was hard to understand, but none of us are perfect, and most of us don’t need someone riding our ass about it 24/7. Kimber and Escridida were only one rank apart, but Kimber treated that poor guy like he was a private. Fucking asshole.

He was more than a standard issue fucking asshole though. He drew energy from the simple pleasure of making everyone under his control as miserable as possible. How we all got through those missions he sent us on for a year unscathed is something I still wrestle with. Touch of survivor’s guilt. I’m pretty sure of that. We weren’t really unscathed. More like the scars just weren’t visible. They were there, and lots of things would make them scream. The scars he put on us were up in our grey matter. Most people don’t jump under a table in a restaurant when the server drops a plate and it shatters. I’ve been doing that for a couple of decades.

Kimber found Jesus when he got pinched for touching little girls. He served 27 on a 30-year sentence. It happened about three years after we got home. While he sat in jail talking to Jesus, Low and I went to the VA for counseling and to get some of the road wear looked at. I ended up on the middle of that scale they use to calculate just how fucked up you are from going to war. Only fifty percent fucked up. Yeah, that’s me. I get a little extra paycheck at the end of every month, and have been for a good long while.

You might be wondering why the three of us were sitting around that little campfire with a guy each of us hated with a passion. I was too, back on that night. Kimber always was a good cajoler and convincer. Even though we hated him, I gotta admit he’s a good talker. He told us that he wanted to talk about Baghdad and make some amends. You know, like those AA guys are supposed to do. Apologies won’t do much for Escridida, was what I was thinking, but Low and Simmons wanted to hear him out, so I grudgingly said yes, he could come along and have a heart to heart if that’s what they wanted.

Anyhow, he made his apology, while we were all sipping on some Jim Beam. It didn’t sit right with me, mostly because of the way he kicked it off. Nothing he did really ever sat right with me. I gotta admit that. Don’t start an apology by telling someone that you’re not guilty. Don’t tell three people you put through hell that you didn’t touch little girls, that it was just she made the story up because she got in trouble. I’ve heard enough of his horse shit to know when he’s lying, and when’s he twisting up reality. Plus, while I didn’t attend the trial, I read the court transcripts. He was guilty as shit, and he’d been doing it a good long while. He messed both of their heads up, bad.

I let him finish telling the three of us what Jesus did to make him a better man, and how sorry he was about the way he treated us back in Baghdad. I only asked him one thing.

“Did you send us on missions out of the wire just to get in good with people?”

He lied and said no, that all those missions, especially the hot ones, came from the major. It disgusted me. I’m not sure quite how to put how gross the man made me feel inside into words. I’d heard him plotting through the thin trailer walls on phone calls more than once. He sent Pincher to Fallujah for a week just so he could get on some pogue run to the biggest PX in the city, and buy who the hell knows what. Probably some goddamn Xbox game. Pincher came back different. Fallujah was real hot back then. Lots of stuff flying around. Pincher saw things people really aren’t supposed to see. He told me one of them. About the wounded enemy laying in the street. What it sounded like when the Abrams ran over his head and it went pop. Pincher told me about what the brains felt like running down the inside of his uniform collar. And how the pulp went real far and got on everything.

There was no plan. I’d swear to that. Not that night. I got up and said, “who needs a refill?” I was thinking about Jim Beam. Everybody held their cups out. I went around the circle and filled. Kimber was the last one. When he leaned back to take a nip, he smacked his lips and something broke. Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking.

When I looked down, I realized that I’d put my Benchmade into his gut. That Benchmade has got me out of some shit over the last 30 years. Kimber looked down and dropped his plastic cup. A waste of good alcohol, if you ask me.

First, I didn’t feel anything at all. Then, I felt the need to get my knife back. It’s expensive, and well made, and I am never without it. I pulled it out real hard so it wouldn’t hang up on anything. The back is serrated. Kimber, even though he’d shrunk an inch or two from getting old, was still way bigger than I ever hoped to be. He tried to grab me. I just put one arm on his face and pushed.

That’s what another thing I wasn’t expecting happened. Low and Simmons put their knives in him too. They went for the neck. He bled out in maybe a little less than a minute. Couldn’t talk. He was trying, but nothing came out except some air, and a lot of blood. You cut on either side like that, and it’s over quick. It was done, and we just looked at each other when he fell backwards into the camp chair with his mouth open in a way that felt obscene to me.

We dragged him a good half-mile, dug a hole, dumped him in. I told Jesus how sorry Kimber was for all the wrong he’d done. We burned the camp chair because it was easier than trying to clean all his blood off.

It’s been about a year since that night, and I just had to write down what happened. It’s what I do. No one ever came looking for him. I don’t think anyone cared enough to do that. The three of us have never discussed what happened, and we never will.

I don’t know if this story has any lesson in it, but every word of it’s the truth and I needed to write it down. I still have a conscience. Somewhere deep, it’s telling me that maybe what we did needs the light of day. I slept good in my tent that night though. Better than I had since 2005. My night terrors and the teeth grinding rarely pay a visit now.

Sometimes the wrong things die, and sometimes they don’t. I’m just a guy who tells stories. I’ll let you sort out which kind are what.

The solution to writer’s block

by Leave a Comment

Stop believing in it. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist.

If you sit down and stare at a blank canvas, something will happen.  If that thing isn’t writing, it is because you are either (in order of likelihood):

  1. Scared
  2. Unmotivated
  3. Suffering from cognitive impairment

I will address these conditions in reverse order and share the solution to each of them.

Impaired

If you suffer from cognitive impairment, seek medical advice. This takes precedence over “writer’s block” under any circumstances. Once your team of medical professionals deals with the impairment, sit back down and move on to:

Unmotivated

If you find yourself unmotivated, write down the three things you are most passionate about in this world. If you aren’t writing about one of them, start. If you write those three things down and don’t have a single idea of what you should be writing about, you aren’t living in the same world all the rest of us inhabit. Go back to step one. Otherwise consider that you are simply:

Scared

If can’t write because you are scared, hello. I’ve been you. Exchange the word can’t for the word won’t. Examine what you are afraid of and tell it to fuck off. Please feel free to replace the invective with something that appeals to you. But realize you’re wasting time. Meanwhile, telling whatever you’re scared of to go blow is the only way to move past the word can’t and realize fear of failure isn’t an excuse. True passion always trumps fear. Cowards are what they are because of choices they have made.

Writer’s block is an excuse to fail. If you heart beats for the stories you to tell, stare at the canvas until your hands start moving and your brain starts pouring words. If it doesn’t happen, you’re not a storyteller.

I wrote this to myself, but I hope it helps you, unknown reader who wants to be reborn a writer.

What kind of character are you?

by Leave a Comment

“Throw out everything you believe in.” It’s the kind of thing I’m likely to whisper to you in the dark. Assuming we’re ever in the dark together. However we got there, know that I’m an antihero.

antihero

noun  an·ti·he·ro  \ˈan-tē-ˌhē-(ˌ)rō, ˈan-ˌtī-, -ˌhir-(ˌ)ō\

: a main character in a book, play, movie, etc., who does not have the usual good qualities that are expected in a hero

I’d fail miserably as a hero. My heart beats right the hell out of my chest when I’m faced with direct danger. My stoic’s poker face is good at hiding that fact. But I’m not running towards the bullets. I’m shooting back from behind solid cover, hopefully with vastly superior technology. Or, more likely, running away so the heroes can go in and get killed eliminating the threat.

You can only extract wisdom from a traumatic situation if it doesn’t kill you or fuck you up so bad you can’t function normally in society after the situation ends.

Speaking of which.

When I was about six years old, I observed a group of neighborhood kids holding down an unlucky child, for reasons I’ll never know. They forced his mouth open and made him eat donkey shit out of a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket. He was screaming and crying. But it was five on one, so he was going to eat that pie. Chalk it up to cruelty. Imagine he violated one of the group’s mores. Maybe he stole another one of the group’s prize possessions.

I could have intervened. I had my bow and arrows that day. I was part of an untouchable caste. A white kid in Haiti. There would have been only minor repercussions if I had attacked.

I know, because I tried it once, on a different day, with a different group of kids. I got scolded by the yard boy, and he didn’t tell my parents I shot a kid in the leg with an arrow. He even got the arrow back for me. A hero doesn’t shoot a kid in the leg with an arrow and then not remember why he did it as an adult.

It’s weird. What I remember.

I remember making a vow to fight to the death before I let someone hold me down and force me to eat donkey shit. You’d have to bash me unconscious before that would be a possibility.

I like the idea of justice, but it seems to be a shifting target. One person’s idea of justice is another person’s abomination.

When I was working as a contractor in Afghanistan we drove around every day in our armor trucks pretending to be brave, and every now and then proving that maybe some of us were. But most of us were just bored. Which is why some of the idiots I worked with found it fun to see how many locals they could knock off bicycles using the side mirrors of our vehicles.

It was easy to get away with shit like that. Chaos in the streets of Kabul is an understatement. I didn’t like it when it happened, but I remembered that I was the kid who shot someone with an arrow and still couldn’t be sure why. Except people change.

I like the idea of justice, even if I’m not always sure what it is supposed to be shaped like. With all that malleability, and the fact that I’m not a hero, I usually watch quietly. Usually.

When my buddy decided he was going to play the mirror game, and knocked an old man right off the side of the road and into a bus, I told him if he ever did it again I was reporting him up the chain of command.

Then I told him if we ever got stuck in the middle of a riot because of his recklessness, I was going to put the first bullet in his head.

He didn’t do it again. And I wasn’t a hero.

He just pissed me off because a) the old man wasn’t doing anything to him and b) he put my life in danger. Afghanistan is a motherfucking volatile place and I had no plans to die there because someone wanted to bip people in the back with their mirrors just to see if they could get away with it.

Antihereos:

  • Neither 100% good nor 100% evil
  • Fated to cause grief to individuals, the community, or oneself
  • Do not need to die at close of the story, resolution is often uncertain
  • Can act as a vigilante, even against oneself
  • Act according to their own set of rules and values
  • May have tragedy in their life
  • May have a tragic personal flaw
  • Lack true identity or are disillusioned with life
  • This does not define them as a villain
  • Their actions are often merely reactions to events
  • Usually not motivated to act for or against anyone
  • They fight present circumstances, not fate

Sounds like a person I am.

One day, I’ll tell you about the time I played with fire. Or the trigger pulling game.

Life, order, meaning, and minimalism

by Leave a Comment

The idea that I’m here for a purpose is a driving force in my life. I seek reasons why it matters that I’m here every day, all day. I have long understood that I derive a deep sense of satisfaction from producing more than I consume.

Maybe it’s how I was raised. My parents met in the developing world doing humanitarian work. They’ve devoted their lives to helping others help themselves. If any part of them rubbed off on me, maybe it was the core idea that we are here to give our fellow humans what we can of grace, humility and kindness.

In the course of exploring how to produce more than I devour, I found Joshua Fields and Ryan Nicodemus. They call themselves the minimalists. Here’s what they say about the word minimalist.

Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom. Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from depression. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around. Real freedom.

Sounds good right? I see nothing wrong with having nice things. It starts to feel gross though, when I have more nice things than I can use while many people on the planet don’t have the basics they need to survive.

It feels worth thinking about what I can do with less. I’m improving my sense of satisfaction with my life by making careful choices about the ‘stuff’ I own and use.

I can’t live with this:

Meeting the Poor’s Basic Needs

  • As many as 2.8 billion people on the planet struggle to survive on less than $2 a day, and more than one billion people lack reasonable access to safe drinking water.
  • The U.N. reports that 825 million people are still undernourished; the average person in the industrial world took in 10 percent more calories daily in 1961 than the average person in the developing world consumes today.

Or this:

The U.S. Consumer

  • The United States, with less than 5 % of the global population, uses about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources—burning up nearly 25 % of the coal, 26 % of the oil, and 27 % of the world’s natural gas.
  • As of 2003, the U.S. had more private cars than licensed drivers, and gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles were among the best-selling vehicles.
  • New houses in the U.S. were 38 % bigger in 2002 than in 1975, despite having fewer people per household on average.

I have a car and a motorcycle, and I use them both. I live in a pretty small cabin in the woods. It’s all the space I need to write and exist. I don’t want a big, mostly empty suburban McMansion. I would not be happy there. Stories are born in small, intimate spaces and they are found when we’re outside, exploring the world.

The first thing I ask myself before I purchase anything at this point in my life is will it improve me? If it isn’t functional, and it won’t bring me a richer existence, I put it back and save my money for something else.

Minimalism is not a set formula. It’s different for every single person who practices it. But the end result will always be the same: lasting fulfillment and a sense of purpose.

Leo Babauta is another source of inspiration in my quest to live with less. The most inspiring thing about Leo is his that he is a ‘normal guy’ living an extraordinary life. Check out the list of things he did to turn his life into one that brought him a deep sense of satisfaction.

You don’t need a specialized degree to be amazing. You don’t need anyone’s permission (except your own of course). You can live a fantastic life on a small budget, debt free and feeling healthy. Best of all, the rules are yours to make and break as you walk down the path and take in the view through new eyes.

I don’t know where my journey is taking me. I only know that I need to tell stories. I’m Pen, and I’m looking for ways to improve the world and myself.

Habits can be changed. Beliefs will shift and allow you to see more of what’s around you. If you let it happen. We are meant to grow as we go.

Take only what you need from this place.

Things that don’t add up

by Leave a Comment

Should one percent of the world’s population have more resources amongst themselves than the other 99 percent? I’ve never believed the world is a fair place, but as I age, I realize that we, all the human beings alive, are collectively in charge of whether or not that’s true. If we wanted it, we could work together to make the world a fair, or at least, fairer, place.

The 80 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people.

That is a pretty staggering fact. Especially if you care, even remotely, about people whose basic needs aren’t being met. If you haven’t been close to poverty, count your blessings. It’s one thing to want to have enough resources to take care of yourself and your family. It’s quite another to have as many resources as your closest forty-three million, seven hundred and fifty-thousand neighbors. I’m sure that the statistics don’t work out quite that nicely in the real world, but the disparity is still staggering.

People shouldn’t starve to death. We can all agree on that, right? People shouldn’t die of easily controlled diseases. That seems like an easy point to get a consensus on. People should be warm, well-fed, and have their health care needs met. Can’t we all agree on that?

The society I live in obsesses over the weirdest things while 80 people control more wealth than 3.5 billion.

Terrorism. Statistically, your chance of dying from terrorism is less than your chance of being crushed to death by furniture. If you live in the United States, in any case. It isn’t a real problem. Like so many other things some of us are worried about.

I try to worry about things that actually matter. When 80 people control more wealth than 3.5 billion, and they’re doing very little to fix the world’s big issues, like

  • starvation
  • war
  • pollution
  • unnecessary deaths caused by preventable diseases

These issues are solvable. If we demand the resources. They’re available. If we take them, using the force of law backed by the will of the majority.

I’ve been actively listening to the people vying for leadership of the United States, which is my current home. All I can say is #feelthebern. Bernie Sanders is, more than any of the other contenders, focused on the huge problem of 80 people controlling the destiny of 3.5 billion other people. Those 80 people are doing a shitty job of solving the world’s problems. Despite their very clear moral responsibility.

I’m willing to risk all the negative connotations associated with #socialism if it means four years of seeing what a motivated idealist is willing to do to rebalance things. Nothing risked, nothing gained. No one else seems to be as genuinely angry about the current state of reality, and I think that’s a reason to give this guy my vote.

This country. This planet. We have enough resources to give everyone a shot at having a decent life. We can do better.

You are a human being. We all are. Our species is better when we take care of each other. Bernie appears to get it. Far more than any of the other viable candidates for the next President of this place I call home. The alternatives make me cringe.

The crab boy of Kabul

by 2 Comments

Leaving so I could arrive elsewhere, with a few illuminating details

In 2011, I left the United States for perhaps the 200th time in my life on a plane. I’ve come and gone and come and gone so many times I’ve lost count. This time, I was headed for Kabul. The capital city of war-torn Afghanistan. A place where (so they tell me) the dust in the air is 15% animal and human feces. Fun pseudo-fact. You are quite welcome to look it up and challenge my second-hand information.

Grammar is important in some places. Kabul, generally speaking, is not one of those places. I plan to write extensively about my time there (due to the ghosts that haunt my dreams). This story is about the crab boy of Kabul.

We, being NATO contractors paid ungodly amounts of money to pretend that we were making better officers out of Afghanistan’s national police force, lived in a “first-class hotel.” That, in and of itself, is another story. I intend to tell it too.

The camp was strategically positioned only 25 or so kilometers from our daily post at the Afghanistan National Police Training General Command, or ANPTGC for short. The place known as ANPTGC is, of and in itself, worth several of my fascinating anecdotes. Let’s set the scene for those of you who have not have the privilege of visiting or living in the city of Kabul:

Kabul smells like a mixture of burning things and offal

It is a maelstrom of chaotic activity. Situated at a relatively high elevation in a semi-arid climate and populated by about 3.5 million souls (give or take a few thousand a day), Kabul is 3,500 years old. And no smell has ever blown away from the city since it became one. Imagine a mixture of burning things, dead things, sweating things and shitting things. That will, perhaps, give you a 10% idea of the amount of nose crinkling I did during my time as a resident.

The streets are paved, sometimes. The motorcycles winding their way recklessly past donkeys, running children, roaming packs of mangy dogs, caravans of paranoid, egotistic, armed elites, and all other manners of roaming life careening wildly through what passes for avenues of transport are a cacophony of suicidal carelessness. The streets are not paved, sometimes. In less than two years I saw more than two dozen human traffic fatalities, an uncountable number of dead dogs, and one horse that dropped dead in the middle of what passes for a road in that particular place.

I’m coming around to the crab boy. Bear with me.

There are no traffic lights in Kabul. Only roundabouts. Some routes are two lanes. Some are twelve. The veins and arteries converge without warning. When there is a traffic jam on one side, drivers immediately begin to use the opposing lanes in a fashion that, if employed in the West, would result in dozens of fatalities per mile of road (do you like how I switched units of measurement?). That doesn’t happen in Kabul.

There are accidents, to be sure. But the beggars that sit in between lanes, combined with the other flotsam and jetsam everywhere, conspire to keep maximum speeds well below a catastrophic situation. Traffic in Kabul is tense. Especially inside an armored Chevy 2500+. But it isn’t suicidal. Not for us contractors, in any case. It’s just asshole tightening. Sweat inducing. Shoulder knotting intensity.

Which brings me to the crab boy of Kabul

As the armed driver of an armored pickup truck in Kabul, commuting up to 60km a day round trip six days a week, I saw many notable things. One of the most memorable, and spotted on more than one occasion, was the crab boy. The city of Kabul is full of dysfunction, disease, pestilence, and poverty. And it’s the capital. He was one of its many lesser citizens.

No armed convoy to convey him to important meetings with egotistical officials wanting bribes. No donkey to take him to market to sell vegetables honestly farmed. Not even a stolen bicycle to get him to the bread vendor so his stomach would not feel empty.

What I remember most is his smile. The kid with the twisted spine who couldn’t stand up. He had to scuttle along like a crab, begging. But his smile. It was like the sun in his brown face. He made me feel things I don’t know how to describe. He was the sun, the life giver. That smile was so genuine.

There I was, inside an armored steel and glass mechanism that probably cost ten times the money that boy will ever touch. Sweating, bitching and arguing with my fellow contractors about banalities that mattered so very little.

The crab boy was happier than I. I made more than 10,000 dollars a month. Tax-free.

He scuttled around with his bent spine, unable to stand up, seeing the world from the dust clouds kicked up by that bustling, insane place. I don’t know how much his begging earned, but I gave him one hundred dollars every time I got the chance. I hope it made something better. For him. For his mother. For whoever his caregiver was.

Every time I unlocked the door of my armored bubble, I was breaking a rule. Every time I broke a rule, his smile was worth any punishment that could have been inflicted on me. Some rules aren’t worth following.

Some smiles are worth handing out whatever hope I have to give.

I hope that he’s still smiling, and I hope his belly is full tonight. I dream of him sometimes and wish the world was different. If I see him again, and I can, I’ll give him another hundred dollars. Or a million.

I wish I could let him see the world from a higher vantage point. I try to switch places with him. Sometimes. When I’m dreaming.

I know I can’t.

Thank you for reading this. If you have a hundred dollars, give it to someone who needs it. If you can spare it.