penfist

stories are the bones of everything

Essays

What kind of character are you?

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“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

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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

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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

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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.

Before and after PTSD

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I’m a sufferer. But not really. Depends on the day. Depends on the triggers. Depends on a whole lot of baggage that is stored somewhere in my head.

I’m not whining. Let’s stop that line of thought before it starts. Rather, I’m telling you a part of my story. Which connects to other stories. Because, human. It’s a part of the deal.

I volunteered after watching something unfortunate. Never, ever Google ‘beheading videos.’ If you have a soul and want to retain it in some semblance of wholeness. Don’t type that in. Shit. I’m dumb sometimes. And drunk sometimes. Plus, my genetics require me to be inquisitive. So I watched. Men holding him down. Men sawing his head off.

I almost passed out from rage. How can people do that to other people?

A few months later. I’m in uniform. For the second time. A few months after that, I’m in Baghdad. And it’s still rippling outward for me. And inward. Because, dreams, scars, and echoes.

I’m diagnosed with PTSD. By the Veteran’s Administration. I’m not ashamed of it. Lots of people had much worse experiences than I did. And most of them weren’t stupid enough to sign up for a contractor job in another war zone a few years after using up more than one human lifetime’s ration of luck. So yeah, I compounded my issues by showing up in Afghanistan later. Different day, different part of the story.

Caring about the human condition sucks sometimes. But I can’t stop. So I cry more than I used to. And maybe sometimes I drink too much. Put me in front of a well-done war drama and watch me shudder and shake while the tears fall. That’s mostly the extent of my post-traumatic stress disorder. With an occasional night terror thrown in. Sometimes those come in waves.Except when I have to run out of a room because I can’t control the exits and I’m not in charge of how long the meeting is going to go and I think whatever is being discussed is absolutely banal.

I’m normal. Except when I have to run out of a room because I can’t control the exits, and I’m not in charge of how long the meeting is going to go, and I think whatever is being discussed is absolutely banal, and I want to scream, “Are you fucking crazy? Focus your life’s energy on something that is worth a shit!You fuckity fuck idiot!”

I know. I overdid the exclamations a bit. You can forgive me. If you’d like. If not, I won’t hold it against you.

I want to crawl back inside the time when I could ride off into the sunset and know that I wouldn’t dream of being trapped forever in the living hell that was Baghdad in 2006. I’d like to stop having flashbacks, big and small, into moments when I was certain the next rocket or mortar would be the one with my name on it. I wish I had faith like some of them. The ones I went with, came back with, couldn’t be like.

God, I can’t hear you. All I see when I close my eyes is the horror we inflict on each other in the name of things I don’t understand.

And just like in 2005, I feel a visceral need to do something when I see savages masquerading as human beings. Unfortunately, the more I know about how many disguises we wear in this life, the less certain I am who is to blame for all this inhumanity.

The struggle

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In other words, the science itself makes clear that hormones, enzymes, and growth factors regulate our fat tissue, just as they do everything else in the human body, and that we do not get fat because we overeat; we get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet make us fat. The science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one—specifically, the stimulation of insulin secretion caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars, like sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup. These carbohydrates literally make us fat, and by driving us to accumulate fat, they make us hungrier and they make us sedentary.
This is the fundamental reality of why we fatten, and if we’re to get lean and stay lean we’ll have to understand and accept it, and, perhaps more important, our doctors are going to have to understand and acknowledge it, too.
― Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

It’s working. This thing we’re doing is working. I can see it in the numbers. They are falling. I have never struggled with my weight. My dysfunctions are otherwise. The demons I wrestle with run a different course. But she struggles. With a monster made of heavy.

Fat. It’s a small word that does so much damage in this shallow ocean we inhabit. I’ve never been fat. But I care about someone who struggles, has struggled, will struggle with the three heaviest letters in the English language.

So much of what they tell us is wrong. The do-gooders operate around the perimeter. Feeding little lies and big ones that shape our daily decisions in manifold ways. So much of the stuff we learn is just made up. Miracles are only things we have not yet been able to explain.

Fat. I think I’ve begun to understand it. Because of this book. Because of a man named Gary Taubes. We followed his advice. My partner and I. We’re following a ketogenic diet. Sounds complicated. Not so much.

The basic premise is to eat lots of fat, moderate amounts of protein and minimal carbohydrates. Cut out the grains and eat as much bacon and dairy as you can handle. It’s working. We’re kicking that heavy three letter word in the ass.

Ten pounds this month. That’s significant. We aren’t starving ourselves. Lean muscle mass is staying consistent but the fat is melting off. Consistently. This flies in the face of what the government of my adopted nation tells me about what to eat.

If the people in charge can’t even figure out what we should be eating, what else are they getting wrong? It boggles the mind. I don’t need a fancy executive summary to know that the official recommendations weren’t working for her.

Life is an experiment. We’ve found something that works for us in this partnership. Whatever currents brought you to this place, if you struggle with “fat” I hope you’ll pick up the book and read. Thank you, Gary Taubes.