September 2, 2008
8:40 A.M.
And what shall the Guns of August yield to?
9:04 A.M.
Bennett, Live on CNN, Rebukes CNN for Exploiting Palin’s Daughter to Score Political Points For Left
9:18 A.M.
You are so beautiful, to me….
11:07 A.M.
A Brief Story Of The Voice
Pt. 1
There was no air, like the air of Fallujah. It was as invisible as any, but it hung like the aura of guilt over a concentration camp, smoke over a forest fire, or the nearly imperceptible light above the head of an infant. But so much more strangely, the air of Fallujah was a voice. A voice without rest, a voice which read aloud the latest chapter in the Great Book of Gross Human Barbarity, the critical update on the endurability of evil as a force no more transient than earth, wind and fire themselves. Fallujah after the battle - except for the constant drone of the eyes of The Keepers Above - was the quietest place I had ever been on all this planet’s 7 continents. But the air of Fallujah, like a mad prophet or a shocked and shattered victim of some fresh trauma, just would not stop talking. At moments a litany, at others a harangue, at others the wailing of a child or old woman being tortured or burnt alive, the screaming of a man who sold trinkets to Americans at the first dull cut of his beheading, the booming invective and instructions of Zarqaawi… but almost always it was a chant, ancient and powerful, by which we all fell asleep and to which we all awoke. No one said shit about it, but we all heard it, it kept all of our attention. It had a lot to say, and none of it was small talk.
This, I can say with the humblest of certainty: Fallujah was a place where the Devil was made flesh, and where for a time, he dwelt amongst men, the perch from which he oversaw all of his earthly dominion. The Devil does not often bind himself to earth, almost as if he were mimicking the life of a man, because he does not need to shoulder the burdens of his faithful, nor is it a necessary locus from which to direct his influence over the powerlines of the Fates. But there was something about these days that inspired him to slip into the realm and produce, direct and star in a show about the non-existent lines between nightmare and reality. A show about the world which Westerners were far too certain that man had advanced himself out of a long, long time ago. The work, apparently, was of too much importance to leave only to minions. And so he established a fortress, and took up the tasks of his vision. The Devil knows many things, including the importance of holding the world’s attention, and of course, the importance of a good headline. And as many of those as possible, please. But he doesn’t say please.
To be continued….
3:36 P.M.
A Brief Story Of The Voice
Pt. 2
I was smoking. It was pretty goddamn cold. It was the night before I was to arrive in Fallujah. At the moment, I was at Camp Fallujah, near but not actually in the city, a veritable Four Seasons by the standards of the place and day. I had recently run out of the crowded massive chow hall where there were all these creatures in clean uniforms, with bright smiling faces and shining bits of everything and fat smiling civilians strolling amongst all these hundreds of men and women dressed in Marine uniforms but who bore no actual resemblance in just about anyway to the filthy, stinking, dying, killing, sleepless, tireless, fearless, bloody, muddy shit-called-food eating, bullet, mortar and IED-dodging Marines that I had just spent two months with.
There were Alpine-high cakes and boulders of ice cream, and for the first time amongst Marines in Iraq, I felt like I was on another planet, and that planet was America.
Suddenly, as I was moving toward my table through the sea of Stepford pogs, a nausea shot up through my belly and I almost couldn’t move. When I first got here they looked at me like an alien in my flak and kevlar. “We don’t get incoming here, you don’t have to wear your gear.” In my former forward homes, it was mandatory. And it was also pillow and blanket. From that disorienting experience of being told I was safe from incoming onward, a disguiet and discomfort built within me, until finally tonight, feeling all day as a stranger in a strange land, I was literally sick to my stomach. And then I got dizzy, and it didn’t feel like it was from the nausea, as it was accompanied by this surge of feeling a complete, total abject disconnect from everyone around me, as if we were not of the same species and world, and the loneliness was so crushing I could neither psychically or physically, as manifested in my stomach, remain amongst these people, Marines or not. I felt like I was on a planet without oxygen, I just tossed my fucking plate, I don’t even remember if I aimed it at a receptacle, and feeling yet increasingly disoriented I charged ahead for the door, thinking that I was in the midst of a crippling anxiety attack, caused by being in a place that was too safe, and surrounded only by people who didn’t know any better. On my way out I looked for the familiar eyes of a hunted animal or killer, and found neither. I hand’t thought about this all day as I was feeling stranger and stranger and sicker and sicker, but at this moment when I had to bolt the scene and head for some darkness and solitude before I left for another of Iraq’s circles of hell, I finally had an inkling of what had had been wrong with me all day. Once outside and headed toward’s my 1 day hootch, I got freaked out at being freaked out. Why in the fuck did all this peace and normalcy literally fry my brain and make me sick, and why was I repelled by the people here, instead of having even the slightest inkling of the normal instinct for companionship? Those questions bothered me for a couple minutes, but very quickly I just became so impatient to get out that I couldn’t fall asleep.
And at about midnight, when I saw the grim reaper as the angel sang to me about having been abandoned on earth and the temperature it would be when she would like to die, I knew very precisely what was going to happen in Fallujah, but more precisely than I dared to realize, and so completely wrong about whose story the angel was singing, that I had no idea how much my life was going to change, and what I was now going to have to carry, and whether or not I could.
And I’m the least of the story.
To be continued
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