Guest Blog, Writing and Donations

Hello beautiful, beautiful people!

A brief update today.  I'll have something cooking for you soon though.  Promise.

Guest Blog

Let me start off this blog post by referring you to The Tsaritsa's blog.  Click here to see my recent guest blog there.  It's a video blog, which is unfortunate for you all, 'cause that means you have to hear my weird voice and look at my weird face.  Well, I guess you don't have to.  She also posted a transcript of my words from the video.  So I suppose you could read it if you like.  I'm still learning about video editing and how to perform in front of a camera.  I do much better when I am before flesh and blood people than I do when I am in front of a cold sterile camcorder.

The topic of the video blog is the #OccupyWallStreet Movement.  It is my first public attempt to weigh in on that situation.  Some of you probably already know a little bit about how I feel about #Occupying, but I think that my views on it are atypical.  If you #Occupy or support #Occupiers or despise #Occupiers, you ought to give it a shot and leave a comment on Haight's blog.  She is awesome!  Thanks, sister!

Writing

So, I don't know if y'all have checked out my other, newer blog.  You can find it here.  It is a "tumblr."  Tumblr is a micro-blogging infrastructure.  The setup is such that it pressures the user into writing shorter posts than one normally would on a normal style blog.  It is also much more visual than normal blogs.  I think the appeal of tumblr is the simple fact that people don't like to sit and read a lot of text a lot of the time, so it's easier when people post photos or short little paragraphs rapid-fire.  The stream of content is constant (if not always original) and the layout of most tumblrs is aesthetically pleasing.  My tumblr is almost all original content, and the theme is that of love and peace and poetry.  While I still consider "In Review" my primary blog, and a place where I can write about anything, from politics to spirituality to all the various times I have pooped my pants, I am really enjoying the tumblr thing.  It keeps me a little more focused.  I post there at least once per day.

That said, I have to tell you all that I am super stoked on the fact that I have felt almost endlessly creative of late.  I have felt like writing or creating or learning (an act of creativity, in my book) almost all of the time.  I am not exactly sure where this new-found energy has come from.  One factor that I am fairly certain has aided me here is my persistent attempt to minimize my lifestyle.  I've written about this here, and I talked about it on the video guest blog, and I've been writing about it quite a bit on the tumblr.  I feel that the more things I remove from my life as far as destructive behavior patterns (drinking, spending money on credit, over eating, purging, shop-lifting, etc) and the more I focus on physical self-denial, the more potent my mental energy becomes.  I think that some of that energy is being corralled into my creative life.  Which is a good thing.

Since I have felt so much like writing lately, and since I enjoyed so much the experience of guest blogging for Haight, I want to take this opportunity to tell you other bloggers out there that I want to write for you.  I know that I have, in the past, told various bloggers that I was going to write this or that for them.  I have usually not gotten around to it, mostly for lack of creative energy.  I feel differently now.  So if you write a blog, and struggle to come up with something to write every day or every other day (or however often), my offer to you is simple: give me something to write about, and I will write about it, and you can post it on your blog.  But you must assign the topic.  I do better when someone tells me what to write.  When people don't tell me what to write, I tend to get a little heady, or I end up writing about shitting my pants. :-/

Also: if you work closely in conjunction with any kind of publication, online or otherwise, I am more than willing to write in that capacity too.  I know it's a long shot to think that anyone like that is milling around my blog.  But on the off chance that they are: I'm willing to write for money or publicity in order to advance my goal of world peace and total love.

Furthermore, I want you all to know that I am going to begin work on a book.  It will be a shortish (I hope) text that will attempt to summarize some of the most important revelations I have had about the nature of the world and the way that I see myself and other individuals fitting into that world.  It will not be fictional, and probably will only be partially auto-biographical.  I really dislike writing fiction.  I prefer essay, auto-biography or poetry.  So I'm gonna start on this book, and I don't know what I am going to do with it upon its completion.  I may submit it to publishers, or I may just self-publish and distribute it online.  Who knows.  The writing comes first.

I think I'm going to go start on that right after this...

Help Me!

If you want to help me, link to me.  Mention me on twitter.  Tell me what you want me to write about and I can guest blog for you.  Tell me how you make money writing, and how you increase the visibility of your writing.  I am completely unwilling at this point to put advertising of any kind on my blog, because I loathe advertising.

If you want to help financially, you can donate to me now by clicking the "donate" button on the right side of the page.  I promise, anything you donate to me will be used to pay off credit card accounts (which I will promptly close) and to buy beans and rice or things like that.  No new phones.  No booze.  No prostitutes.  So if you wanna kick me a ten spot, that would be totally cool.  If you're wealthy and bored and want to see if one dorky writer can change the whole world, then send me a few thousand dollars to free me completely from my debt trap.  I'll buy a tent, live nomadically, and spread the message of peace.  You'll see.  It will be awesome.  And if you just want to talk to me, that's the very best way to help me.  So please, talk away.

Love.

Fasting, Love and A Girl From India

HELLO BEAUTIFUL PERSONS!

I say "persons" because I was talking to a friend the other day about the nature of language and how it can be restricting in so many ways.  My friend is taking a feminist studies class, and they have been discussing the propensity of English to impose masculinity onto our species with words like "MANkind" and "huMAN" and the like.  I find this concept to be fascinating.  We do indeed live in a very male-centric society.  So I'll try to say person as opposed to human more often.  Although I don't think it will be very easy to adhere to this.  Because I love persons.  Humans.  Men.  Women.  Children.  All. :-)

I'm in a writing mood this morning (I wrote this short piece on culture and technology earlier on tumblr), and I feel that I do some of my best writing in the morning.  So I want to respond to some questions that I recently received from a girl in India who has been reading my blogs.  First off, I want to say "hi" to her directly, and to tell you all how flattered I was at her remarks about my writing.  She proceeded to consume a lot of my writing all in one sitting upon discovering my blog, which really made my day! :-) Thank you, sister!

The questions she asked about were about my fasting, and about how I found myself in a state of loving all people.  I will adress those both here.  Let's get started, shall we?

Fasting

So for those of you who don't know me personally (which you should) or do not follow my tumblr or tweets (which you also should), I will tell you that I have been experimenting with fasting of late.  I haven't gotten too far into it yet.  I have only recently completed my second 24-hour fast.

Some background information about myself and the way I consume food would be prudent here.  I am a person who loves food.  ALmost all food.  Except for seafood, which makes me wretch, normally.  I am not a vegetarian, because I love meat.

All of this looks absolutely delicious to me.  I know... I know... I just blew away all of my feminist street cred'.  Fuck it though. Girl is bangin' hot.

  I even love fast food.

Don't judge me.  This food all tastes great.  It is, in fact, designed to taste great and be addictive, after all.

I love having expensive steak and sushi and I love love love anything my mom ever cooks (except for "Chicken Tetrazini" which is... just disgusting. My sister and I made her stop making it).

I love food so much that I used to eat it way way too much.  I also had a severely distorted perception about how my body looked, and so I was in something of a trap: how do I lose weight (I perceived myself to be obese when I was not) while simultaneously eating pounds of delicious food at a time?  (And I do mean pounds.)

I started purging in an attempt to control my weight at a young age.  I would say the first time I did it I was probably around the age of 14.  At that time, I was legitimately overweight, although I still perceived myself then to be more overweight than I actually was.  I began using the ol' "finger down the throat" trick.  Doing that, I was able to make myself vomit up meals that I had eaten for a while.  My gag reflex began to become less sensitive though, and I began needing to use various implements other than my finger to make myself puke.  I used the handles of toothbrushes, pens, long thin kitchen spoons, and other such items.  

I recall at one point (and I may have related this story before) that I was driving across the Rocky Mountains, and I stopped at a town on the way to get some Wendy's.  I ate two huge sandwiches (probably a Classic Double and a Spicy Chicken Fillet, my favorites there) in addition to a large fry and a big "Frosty."  Now, normally when I would engage in this sort of behavior, I wouldn't have the idea at the outset to eat and then make myself vomit.  I would tell myself "you can eat it this once, and then you will just stop eating unhealthy and lose weight from here on out."

But immediately after my compulsive and addictive consumption, there came incredible, overwhleming guilt and self hatred.  The feeling of all that salty, greasy, yummy food in my stomach made me crazy.  So as I was driving, I decided to stop and purge.  I stopped at a rest area along the continental divide and went in to puke.  I had a pen about like this:

I knelt down in a stall.  There was no one else at the rest area at the moment.  My car was the only one in the parking lot.  I bent over the toilet and shoved the pen down my throat, holding it from the cap.  I puked.  And puked.  And puked.  And I started to feel that twisted relief of having eaten and then puked.  I shoved the pen down my throat for one more hard purge, and then some bad shit happened....

Here's a drawing of me almost dying.

That's right.  The fucking pen cap came off and the main portion of the pen started sliding way way farther down my throat than I ever wanted anything aside from food to slide.  (Blow-job joke, anyone?)  

I was alone.  I immediately thought I was going to die as I struggled against the reflex to swallow the pen farther down.  This was one of the most terrifying moments of my entire life.  It was by the grace of God herself that I was able to, in the end, barely snag the pen with my tumb and middle finger and drag it out before it disappeared all the way from my mouth and strangled me there alone kneeling before a toilet filled with puke and covered in someone else's piss.  Sad times, right?

Later on in life, I developed another means of purging myself, which was to take mad amounts of this:

Pretty messed up right?  Let me tell you that eating pounds of food in one sitting and then eating a quadruple dose of a stimulant laxative an hour later will really really give you a bad gut ache.  Later, I turned to this:

Milk of Magnesia

Milk of magnesia is non-stimulant, so there was a hope that it would do less damage to my sad abused body.  It turns out, though, that milk of magnesia is way way more effective as a laxative than stimulant laxatives such as Exlax.  I would drink like a quarter of a bottle of this shit at once, and soon enough, everything in my digestive system would come spraying out of my butt in a hurry.

I do mean spraying.  It was sometimes like a fire hose.  And it wasn't really normal poo.  More like greenish brown light soup of some kind.  Oddly enough, it never really gave me stomach cramps.  I just pooped a lot of fire hose liquid.  This is funny in retrospect.  Here's a video that kinda gives you an idea of what I was going through:

This was me, only I was less black and less funny. :-/

So needless to say, food and I have had an odd relationship over most of my life.  Generally speaking, I used food the same way I used alcohol and other mind-closing drugs: to numb myself.  I used the odd behavioral mechanism of purging to enhance my sense of control over myself.  

Which brings us to fasting.

When I was bulimic, I attempted frequently to be anorexic.  I would try to force myself to stop eating in order to lose weight because I thought that the reason I didn't have the proper life or the proper girls in my life were because I was disgusting to look at.  I was able to force myself to stop eating only very rarely, because food was an addiction to me.  I made it to a full twenty-four hours maybe once or twice in my vain attempts to control my issue.  I also had a few times where I didn't eat for some time due to intake of drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine.  But I don't think that any of that counts as fasting. 

This shit here will take away your appetite fast.  Not recommended.  A weak, mind-closing substance.   

Since earlier this spring when I realized that I didn't have to hate myself so much, I have easily ceased all bulimic or anorexic behavior, and obsessive thoughts about the way that I look have (finally) fallen by the way.  In the midst of my bizarre and surprising process of revelation, I realized a lot of other things about the world, and I realized that I might like to experiment with fasting.  The thought at the inception of this was my consideration of the fact that much of the world is hungry.  According to most figures that I have seen, the number of hungry humans in the world is about one billion.  That's a full seventh of the world.  This makes me genuinely very sad, when I consider the fact that we have the technology, the energy and the money to make this problem disappear in a matter of months.  I understand that global redistribution of wealth under current economic models is a difficult if not impossible task.  But I also think that current modes of economy are shit and should be abolished, and that the one billion hungry people (particularly the children in that number) ought to have at least enough food to sustain themselves.

Then I started thinking about the food that I consume, and how much it really costs.  On most days, now, and in most cases, I equate economic energy of any kind with calories, which are what a seventh of the world needs.  When I look at the way I used to eat, whether it was healthy or not, or whether the food came from a restaurant or I prepared it myself, I can see that there was a lot of potential calories being squandered in my diet.  As an American, I had a diet that consisted of a lot of meats and cheeses and highly processed foods.  Foods that are relatively expensive to produce and to transport.  Foods that were both bad for my health and gluttonous in the sense that I began to see myself as eating more than my fair share.

So I decided to try something different.  I started to eat things that were more economical.  One of the things I eat the most now are beans and rice.  Beans and rice are extremely economical.  I conserve my economic energy, which I equate to calories that can later be used to feed someone else, by eating beans and rice like this:

Yummy!

I frequently consume the beans and rice in burrito format as pictured below:

Shitty picture quality. Sorry. :-/

So as I began to reform the way that I ate, and as I began to minimize other portions of my life by ridding myself of excess, I was struck by the idea that maybe I could have something to gain from taking periods of time when I don't eat at all.

This quickly became a clear choice for me.  The following are the major factors that make fasting a clear choice for me:

1.  Fasting means not consuming, and not consuming means taking energy out of the hands of the American economy, which I believe to be an economy of death and war (see Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, East Timor and others).

2.  Fasting means reducing the amount of calories I consume in a world of finite resources where many people are starving.  

3.  Experiencing hunger (albeit highly controlled hunger) gives me a greater sense of empathy for that segment of the globe's population that is truly hungry and not in control of their hunger.

4.  Many of the major world religions endorse one form of fasting or another, which I believe to be some indication that fasting can lead to an increase in spiritual satiation.

5.  A study I read once showed that people who experience periods of brief famine in their lives tend to live longer.  It has something to do with the cell-death-clock.  Don't quote me on this.

6.  Fasting saves me money, and I am a debt slave for the time being so I need quite a bit of money before I can be free of that slavery.

7.  Fasting alters the way the brain works, and I believe that at some point, if I am able to extend my fasts to a certain point, I will be able to have alterations in consciousness due to altered body metabolism.

8.  Fasting requires a large amount of self-control, for me, because I love food and think about Qdoba and pizza every single day.  For me, self-control is a learned behavior that I acquire through practice, and I believe that fasting improves my skill with self-control, which is something I seek.

9.  Fasting brings a greater appreciation for delicious food when I do eat it.

10.  Fasting is something fun to blog about.

So, that's it.

I have completed two twenty-four hour fasts so far, and I believe I will try another one this coming week.  The first one was much harder than the second one, and the third one will likely be easier than the second was.  Once I become comfortable with the twenty-four hour timetable, I will be interested in pushing it up to thirty-six hours and then perhaps to forty-eight hours.  I do not feel compelled by these goals though, and as per usual, everything in my life is subject to immediate change upon my receiving new self-awareness.  So I don't know how long I will experiment with fasting or how far I will push it. But I am going to keep doing it and telling you awesome people about it while I do. :-)

How I Came to Love All Persons

This one is trickier.

I am going to be brief here, in fact.  

I found universal love by relinquishing self hate.

How the fuck did I come to wake up one morning with my own self hatred simply lifted from me?  I struggle to find a word besides "miracle" to describe it.  But when my hatred for myself withered, my love for all other persons was allowed to blossom.

I think the key to finding universal love is to realize, as I have said before, that morality and human behavior are very subjective.  The best example I believe people have of this is not outside but within themselves.  I looked at all the times I had "messed up" in life, and became finally aware, at some deep level, that, despite the fact that, with objective retrospection, I could see that my actions had often given me terrible outcomes, I never thought at the exact moment I did any action that I was doing the worst possible thing.  In fact, truth be told, I had both consciously and sub-consciously weighed out the facts and come to the conclusion that the action was indeed the best action to take at the time, despite the fact that I frequently knew there could be some negative consequences beforehand.  

My experience and knowledge of the world simply showed me that doing the action was better than not doing it.  This applies to every single sober action I ever took.  (If I drank, I don't think I any longer had the ability to make these kinds of decisions.)

If this is true for all of my actions (even my very worst ones) then it must, really, be true for all healthy-brained sober humans.  I realized that behavior is subjective and that no person ever wakes up in the morning and says: "man, I can't wait to deliberately fuck the world up today to my own detriment or to the detriment of others just for detriment's sake."

Since no person ever says this, then, really, my judgment of others ceased to matter.  All became forgivable to me when I forgave myself.  Everything is circumstantial.  Poor behavior results from indoctrination by culture and from lack of education about the nature of the world.  That's it.  Therefore, I came to see myself as equal with all other persons for the first time in my life.  When I found that, I realized that all I truly wanted was love.  When I realized that that is all I truly, deeply wanted, then I made this simple connection:

to get love, I had only to give it.

I love the entire world and everyone on it because it is absolutely the most effective means possible to fill my own cup of love up until it runneth over.

And I mean to tell you, friends: the cup runneth the fuck OVER!!!! :-)

-----

This was all for my friend in India.  I hope she enjoyed this and that it answered her questions.  I love you, Pakhi, and am glad you find my writing intriguing! Thank you for connecting with me.

Also: look forward to my first public writing weighing in on the #OccupyWallStreet movement, which will be appearing at the Tsaritsa's blog sometime in the next few days, I hope, depending on when I finish writing it and when she decides to post it.  She's a B.I.L.F.  I'll let you figure the meaning of that out for yourself. ;-)

Love.

A Short Fiction

Hi guys! :-)

I had to write a piece of fiction for a class.  It's due tomorrow.  I'll give it to you all tonight.  Take it with a grain of salt.  It was written in haste and the subject matter is dark, but the flesh of the story hides things that are very meaningful to me.  Also, I copy/pasted this and some of the paragraph formatting looks a little screwy for some reason but it shouldn't detract from the story itself.

Sorry about all the gravity lately.  I'll write something lighthearted soon.

If you want it in PDF, for your e-reader or whatever, click here.

Also: for those of you that haven't, check out my new micro-blog here.

Here we go:

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A Night’s Work

The siren crept into his American long-legged dream slowly, droning softly in the background at first, covering the woman covered in his sweat and growing, breathing down his neck, rushing him, urging him on to his triumphant visceral climax.  As it manifested itself into that shrill discordant pulse of mechanical red light fear, he became lucid and knew that soon the alarm would break him free from his dream state and from the stack of breasts and blonde that lay beneath him, moaning that pop-song of the bicentennial into the American heartland.  He hurried himself, propelling himself faster between her legs, trying to beat the ticking clock that was his flesh ears, which would soon no longer stand for his sleep.

            She moaned louder. He could see it in the vessels and tendons attempting to pull themselves free of her neck through her pale skin.  He couldn’t hear it though.  As he thrust and pushed and tried, climax seemed to sink away from him as into a black hole and he began to get tired.  He wondered how he could tire physically in a waking dream and thought of his mother in frustration and then his mind turned to the missiles and he felt a single gigantic bead of sweat coalesce at the end of his nose.  He watched as it fell from him.  He felt the salty liquid spring itself loose.  Time seemed to slow down and he stopped thrusting, and she looked up at him with those eyes that begged too many questions and made him a woman and the siren stopped as the bead drifted along its straight path, downward, to explode in a cartoonish splash on the taught flesh just above her navel. 

            “Just… just one more minute…” he said to no one.  She suddenly had no face and no ears. Then, he woke up.

            The siren in his cramped workstation was deafening, and a red light on the wall blinked itself on and off along with the cacophony, warning him that the proximity sensor outside had been set off by the motion of some deer or coyote again.  Out there in the plains, where he watched his babies, the missiles, the wildlife came frequently.  He would suffer the sound of the alarm at least twice per week.  He sat in the cramped, obnoxiously white and well-lit space six days per week.  His shifts lasted twelve hours.  He wore his fatigues.  He liked his babies.  His five little children of death.

            Blinking the sleep from his eyes, vaguely remembering the blonde and his frustration, he stood himself up out of his big comfy chair and picked up his M-16, which stood propped in a nearby corner, aiming into heaven and the heart of God.  The gun was loaded, as always.  His sidearm, too, was loaded, but no longer felt heavy against his right hip.  He flipped a switch on a colorful control panel, next to his notebook computer, and the siren stopped.  Big black clown boots tick-tocked their way across the sterile, smooth cement floor as he walked the five feet to the tiny dark stairway that led out to the North Dakota emptiness.

            “These fucking deer…” he muttered to himself. 

            There were a couple of holes in the fence around his silos that had been on the slate for mending for months.  The coyotes and deer easily got through to the grass and the small game that moved around the one-mile square area in his charge.  It was seasonally warm outside when he pressed his full body weight into his shoulder and then into the big steel door that he didn’t bother anymore to lock.  He’d been scolded for it once, but the C.O. had his own problems and didn’t make a big deal about little things.  No one had ever attempted to breach the perimeter of the restricted area since the silos had been built.

            He’d forgotten to hit the lights.  He stepped back into the stairway about a foot and pounded his fist against a large red button on the wall.  Behind him, the grassy expanse lit up under the floods.  Procedure was to identify what had tripped the proximity alarm, and, if it was human, to detain it while calling for backup.  Since he knew it wasn’t human, he knew he might have a chance to practice his aim on some unfortunate animal.  He would log the disturbance in the hourlies and, hopefully, he thought, return back to the dream of the blonde.  The blonde was his apple pie.

            His eyes searched around him as he stepped out into the grass.  He could smell the dirt and the grass.  Stark contrast to the smell of the base, where he lived.  The base smelled like diesel and brass polish and gunpowder.  But out here, it was the smell of earth.  A beautiful place to take care of his babies. 

            Scanning the horizon, he immediately thought that the animal had already ran away.  Usually they did when he hit the lights.  They seemed almost as bright as the sun behind him and he could hear them burning with electricity running through their industrial bulbs.  He was seeing nothing out on that dark horizon.

            “Fucking deer….” He muttered to himself.  He saw nothing, but heard the gentle howl of a mother coyote to his North.  He reached into his breast pocket and produced a pack of Marlboro Reds and a Zippo lighter with a military insignia on it.  He thought of the dream again, and felt aroused.  He thought of the cigarette that he would have had at the end of the dream, had it ever came.  The end of his dreams never seemed to come though, and he flicked the lighter open with that familiar metal clink.  He pulled his callused thumb down once, twice, then three times across the tiny wheel that dragged across the flint.  Finally, a little poof and fire was his.  He lit the end of the cigarette and heard it crackle as he shut the lighter again with that satisfying American noise.  He liked the way the little cylinder fit between his lips and he felt as man.

            He leaned on his weapon and thought of little.

The cigarette was almost gone when he heard something a few yards away from him to his left.  He was startled, but told himself that he was not.  He hid behind his cloud of smoke and his missiles and his gun and did not ever have to be afraid.  He pulled the gun up from his side, up from where its butt had been resting in the dirt, and swung it around toward the noise.  He strained to listen, the still burning Marlboro pouring unfiltered smoke now up into his eyes.  There was a dark spot in the lights where a few of the bulbs had burned out, the way the fence had been holed.  He heard the noise again.  It sounded like a coyote.  Too soft to be a dear, but rhythmic like a footstep.  Eyes burned from smoke and focused.  Left hand pulled the cigarette down from his face.  Ears reached out.

            The steps, he realized, were not of four feet but of two, and his heart immediately began to pound. 

            “Stop!” he screamed on reflex into the night.  He thought he saw a figure emerging from the malfunction-produced shadow.  The steps proceeded, and he became aware of the shadow in a real sense.  A slight figure, walking slowly.  Deliberately.

            “HEY!  STOP OR I’LL SHOOT!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.  The butt of the Marlboro had fallen to the ground next to his boot and now he was staring down the length of the black weapon at the shadow.  It continued to move toward him.

            “YOU ARE TRESPASSING ON THE PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE! THIS IS A RESTRICTED AREA! PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND KNEEL DOWN SLOWLY, NOW, OR I WILL OPEN FIRE!” he screamed.  He had never had to say it before.  Never threatened that thing they had made him memorize.  He’d never aimed a weapon at a human before, but he had dreamt it a million times.  Somehow, the dreams had never felt like this.  He thought of his mother and his babies.

            The figure advanced into the threshold of the light and he immediately aimed his weapon away.  He sucked in a gasp.  It was a young girl.  Maybe eighteen.  Her eyes were closed and she stepped slowly and deliberately toward him.

            “What is….” He started to ask himself.  He put his gun on the ground, breaking procedure, and walked toward the girl. 

            “Hey! Hey!” he shouted out, as his big black boots clip clomped like hooves across the ground.  He cleared the distance between his gun and the girl in a matter of seconds.  He wondered why she hadn’t responded.  He stood in her path as she stepped slowly forward and when she stepped into his space, he grabbed her small frame by its shoulders and shook her.  She started, and lurched back against his grip, eyes suddenly flung open.  A dark brown.  Almost black.  She lurched back as if in terror, but her eyes were soft.  Her hair was black like the metal of his M-16 and her skin was brown.  She smelled like a campfire. 

            “Where… what?” she whispered.

            He let her go.  She looked confused as she glanced around herself and then back at him.  He realized that she must have been camping nearby and had a spell of sleep-walking.  Campers frequently came out that way.  They weren’t supposed to.  No one stopped them, as long as they didn’t cross the fence-lines.

            “It’s okay.  I think you were… do you sleep walk?  You’re on Air Force land.” He said.

            “Oh…” she said.

            “Out there camping, huh?” he asked.

            “Yeah…” She was silent in thought, looking as if she was about to explain.  Then she just repeated: “yeah.”

            “Listen, you shouldn’t be wandering around out here like this....” he said, glancing around at the dark horizon suspiciously.

            “Wait… where am I?  Who are you?”

            “I’m Corp… I’m Chris.” He said. “This is a missile range.  You know, like, the nukes?”

            He said it proud and recalled his oath.  His oath had made him feel man, like the long, slender cigarette between his lips.

            “Oh god….” She said.  She stepped back away from him.  She struck him suddenly as perfectly beautiful.  Nothing like the blonde in the dream.  Something inside of him raged and he thought about the missiles being flung loose from their cages.

            “…what?” he asked.

            “You… this… you’re in charge of bombs?” she struggled to speak, but was beginning to appear more awake.

            “Well, just five.  But, yeah.  Well, it’s fifteen actually, each missile has three warhe….” He trailed off.  He wasn’t supposed to talk about the missiles to anyone.  But he had trailed off because her face was contorted in horror.  Her skin was smooth and looked as though it was rarely contorted at all.  He liked the smell of the campfire wafting off of her, but it was dissipating as she backed away from him.

            “Can I just go?  I won’t tell anyone I was out here.  I’ll just walk back the way I came,” she said.  She started to turn around.  He wondered what was startling her so bad.

            “No!  Wait! You can’t go.  It’s dangerous out there, and, anyway, the…” he wondered what to say, briefly, then continued, “… the guys on base are already on their way out to secure the perimeter.  You tripped the alarm.  If you don’t want to get in trouble, you can’t run off.”

            He lied.

            She paused, and turned back to him.  She appeared deep in thought for many seconds.

            “Why do you do this job?” she asked bluntly.

            “Are you kidding?  This is the coolest job in the world!” he replied.

            She looked angry.

            “You don’t know what you’re saying.  That’s crazy.  Why would you want to sit here by these things?  Where are they, anyway?” she glanced around herself.

            “They’re all over there, behind the lights.  You can’t seem ‘em from here.  But they’re there.  I like sitting out here.  I get time to read.  Play computer games.  Sleep a little here and there.  I was sleeping when you set off the alarm.  You interrupted a good dream…”

            “You interrupted a dream too…” she said.

            She stepped back toward him.  He pulled out the cigarettes and lit one. The coyotes curled a series of howls across the distant northern sky and the campfire smell got stronger again before the tobacco obscured it.

            “Do you sleep walk often?  Do people dream while they do that?  What was your dream?”

            She looked at his eyes but appeared to be focused on something distantly behind him. 

            “I can’t remember exactly.  I was with my brother… maybe in a car driving to St. Paul?  I think we were going to Minnesota but it might have been a bus or a train or…” she continued to look into his eyes as she conjured up the sliding memory of the dream.

            Suddenly her eyes widened.

            “What?” he asked. 

            “You won’t believe me… but my dream was about mushroom clouds! Fucking… nuclear explosions!  How WEIRD is that?!?  I have NEVER dreamt that before tonight…”

            He cocked his head to the left in canine disbelief. 

            “I remember… we were on a bus or a train and I remember looking back behind us and seeing these ridiculous explosions where we had come from… and I remember knowing that our family had been trapped there.  I remember knowing that my family was dying…” she said.

            “That is… REALLY weird.” He said.

            They stood there quiet for a moment.  He didn’t know what to say.  Surely she was exaggerating herself.

            “Walk back to the control room with me.  You can stay there for a bit.  Normally I think they would arrest you and you would be in big trouble but… I think I can convince them it was just an animal.”

            She was lost in thought, her eyes glazed over.  Then, almost robotically this time, she began to step her slender form toward the lights behind him.  He walked with her, and hurried ahead of her slightly to grab his weapon.  He slung it over his shoulder and then turned around to her.

            “So, in the dream, why were the nukes going off?  Shouldn’t you have been dreaming about explosions in Russia or China or something?”

            “I don’t know.  I don’t remember much specific.  Just the most sickening pain…”

            “Well that sucks.  My dream was way better.  I was dreaming about a girl.  She looked kinda like you, in fact.” He lied and winked.

            She stopped in her tracks a few yards from the door to the little stairway.  He dropped the half smoked cigarette to the ground and stepped on hit with his clown boot.

            “What if this means something?”

            “What?” he asked.

            “Why did I walk out here?  Why did I dream that?  This has to mean something…”

            “Don’t get all weird on me now, sister.  Maybe it just meant… that we were supposed to meet.”  He smiled big at her, trying to seduce her but not knowing how.

            She stared down at her feet, covered in designer hiking boots.  She wondered about how she could have tied them in her sleep.  She felt at once as though she was still dreaming.

            “What the fuck is this?  Who are you?!?” she shouted at him suddenly.

            “What do you mean?!  I told you already!”

            “This isn’t real.  I’m still asleep!”

            “No, no.  You’re awake.  And you’re starting to freak me out.  Come on and get in here you can go back to sleep on the bunk. I’ll take you back to town in the morning when my shift is over.”

            She thought about his proposal, staring at her feet.

            “No.  We’re turning these things off.”

            She stepped toward him.

            “What?”

            “We’re turning these bombs off.  We’re going to break them.  You’re going to break them.”

            He laughed.

            “I’d go to prison for a long time if I did that.  So would you.  You’re crazy.”

            “It could be done?”

            “It coul… no! We’d go to prison.  They’re never going to get fired anyway.  Who knows if they even work?  We’re not doing anything to the bombs. You’re crazy!”

            He thought about his mother and the blonde and his babies.

            Then he felt his eyes involuntarily moving up the gentle line of her body.  The curve or her hips was small.  She was short.  Thin.  Not his American dream girl.

            Suddenly, a violence erupted from her mouth.

“You mother fucker, you turn off those bombs or I’ll make you kill me tonight!” she screamed.  She charged at him.  Reflexively, he caught her before she could dodge by and into the control room.  He caught her and held her and she screamed.  He was starting to wonder if she was high on some powerful psychoactive or if perhaps she was schizophrenic.

            “Hey, kid, calm DOWN!” he said with force, pulling her into his chest hard to restrain her.  She calmed down physically and now her gaze drilled into his eyes and her focus was right there, seeping into his optic nerve, permeating his brain down to the reptilian center.

            She stared hard in anger and disgust.  He couldn’t imagine what to do next.  She was clearly unstable.  They hadn’t trained him for this.

            “I could get in trouble for you being out here,” he said softly.

            “Fuck you.  Turn them off!”

            “This is just my job…”

            “How can you live this way, with so many lives on your hands?”

            He’d never thought of it.  His mind was drawn into her.  He sucked in a deep breath and sensed a tiny whisper of perfume.

            “You’re beautiful…” he whispered.

She didn’t respond.

He leaned in and kissed her mouth.  It was short, and she jerked back, but did not free herself from him.

            “You piece of shit.  You want me?”

            He nodded, like a boy, sullen.  She smirked.  She leaned into him and kissed him hard.  Her tongue darted into his mouth and tasted stale tobacco.  She tasted like cheap beer.

            The kiss lasted several seconds, and then she pulled back. 

            “Turn them off?  For me?”

            “I… can’t.”

            He was becoming a monster inside.

            She lifted the 9mm Beretta from the holster she had unclipped at his side and dropped low, sliding from out of his arms with ease.  She stepped back two quick paces and pulled the gun up to point at his face.  He didn’t say a word, immediately placing his hands in the air.

            “Now… turn them off.”

            He stood like a statue.

            “Put the gun down.  The men from the base will be here any minute.  This doesn’t have to be like this.  Put the gun down and you can just walk away.  I promise,” he said.

            “You kiss like shit, you know that?”

            “I… I’m sorry…”

            Her eyes softened.

            “How can you live this way?”

            “It’s just the way it is.  If I wasn’t here, someone else would be.  There are a hundred silos out here.  Nineteen other guys doing exactly what I’m doing.”

            “Would you push the button if they called and told you to?”

            “I don’t think about that.”

            The heavy weapon remained perfectly still in her hands.  She had turned the safety off before aiming it.  She’d fired before.

            “Would you die, then, for them?”

            “What? For the bombs?”

            “Yeah.”

            He heard coyotes across the expanse of the night.  They sounded melancholy.  He thought about his American dream.  His white woman covered in sweat with preposterous breasts.

            “I took an oath.”

            “You kiss like shit.  Probably fuck like shit too.  You military men all fuck like shit.”

            He was startled and suddenly angry.

            “Why don’t you try me?”

            She laughed.

            “You couldn’t handle me, Corporal.”

            His heart was pounding and he could feel himself sweating now from anxiousness.  She looked calm and angry.

            “You will turn the bombs off now or I’m going to shoot you.”

            Heavy breath filled his shallow lungs.

            He thought of the warheads and was suddenly filled with resolve. 

            “Fine,” he said. He turned around and walked quickly toward the control room.  The steel door was still cracked open and cold white light flowed out of it.  He swung the door wide and darted inside.  He could hear her rapid footsteps behind him.  When she appeared around the edge of the door, the butt of his M-16 slammed into her temple and she crumpled to the ground, writhing in pain.  He kicked the Beretta away from her into the dirt.  She was silent against the hum of the floodlights above.  He reached over and hit the red button.  The lights flickered, and then were off.

            He pulled her inside and laid her on the cold cement floor.  Her brown skin was in contrast to everything about him.  She moaned and he fumbled to remove her belt.  She shut her eyes tight, trying to recollect her awareness.  The belt came loose and he began to drag her feminine cargo pants down her legs. 

            She opened her eyes and knew what he was doing.

            He pulled her underwear down and struggled quickly to remove his own pants and underwear, and then he went about his dream work.

            He thrust and thrust for a long time.  He felt, at moments, as though he were coming out of his body, shocked at his action.  He couldn’t believe himself.  He felt sick and he thrust himself into her and she lay there as cold and still as possible.

            He sweat.

            A bead of sweat rolled off the tip of his nose and splashed down onto her gray T-shirt, creating a dark little circle of moisture.

            He thought about his mother and he strained against himself and he thought about his missiles, long and hard, ejecting their payload of death, and he tried to eject.  He worked and worked.  He pushed and shoved and grew tired and finally, after his eternity and hers, he gave up. 

He pulled himself free of her and rolled onto the floor beside her.

            He began to weep.  She leaned her head to the side to look at him.  Fatigues around his ankles, boots still on, he wept.  Like a child.  Like a baby, curling into himself. 

She had been his first, and he had failed in the most profound sense.

            She stood up and pulled her clothes back on.

            “You fuck like shit,” she said. 

She leaned over him and looked at his face, red and hot from tears and potential nuclear fire.  She spit on him.  It landed on his cheek and ran down to his lip.

            She stepped out into the sound of coyotes and disappeared into the night.    He wondered what mommy would think, and he knew.

            He knew.

            He was no man.

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Love.