Mask of Agamemnon

Vainglorious, proud, out to avenge a sacred wrong,
With every assurance from kith and kin
That his action was not only noble but holy,
He boarded the machine burdened with death.

Within his trojan horse, he came upon their masses.
At his signal, fiery mayhem burst forth,
And, in an instant, all was laid to waste, he as well.
Heads, arms, legs, and trunks, strewn about in chunks.

Iraq is NOT Vietnam! It's actually...

Bizarro Vietnam.

Vietnam Order of Events
1. Takes over from another country; US sends in Advisors
2. US slowly escalates troop levels
3. After set-backs, vows to train up host country forces to fight
4. Reduces forces
5. Withdraws (loses war)

Iraq War Order of Events
1.  Sweeps in. Declares Victory
2.  As insurgency grows, vows to train up host country forces to fight
3.  Escalates forces (surge)
4.  Reduces forces/withdraws
5. US Sends in Advisors; considers bringing in other countries

An Open Letter to Dame Angela Lansbury

Miss Lansbury,

I think you and I need to be a thing. A romantic/sexual/bang-buds/whateveryouwannacallit kinda thing.  But after we go through a whole getting married kinda thing.  A getting-married-with-no-pre-nuptual-agreement kinda thing.

Because, you are a lady. A dame even.

And because there's no reason to mince words.

The young ladies and I? That's just not really working. 

Also not working is me.  Well, that's not true at all.   I'm the opposite of not working. I'm working too damn much. All the time really. And working doesn't work for me.  In fact, I've been relying on work, well, money, for half my life and it (work) really sucks.  I think I've given it the good old college try and it's not for me.

You know what is for me? You. And your money.

Why should I deny it?  We're both adults here. 

Wow. Just...Wow

I've been working at a personal injury law firm for the past year. We have clients all over the state. I have been doing a little bit of everything at the office: I carry cases as an attorney,  I help with organization and operations, and I sign up clients and bring them their checks at the end of their cases.

I was making a run of checks out to clients today and my last one was outside of Pinewood, South Carolina.  I was running earlier than our scheduled appointment, but most people don't mind if you show up early with money.

I pulled up to the trailer and a young black man was standing on the porch. In a thick country accent, he said, "You here for Lorenzo?

"Yup. Sure am," I replied.

"Lorenzo ain't here yet. Come on in the house."

So I followed him into the trailer. Inside, a grandmother was sitting in a comfortable chair watching a large screen TV. One of those judge TV shows was on. There were framed pictures of Martin Luther King and a black angel with white wings and there was a cross on the wall.

The unnamed young man, the brother(?), silently led me into the kitchen and sat me down at the kitchen table. He sat down in the chair next to me. The mother(?) was frying up something in the kitchen. An aunt emerged from the back bedroom and they all started chatting.

The Drift Away

Washington Reid Patrick III 1979-2014

My nails have the dirt they'll press on and around you caked underneath them. I grabbed the dirt with my bare hand. No shovel. I held it aloft and envisioned you in the iteration I knew best, the boy I joined on so very many escapades. 

And now I've borne your weight with other men who knew that boyhood form of you, and the versions of you in the times since life took you and me on separate journeys. I stood as holy men intoned, and widow and parents wept. Tears of my own welled and rolled, as I made witness to their pain.

When you and I were acolytes, peeking behind the curtain of that venerable church, where the man after whom I'm named has lain so long his headstone has been engulfed by the soil, I never considered I'd see you put to eternal rest in that same place.

I released that fist of dirt and it thudded impotently on the lid of the metal sarcophagus we'd put your coffin inside and lowered to finality. Water was welling in your grave.

Fare thee well, my friend.

A Lesson in the Bigger Picture of Outrage

For all of you who are so vocally against Mr. Duck for what he said, please think of the repercussions of your spewing wildly. 

He is a multi-millionaire whose primary source of income isn't affected in any reasonable degree by your outrage. His main consumers, in fact, will probably BOOST their purchases of his duck call products to support him. Plus they'll double down on Duck Dynasty merchandise purchases and viewership.

Outside of income, the man and his family and their entire social circle are not affected in the least, socially, by your outrage. Do you not understand where he lives and what people there think about "liberal" opinions?

Who are you outraging to affect? He and people who think like him aren't going to pay you the slightest bit of attention anyway. You and the people who think like you already think like you. There's a middle ground of people who don't think at all, I suppose, but what's the real point in shouting for them if they are too dumb to have an opinion?

In summation, you've shouted, upset your FRIENDS who disagree with you (because the people you're debating with are hopefully friends and not complete strangers you let have access to your facebook wall), and further enriched a millionaire and entrenched him as someone "brave enough to speak his mind/beliefs even in the face of losing money" to a base of people who hold that as a cardinal virtue.

If your response is, "I don't want to be friends with people who think that", guess what? That's fine for this particular issue, but the bigger problem with holding to that is that if you require all your friends to think exactly like you do, a) you're whittling your potential friends to an unnecessarily small group of people who are redundant since they're not bringing any insight and b) sweet christ, how sheltered do you need to be from being displeased?  You're living in the exact bubble that Mr. Duck is. Way to go, dodo.

None of which is to say that you should casually accept bigotry or "hate". But I'd wait until an idiot sounds a call to action rather than sounds off on his underdeveloped opinion. The reasonable, intelligent thing to do is take note when someone says something you vehemently disagree with and treat them accordingly. If you were a fan of Duck Dynasty, stop watching and participating (buying merchandise, promoting it, etc). Be (moderately) quiet about it so as not to give them the reactionary bump/boost.

Or you can continue to bleat and ego-masturbate in your comfortable self-righteousness.

(edited 1/5/2014 because of an egregious attribution of of The Walking Dead to A&E instead of AMC...sheesh)

The No-Sided Conversation

Things had gotten weird between them.  That wasn't really it. They'd gotten "uncomfortable."  He thought. But that was the bitch of it.

He wasn't sure.  Maybe it was all in his head.  But it didn't feel that way.

They were friends. "Glorified acquaintances," if he were honest about it.  Their circles overlapped from time to time.  Still, he liked her and that was the also the bitch of it.

Had he made her uncomfortable by being too flirty with her and crossed a line?  Had he simply been uncomfortable because he didn't know the right place to be with her flirty/friendly-wise and she picked up on his discomfort and became uncomfortable simply because he seemed to freeze up around her, as if she were doing something wrong?

It felt like they were on a feedback loop of emotional negativity and defensiveness, but without a real reason.  Perhaps.