freewrite

What kind of character are you?

February 8, 2016 by Pen 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.

Breaking your own leg

January 21, 2015 by Pen Leave a Comment

Some people avoid the hard stuff. At any cost. I’m too dumb or too smart to do that. Depending how you look at it.

He’s a big black guy. Mid 30’s. Out of shape. From somewhere in deep Georgia. Thick drawl and a belly that’s soft and round from too much fried food. This guy is scared. He tells me so. We’re on the line practicing rushing. It’s this game of life and death where you simulate attacking an enemy position under machine gun and RPG fire. There are observer controllers throwing little sticks of dynamite at you. Firing on you with real machine guns loaded with blanks. Screaming at you. You get the idea.

Under a hot sun in the middle of a place far from everything you’re comfortable with you prepare yourself mentally and physically for war. And this guy wasn’t having any of it. I don’t remember his name. But I remember how scared he was. He didn’t want to go over there. He wasn’t going to die over there. I imagine him humping a pack through the desert. And dropping from a heart attack. He’s carrying a lot of extra weight already. Without the body armor. Without the combat load. He’d be struggling to run these simulated assaults even if he was butt naked.

We’re on the line. Reset. Do it again. Charge. Assault the bunkers. Get screamed at. Hear how pathetic we are. How part-timers like us are going to die. Because we’re out of shape. We don’t take it seriously. We can’t hack it. For some of us it’s the truth. We’re a bunch of middle-aged weekend warriors from all over. Called up to supplement the serious soldiers. The ones who do it full-time. A lot of us are sucking serious wind. This is the National Guard. We aren’t big Army.

This guy next to me isn’t having any of it. He’s dripping sweat and muttering to himself. I can see him coming up with a plan.

I focus on my work for a bit. We rush in a line a couple more times. We’re being evaluated. From the privates on up to the company commanders. Under the microscope. This place they sent us is a proving ground to weed out the weak ones. Yesterday a company commander was relieved of duty for screaming at the observer controllers. Those guys love their games. They’d been sneaking up on our tents in the middle of the night and throwing artillery simulators inside. Scaring the shit out of out of shape, exhausted middle-aged men. And perspective makes all the difference. The company commander took offense to having small sticks of dynamite thrown into the middle of his men while they slept. He lost his shit and screamed about it for a while. Now he’s gone. Someone else is in charge.

And this guy next to me. I’m watching him sort through his options. He tells me about his family a little. He’s got kids. Doesn’t want to leave them for 15 months or longer. Doesn’t want to get blown up in the middle of some desert far from home. We rush again. Some of us screaming with all our energy. This guy is using all his energy just to make it up the little hill to the bunkers we’re assaulting. He’s about wiped. He doesn’t scream. He mutters. And plots.

Last rush of the morning. Almost time for lunch. I watch him as we run. I see the moment he pulls the trigger inside his head and wonder what he’s going to do. We’re running across the flat open ground firing our own blanks and avoiding the artillery simulators. Ducking low and honing in on our target. Bunkers at the top of the little manmade rise. I see him dripping sweat to my left. He’s not quite keeping up with me but he’s charging for all he’s worth. We’re running up the rise. He puts on a burst of speed suddenly. Passing me for a second.

I watch him throw his rifle down in front of him and then tangle his right leg up in it. Intentionally. I hear a snapping, popping noise as he breaks his own right leg against the rifle on the side of the hill. He goes down screaming.

Later, in the medical facility, he’s content. I had to help carry him there because I was the guy next to him when he went down. He gets to go back home now. To his people. I’ll end up going in the other direction within two weeks. A long plane ride to the other side of the world. I sometimes wonder what it feels like to break your own leg.

I’ve never been wired that way. I never will be. But I wonder what might be different if I was. A lot of things changed in the sandbox. I still wake up from dreams of snapping my own bones.

Languages we don’t understand

December 9, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

I dream of a man chained to an engine block. Another man approaches cautiously. Not daring to come very close. He has a dish of food. The feral growls and lunges. Snapping and foaming at the mouth. The caregiver pushes the food within reach using a stick. Insanity comes from many sources. Blood lines. Bad decisions. A betrayal by a brother, a mother, a cousin. Insanity is tenacious.

I dream of you, splayed out before me. Waiting to be penetrated. Waiting to be eaten. Waiting to join me in the shadows of existence.

There is a line of tanks across the side of the mountain. Pointing towards the city filled with graffiti that says “fuck the oppressors” and similar things. The city is filled with buildings cemented together with mortar that contains the dust of the bones of the ancestors of the tribe that lives there. There are no walls high enough to keep out the bad things that live in our hearts. These monsters that come in the night. Demons are an invention we use to excuse the monsters that we are.

His name is Adolph, or Joseph, or Reinhard. Her name is Elizabeth, or Griselda, or Lizzie. We don’t forget what they did. The ghosts of the infamous haunt shadows we try not to walk in. And for some reason, I have always gone into the dark and looked at the shadows. Whispered back to them. The man chained to the engine block is lunging at his caretaker. If he could he would kill the one who brings him food in the dark.

I want to fly and soar. Instead I am running. A rocket is spiraling through the sky over my head. Not the glorious kind that will arc upwards out of the atmosphere and into cold space. This rocket is not designed to explore dreams. This rocket is the short, ugly kind that explodes among the date trees where I live now. An unwelcome package that contains between 40 and 110 pounds of high explosive. The delivery boy who is a few miles away hopes this rocket will end the story of me. I am an invader who walked into this world with a mind full of ideas that are unwelcome in this place.

I am not of this tribe. Not of this land. I am malleable, transitional, a roamer.

We clean up our office. Throw out the detritus of the administration of war. Most of it is written in a language I do not understand. The letters flow from right to left. This is backwards to my mind. Alien. Incomprehensibly foreign and of little value. I do not understand. I do not want to understand. This tribe’s different god who is not my god. My own tribe and their god is alien enough already. No room in my head for these scribbles. The next day my tribe tells me that we have offended our host tribe. The papers we threw out were holy. Honor has been slighted. They want to kill us now.

Yesterday they were friends. Today they will cut our throats. I am numb, anesthetized.

I see him amongst the rest of the warriors. Armored up, armed up, ready to kill. But he is different. He is not shuffling, spitting, watching with veiled eyes and stoic face. He is calm. In another world. Inside a book, a story, a place that keeps him anchored to something that is not a bomb, a bullet, an explosion of violence that could at any moment bring the final black down upon him. I take note. Learn the lesson he is teaching. Escape comes easily. In many forms.

I sleep on a bed of bones in a valley under the stars. War is coming. The oldest whisper. The water of this place will turn to blood. We are hungry for more. It is the oldest cycle.

Do I want your wife, your land, your dreams? What would I steal from you my brother? None of that. I want to be alone with my demons. The ones who make me tell stories.

I wake up sweating. Missing you. Who is my little fire. I want to mold the very fabric of existence into something that feels like home. But home for me is a city drifting in a dream above the clouds. Home for me is a place that exists only in the pages of a story that is not written yet. On a planet far away where war is only a memory and we are all one tribe. Evolution has more work to do before I can stop being a monster. Before I understand conflict, peace, resolution.

Fire burns and keeps us alive in the cold. Sometimes the light keeps the monsters away at night. The heat is welcome. It provides contrast and context. My hands are such marvelous things. I stare into the fire for a while. Look down at these instruments of mine that can flow out words or wrap themselves around a neck in the night to choke. I wonder what kind of story I will be. In time, the fire turns to coals and I fall asleep thinking of heroes and villains. How they are often one in the same.

I wake up in a different place. At a different time. It has always been so.

The fire is now a conflagration. A diesel truck is burning a few hundred yards away. The cab contains bodies. Badly burned. Souls fled. Charred human remains riddled with metal bits. We drive by and I am the one who is at the wheel. Inside an armored shell. Hoping that fire will be held at bay by the artifices of the engineers who designed this rolling ship I pilot. Miles and kilometers fade into the past and I am still alive. Gathering stories of what it means to be human. Wrestling always with the forces inside that try to hide meaning. That want me to be a lunatic chained to an engine block in the dark. Snarling at the moon and at my brothers and sisters because the world tried to eat me. I was unlucky enough not to lay down and die. I have never been graceful about the prospect of being chewed up.

I am water. I am blood. I am a trickle of life giving sanity in a desert.

Toss and turn. Sometimes scream. Sweating profusely I remain troublesome. To my tribe and yours.

Hello. My name is pen. I don’t fit into anything comfortable. I’m too sharp for that. I leak too much ink. I won’t stop dreaming.

Please come hold me in the dark. Tell me a story of transcendence. I know you drift too. Let’s keep looking for a home. When I’m tired and must sleep I hope you’ll feed my brother lunatic. He’s over there chained to an engine block. His mind is broken but I know that soon you and I will learn how to repair the damage. We’re healers with hard edges. Our scalpels are stories written in languages we sometimes don’t understand.

To flow freely

October 25, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

There are a million things you can be. Will be. You will not be told this secret by most you meet. For they are afraid. They live in a world that is finite without the understanding that all things begin and end over and over. Finite fits inside infinite. We are again and again. We are eternal. Not in the small way that some storybooks tell us.

The inevitability is that your atoms will, at some point you do not fully control, be scattered and rearranged. You are composed now. Your story has a start and a finish. There are only so many chapters. What most people fail to see clearly is that the story of you and the story of me are part of a bigger story. The story of us. All of us. We all swim together in an ocean of time. At different moments we might tread in its gentle flow and float together for a while. I know that the moments when I can swim with you might be fleeting.

That is why, when I am bobbing along in the timestream and you happen to be caught in the same current I am, that is important. You might be my companion for a moment or a lifetime. I don’t know. To flow freely is my destiny. I have spent too much time and energy trying to do something that no one swimming in an ocean of time should try to do. Staying in one place should not be the goal.

I will flow freely. To wherever it is that I end. To begin again in a new incarnation that is not going to be what I expect. As I wait for the gloriousness of not knowing to arrive and wash me away it occurs to me that I would like to touch you. I’ll try to remember your eyes. Their color. I’ll try to remember if you laughed and what it sounded like. I will write down the one thing you said to me in that moment that was worth remembering and learning from. Even if it is only for a moment. You were trying to teach me something in the moment that we floated together. I’ll ponder and remember and try to know what it was.

What if that moment turns into a lifetime? It could you know. The ripples and echos and eddies of us seem like beautiful untapped potential. At the beginning of this story I did not understand that I will pass a million faces floating in the sea of time with me and perhaps only see them once. That all of those faces contain something I should try to know.

It’s why now, if you see me float by, and are paying attention you will notice that I am staring. I want to know because I do not. Know how much time is left before my story ends. Or your story ends. And where the ocean will receive this thing I call me into itself. So I look deep into your eyes as you pass by. To see if you will give me something worth chewing on, worth writing about, worth a dance or a song or a painting.

And when the next me comes along without remembering the last me I hope that something I knew in the part of the ocean where I met you helps the you and I who come next know something new. We are all meant to flow freely, to swim until we are tired, and then to sink down into dreams and be remade.

There are a million things you can be. Will be. Which one would you like to know about before this story ends? Let’s take a moment together and float in the question.