Thank a Veteran

I was a soldier once...and young. Now, I'm not old, but I also ain't young. And, these days, I could only fit in my old uniforms with a steel shoehorn and a liberal application of grease. But the soldier mindset is still in here, buried under the accretions of the decade of subsequent civilian life.

And here I am now, a(n intentionally) goofy, (unintentionally) pudgy dude at the dawn of middle age, out with friends at a loud dive bar after a wedding rehearsal party:

Maid of Honor (MOH; a pretty-enough ~25yo blonde from Ohio): mumblemumblemumble

Me: What!?

Bride to Be (BTB; my friend, also an attractive, blonde Ohioan): Ajax can barely hear! He was in the army.

BTB wanders off.

MOH: You were in the army?!

Me: Yeah! I used to play with cannons!

MOH: You ever kill anyone?

This is tricky. We're out at a bar. We've been drinking. No, I didn't initiate this, but stopping and lecturing and nuking the atmosphere isn't the right call. At the same time, I never let anyone who asks that think it's okay. But I also try to be delicate.  

To be explicit, it is NOT okay. 

First and foremost, it is a useless question; there is no positive, for any answer, for anyone, in that conversation.  If I killed someone and I feel bad about it, was finding out worth making me feel bad? If I killed someone and I *don't* feel bad about it, was finding out worth being uncomfortable because, whee!, you're talking to a cold-hearted killer now?  Also, what good is the knowledge about my killing someone?  If you haven't killed someone too, we're not going to really understand each other. It's like knowing a chinese word but not knowing what it means. You can say the sound out loud; hell, you might even be able to draw it perfectly, but you don't get it or know when or how to use it.  So what's really the point of knowing it?

 Anyways, the vast majority understand that asking someone if they've killed someone else is an "indelicate" question at best, and a "fucking rude" one at worst.   Coincidentally, it has only ever been attractive young women who have asked me that. I go with my response I've used for the others.

Me: It's okay that you asked me that, because I wasn't a doorkicker and I *didn't* shoot anyone, but that's not really an appropriate question to ask a veteran.

The other times I've replied with that, the girl has invariably said "Oops. My bad. I didn't realize. Sorry." and I've said, "No worries." and that's been that.  However, MOH somewhat aggressively rejoins: 

MOH: Why not? 

Me: Well, because killing people, even if justified, leaves a mark on someone and it's kinda rude to bring it up.

MOH: I don't see why. That's what you signed up to do: to kill people.

I'm shocked and confused.

Me: No. I commissioned because I'm from a military family and it's a tradition.

She carries on aggressively.

MOH: Whatever. The whole point of the army is to kill people. That's why you joined.

I'm taken aback.

Me: No. And if anything the guys I know and I joined to protect people.

MOH: That's just your 'white privilege' talking.

At this point, I see red. As in, my vision literally flashes red, as a well of anger erupts that I'm wholly unaccustomed to feeling.  

I will be frank: only a woman would say anything remotely like this and not understand before saying it that she was inviting a punch to the face. I'm not saying violence is appropriate or commendable, but men know there are lines that they risk crossing that will result in violence. 100% of men in this situation (antagonizing a veteran about service) would know they ran the very real risk of getting decked.  

However, I am not a personally violent person and I try my best to control myself, so I take a very deep breath and push the anger down.

Me: That doesn't even make sense, if not the majority, huge numbers of minorities are in the military.

MOH: Yeah, poor people sign up because they don't have other options. But even then most people sign up to go shoot people.

At this point, since breaking her nose is not on the table, and having a back and forth with a jerk is not going to accomplish anything other than making me madder and madder, I pause for a moment, and then go meta.

Me: I don't understand why you're being antagonistic.

MOH: What do you mean? I'm not being antagonistic. 

Me:  Yes, you are. And you know you are.  We are out, AFTER OUR FRIENDS' REHEARSAL PARTY, and you're insulting me to my face and doing it knowing you're insulting me. Why? For what purpose? Is messing up the night your goal?

Now she's shocked, because I called her on it.

MOH: No, I'm not, I mean...

Me: Yes, you are.

The Bride to Be wanders back in to our conversation. She smiling.

BTB: What's up?

Me: Nothing. I gotta grab another beer. You want anything?

I smile for her and wander off to the bar. No reason to tank her night with her friend's bullshit.  I go to the bar and ask for a cup of water.  I stand there, slowly sipping water and stewing. A couple of friends come over and ask me to join them, but I demur and, after a while, I slip out and head home.

An Open Letter to Taylor/Miss Swift/TAYLOR SWIFT!

Taylor,

Maybe that's too informal for me to be with a woman worth approximately a quarter billion dollars when I'm working at a success ranking (out of the 7 billion humans on this planet) of "blech".  Hmmm.

Miss Swift,

No, that's not right. Because my being over a decade older than you makes that come across as, I dunno, like some substitute-teacher-who-lives-at-his-parents'-house-and-only-got-his-teaching-certificate-so-he-can-find-a-way-too-young-girlfriend-and-then-stop-substituting-so-he-won't-go-to-jail-like-some-sort-of-proto-tinder-life-hack-for-pedo-creeps. 

Of course he's holding up a foot-long.

Crap. Maybe I shouldn't have brought any of that up. I definitely shouldn't have. Let's start over.

TAYLOR SWIFT!

Much better. Not weird at all.

Okay. I feel like this is going to be hard to explain, but it really shouldn't be.

You're really good looking and, by pretty much every standard, very good at what you do.  I'm not necessarily either of those things, at least not by every standard. I will say, by some standards, I'm flipping amazeballs, but, you know, others, not so much...let's move past this.

Anyways, I'll cut to the chase rather jarringly. We should just go ahead and get married.

I mean, the main reasons are self-evident: I've already explained why I'm great when I wrote the letter to Blake or Melanie; and I explained how comfortable I am with taking a back seat to my lady's career in my letter to Amber, and I've already shown the degree that I'm willing to satisfy a lady (I think we can all agree that the ultimate degree is sex-death) in my letter to Angie, and I even admitted that I like my women to be ridiculously, pathologically, terrifyingly, mesmerizingly crazy in my letter to Rosie. I mean, swap out their names with yours, and everything still works. I'm great, you can lead, I will do whatever it takes to make you happy (WHATEVER IT TAKES), and, hey, if you get "passionate", great.

I figured it out! I know what I can offer to you, specifically: I haven't offered to go guano crazy for a lady yet.  

Look, what you need is someone who's crazy so you have something to write about, but who's not actually crazy so that your life doesn't suck. It doesn't do to be a quarter-of-a-billionairess and still sorta miserable. Basically, you need someone with imagination to spare, but a moral code to keep from actually doing awful things. That's me in a nutshell.

Look, I grew up around a sociopath.  That means that to survive, I had to basically learn to become an expert in people-games.  I will screw with your head so bad you won't know which way is up.  When I say I will play games, I'll do it, not to be hurtful (because *I'm* not a sociopath), but to keep things exciting for you.  

But, like, no candles, because molten wax hurts. I mean, I hear. And stuff.

  Normal guys, even the celebrities you've had dalliances with, the best they're going to do is be asshats. Jake, Harry, John, etc... They'll be charming for a bit, get what they want, and then give you the cold shoulder. Some might string you along by lying.  

Yawn.

That's ho-hum. That's ordinary. That's boring. 

I'm offering next level here. Hell, not even next level...I'm offering orders of magnitude beyond bewilderment.  I'll have you kidnapped and held in a dungeon (well, not really; you'll be perfectly safe but you won't know that).  

What's the worst thing that can happen in a turkish prison?

I'll burn down our house (not often, because you're not made of money, but enough times so that my doing it is upsetting).  

And the candle smells great too!

I won't have sex with you. 

Oh, the sex I won't have with you; it'll drive you crazy.  

All those millions of men (hell, women too) who want to get in your pants, and I'll just shrug my shoulders and sip on a scotch when or if you bring up the subject. 

That alone will infuriate you to a degree you won't be able to fathom until I drop that on you. I can't wait not to have sex with you.

I'll flirt with your mom. Hell, I'll flirt with your dad. I'll make your dog like me more.  

When I'm not doing any of that, I will be the most charming, imaginative, considerate son of a bitch you've ever been around, 

And Suave

until the moment there's anyone else to witness us, and then I'll fart louder than cannon fire, and chew with my mouth open, and talk about porn ecstatically. 

Sexy, right?

Oh, the embarrassment I'll be for you.  Your friends will think you've lost your damn mind.  But you'll know the truth. 

And your fans will too.  Because you know that all this emotional terrorism is going to keep you churning out hits well into our having grandchildren (the songs you're going to write about in-vitro because of my not having sex with you but insisting on seven children, minimum, are going to win you ALL the Grammies).  There's going to be no Madonna tailspin to your career where you just try to figure out what the kids are into nowadays and jump into that. 

MDNA or whatever. Yeah, very cool. Sure. Please don't hurt me, Madge.

Trust me, your life is going to be a mother-flippin' trainwreck and no one will be able to look away. Ever. 

I mean, what if I drugged you and you woke up from secret surgery looking like the departed Miss Smith?
That's gotta be AT LEAST a couple albums, right, Sweetie?

I'm promising you DECADES of insecurity and confusion and angst. 

Has anyone else ever made that promise to you? No. Has anyone else ever even thought of making that promise to you? Of course not. Because they're boring and have poor imaginations and they're not right for you.  Only I am. 

 
You have all the money in the world to be able to buy anything you want.  But if money could buy happiness, you'd have done it by now.  The only thing you can't buy is the one thing I can give you: amazing, intoxicating, super-duper crazy.   And that amazing, intoxicating, super-duper crazy will make you happier than you can imagine. I promise.

See you soon,

Ajax Carpenter

TRANSGENDER PROPAGANDA INVADES YOUR CHILDREN'S HEADS!!!

I don't know how on Earth the folks at Pixar worked up a script and pre-production and animation and recording and marketing to time the release of their hyper-aggressive, gender-queer rallying-statement movie, "Inside Out", to Bruce/Kaitlyn Jenner's revelation and the destruction of the traditional nuclear family by the recent Supreme Court decision, but, you know, kudos to them on their sorcery to drop this bomb at the worst possible moment, when it will have the greatest effect in support of their bizarre vision of a genderless world where reality means nothing.

White Supremacy? (Charleston Shooting)

Please bear in mind this is not a political post. The point of this is not to "discuss" (shudder...), particularly collateral issues like gun control or symbols of racism (the Confederate Battle Flag).  This is an address to White Supremacists, which the author sincerely doubts one will read.  But you never know...

So, White Makes Right?  That's the general idea behind White Superiority, ain't it?  Whites Are Better!


How?  I mean that sincerely.

Physically?

I'm not really sure how that claim can be made.  In the United States, it's fairly well understood that if you're talking about top-flight athletes, Blacks tend to fill up the lists of greatest athletes in our traditional sports (sorry, soccer, you're not in that group yet).  Are we really going to argue this? Surely not. If you want to be taken seriously, you can't try to point out Larry Bird, or Larry Csonka, or Rocky Marciano or some such outlier in sports that multiple races participate to a meaningful degree (sorry, Ice Hockey).

I mean, to be fair, I think saying one race is physically more gifted than another becomes an exercise in picking and choosing, but if we're going to be troglodytes about it, I think Whites lose on this.  And if you're going to point to soccer and Europe, or maybe the Winter Olympics, um...your head is way too far up your butt to have any "discussion" (shudder) or "conversation" (shudder).  But that's kinda the point. You're a dumbass. 

Additionally, and to be very "real", if you're talking about the United States, Blacks and Whites as a whole appear to be equally fat and on the road to early death from coronary disease.  Is "we're less fat" really the argument you want to go with?

Also, I mean, if you're not an amazing specimen, what the hell sense does it make to point out great athletes who share your race that you would be embarrassed to be placed next to?  "The Mountain" on Game of Thrones is White.  He's 6'9" and nearly 400lbs of terrifying muscle.  I'm 6'2" and about 230lbs of jiggly.   I'm not even ripping on myself. For an average American, I ain't so bad. But I don't think "I ain't so bad" can be teased out to, "Everyone with my skin pigmentation is better than others whose are different."

If you're a fat, dumpy mess and you're talking up how White athletes are the best, that's kinda like the sad sack 45yo office drone bragging about how "*We* are the champs!" after the team he roots for wins the Super Bowl.  He didn't do squat.  He just had a loose affiliation. I mean, that happens all the time, but it's idiotic, childish, and, frankly, sad.

Mentally?

I honestly don't get this at all.  I happen to believe that a vast majority of all people, regardless of skin color are idiots. And guess what? Nearly everyone of every skin color agrees with that.  So then what you're really saying is that White people have the smartest smart people. 

For the same reasons I just talked about above, if you're not one of the smartest smart people, that position is idiotic, childish, and sad.  If you're really a White Supremecist and want to go that route anyway,  you're going to have a hard time, because you don't get to count Einstein or any other Jewish folks, of course.  Percentage wise, on the Smartest Smart Folks to General Population ratio, Jews blow Whitey out the water.  There are , of course, non-racial superiority reasons for that, but it's just not arguable. And let's not do test scores, particularly for American Whites vs. other races. 

It appears that, for the most part, if a human is born with the gift of mega-intellectual ability AND it is nourished by friends, family, and culture, AND he/she pushes him/herself AND he/she catches a break, then any particularly-colored person can vault into the intellectual stratosphere.

Culturally?

Usually, this is really what you're talking about when you say Whites Are Better, right? I mean, the other races are savages, correct?  What's the positive, better aspect of the White Culture, though?  Surely not that we are less barbaric?  I mean, Whites are responsible for the Holocaust (and wiping out the American Indians). That's not great. Whites enslaved blacks (and American Indians, and virtually enslaved Indian Indians for a great many years).  Not great. 

But, of course, far from thinking those are negatives, you think those are the primary example of how Whites Are Better, because when Whites went up against other races, they came out ahead.  I'm not sure that's really "culture" of course.

That was numbers (in the case of the Jews and American Indians) or technology (in the case of the Indian Indians and American Indians and others).  Race really doesn't have much to do with that.  Genghis Khan and the Mongol Hordes had better technology and annihilated everyone of every race they came up against for a very long time.

Even among whites, when one group has a numbers advantage and equal technology, or smaller numbers and better technology, that group wins.  Then you have to start talking about which white people are better than other white people and you start saying very strange things like, "the Irish aren't really white".

But, anyway, a lot of the argument will attempt to point out how "less developed" the other races are.

Let's look at this little White Supremacist Chicken@#$! who just murdered nine people in my hometown. 

Was he a great warrior/athlete? No. He's a scrawny little jackass who used a gun to murder people, including women, who could not fight back.  He also told a survivor he was going to commit suicide and then didn't have the balls to go through with it.  Real impressive there, yeah...

Was he a genius?  I guarantee he wasn't smarter than most, if not any, in that church that he murdered.  Every picture posted of him seems to have the annoyed/vacant look of the perpetually, intentionally, proudly ignorant.

Was he more accomplished?  It doesn't sound like he had a job.  Reports are, he mostly played video games. 

Was he more sophisticated or more developed culturally?  HE WENT INTO A CHURCH, A PLACE OF WORSHIP, WHERE HE WAS WELCOMED IN, AND THEN MURDERED UNARMED PEOPLE. The argument for White Superiority used to be the "Truth" of the Christian Religion. Whitey had it, and the other races didn't, so that's what made us better and God Was/Is On Our Side.  The little dippoop pretty much vacated that argument, agreed?

I've met a number of white supremacists in my day.  I have yet to meet one who not only isn't smarter, more accomplished, or more of a warrior than I am/was (not trying to toot my own horn, just saying for the point of this because I'm mega-super-duper-phenomenally white), but isn't really mostly a spoiled, narcissistic moron. Far from being exemplars proving whites are better, every white supremacist I've ever met makes whites look dumb and inferior.

The Conversation

He hadn't been out with that group in a number of months.  She was on the opposite side of the long table, at the other end.  Everyone was talking and it was loud, so when he made eye contact with her, he nodded, half-smiled (nearly a smirk), and lifted his hand in a half-hearted wave.  She did much the same.  It wasn't til the end of the evening, when everyone had gotten up and was saying their goodbyes that she came over to him.  Nobody else paid any attention to them.

She (S): Where've you been? 

He (H): You know how life gets, just been busy.

S: Really? I was starting to think you've been avoiding me.

H: Um...I mean, not to make things awkward, but kinda.

Crazy Woman

I am taking my chunky butt to the gym (first time in my life I've joined one) because I got FAT this fall. 

 

Picture the moment: 

 

I'm groggy. I'm walking from my warm car, through a bitter, biting wind in 39 degree darkness with a hint of damp, to what I consider to be a glorified self-torture chamber.  My bed-head hair is all over the place because it's 5:30am and whothehellcaresorisgonnanotice. 

 

And as I get near the door, a blonde woman bursts outside and accosts me.  I don't know what's happening. I nearly reach for my wallet, thinking I'm being mugged.  The mental fog clears and I realize it's my cousin's wife, Laura.  She's perky and PUMPED about being at the gym.  We walk in together as I mumble responses to her enthusiasm.  She teases me for working out in dress shoes. Then she runs off back to the treadmill.  Dammit. I left my gym shoes in the car.  I trudge back out.

 

Thirty minutes later, I'm huffing and puffing, attempting a meager, nay pathetic, amount of sit-ups.  I open my eyes and Laura's standing over me. PUMPED.  "COME TO SPIN CLASS!!!!! C'MON!" No way, I explain.  "C'MON!!!" Uh-uh.  "YOU'RE COMING TO ONE NEXT TIME. YOU CAN BE IN THE BACK AND DO YOUR OWN THING!" The best I can give her is a blank stare. No one, let alone a mother of infants, should be this excited before 6am.   She runs off to spin class. I resolve to be a gym ninja, unseen and in the shadows, from that point forward.  

 

You will not motivate me, woman! You hear me! You will NOT!