Detention

I hear the guards coming as they drive their “Gator” across the rocky ground. I see the dust billowing up behind them through the razor wire horizon. I hear them park and when they stop their vehicle I hear them talking. The incessant recitations of the many mantras of their Capitalist society said all with the same absent drawl. There is a certain lack of something here, but it seems almost too plain to say that it is “freedom”. Of course there is no freedom here.

It is a prison camp after all.

The gates to Camp 2 open with blatant and foreboding shrillness. Two new sets of clacking boots join the endless marching of the roving sally gate guard. His name is Johnson. He is replaced every 12 hours by Whitmore. Every twelve hours for last five years these two have “relieved” one another. Neither of them could possibly know the time I have invested into imagining their lives, or the lengths that I have gone to to piece together the story of the world outside of this prison from their few vacant words.

The story seems grimmer than when I left it.

The subtle impression of thousands of voices spoken below a whisper all hush in a great vacuum as the gates of Mike Block opened and in walked two of the meanest people ever put on this planet.

You could feel their anger washing down the corridor. Worse yet, I could feel the righteous indignation of my comrades get washed right away as each and every one of them crawled back into the tiniest, blackest holes in their minds where they nursed memories of when these two came for them.

Their boot heels rang obnoxiously off every crooked angle in this God forsaken cell block. I heard each and every step until the footsteps stopped outside of my rusted and humble cell.

I was stretched out on the metal slab that serves me as a bed and a desk and a table and a place from which I deliver sermons.

“Hey mother fucker.” The taller of the two said to me. “Wake the fuck up, bitch. It’s time for a talk.”

“I heard this fuckin faggot started this whole mess”.

“That’s between him and his interrogator. HEY! I said wake the fuck UP!”

I slowly parted my eyes to stare coldly into his. I will admit now that this act caused me no small amount of pain.

These Alpha Soldiers are real crafty types. Made special to deal with my type Terrorist. Their whole mind is wired to disrupt our whole everything. But I’m no push over in my type of Terrorism.

The beanhole clanged open viciously and I put my thin wrists through it. I could see their eyes taking in the tattoos that peeked out from the long sleeves of my orange jumpsuit. Their faces twisted in a compulsive act of revulsion at the sight of art. That alone gave me a good deal of fear about the current nature of the outer world.

The shackles were clenched tightly down on my pronounced wrist bone. I could feel them cutting in that special impartiality that they alone possessed. Once those were on they handed me the end of the connected chain.

“You know the fucking routine. But please. Make us come in and help you. I fucking dare you.” The tall ones hands were a vice on the chain until he finished with his hateful taunting, and only then did he release the chain.

I spun myself around it and obediantly, but with that little protest we can afford to offer, handed the end of the chain back to them.

The shorter one dropped the feet shackles in and then bent down to undo the bottom beanhole and insert his hands into my pestilence. Some detainees have used this as an opportunity to crush the wrist bones of their guards, but I don’t get their kinds of guards. I couldn’t have broken these wrists back when I was healthy and free. And these men were permitted to kill me. It is a wonder that they haven’t.

The rusting orifice that is the lock to my cell twisted open for the first time in months. Their huge hands grabbed me like dead prey in the mouth of jackles, pulling my frail bones out of my old home and out onto the cause way.

We began our slow walk to my interrogation booth.

Their satellite radio hissed on and the voice of a child asked impatiently: “Gulf One, this is Escort Control. Do you have the package?”

I could feel the irritation in the taller ones voice when he keyed his mike and replied “Roger that.” And as he released his finger he said “you little fucking faggot.” He looked to his friend and spit out “that fucking piece of shit sits in that comfy office all fucking day while we’re out here touching these fucking disgusting motherfuckers. One of these days I’m going to catch his ass out of that office and I’m going to rape his fucking face!”

“Yeah brah. Fuck that dick sucker. I’d help you.”

“Someday”.

Apparently I had been forgot about between them. I had to pull my feet up to hop along between them or else they would have dragged me across the stones. It’s a little less than a mile to Interrogation Facility and folks get awful bloodied up being dragged along like that. The common courtesies were the first to go.

It took us all of twenty minutes to cross the barren waste that lies between the various camps. Those were valuable minutes to me. Much had changed about the security here since he had last been out. There were more roving guards between the fences. There were new shacks that had been planted silently by the operator crane. Things change. Everything was exactly as we expected it. What a relief.

The flood lights started to kick on as the sun began to bury itself behind the razor wire and fences that blocked from our vision eternally the cliff that hangs over the sea. They cast the ghastly blue flourescent light, turning all flesh into a sickly white. How I hate those God damned lightbulbs. They spread the shadow of the approaching “Fortress” in all directions at once. The night sky was red over head. These are always somber hours. Nothing could be heard save for my shackles now, and every soul on this camp could hear them. And every soul in this camp knew who was bound by them. Not a one of those souls harbors any fear that I will tell. I know these souls best of all, and they know me.

The door to the horrible ebony obelisk opened swiftly and silently at the touch of a button pressed deep inside this building by a young man trained from birth to operate computers, a young man who watched everything in this camp on a fragmented wall of screens. We have a great fondness for this young man.

Inside our footsteps and my chains were amplified off of every shiny metal surface. All surfaces were shiny and metal. We jangled and clanged and clacked together a nightmare concerto among the labyrinth of corridors that we deftly weaved through. It was difficult to not let my inertia betray that my mind knew this particular maze quite well in such capable hands. I was confident that I would not slip. There are Angels on my side, Fallen though they may be.

Soon we were at the door of what was to be the epicenter of the invasion to come, yet nowhere on that island could any man or device detect a single iota of eagerness. My own heart beat a calculated war drum of fear all for the story that the people who monitored the detectors that have watched me since I was in my cell, or the story that I am trying to tell them.

The real story, this story, is happening in a safe place.  This story is actually about that place, but I am getting ahead of myself and that is later on.

The door slid opened and I was pushed into a blinding white room. Between me and a metal desk was only an industrial eye bolt on the floor. Behind the desk was an Agent from the Drug Interests. He wore black goggles which fitted into healthy, white sockets. His nose and mouth were covered by a viral mask, on the insides of which were a microphone and a transmitter which communicated with the chip inside of his brain which allowed his superior officers to communicate with him. He was lanky but his crisp white uniform fit him quite handsomely. There was almost nothing that could be told of this person. On the outside, that is.

My Escorts fastened me to the floor with grace despite their clear agitation in the presence of a human that was barely in the same species as them any more. I could tell that for them this man was as much an outsider as I was. I let only a small amount of smugness show on my otherwise fearful face. I believe it may have aggravated my host. He began our interrogation before the professional men were even done.

“Detainee number zero-two-five-eight from Mike Block, Cell two-two. Interrogation date: zero-five-dash-one-eight-dash-two-three. First Interrogation. Subject was detained along with twelve other men in the VA hospital in Battle Creek Michigan. They were all part of a Terrorist Cell based out of Building 31. Details of the nature of their collective acts of Terrorism are at this time unknown, but the wave of disruption that they set off is currently still growing despite their detention. An effort is now being made to discover the nature of their acts of Terrorism. Chief Technician First Class Reissinger. ISN 0258…”

“Yeah Chief. What can I do for you?” I responded with a manufactured air of sloppy charm.

“Do not interrupt me when I am speaking to you. This is to be an intensive interview and at the end of it we expect to know everything or you will be medically sedated for the rest of your life. Do you understand that?”

“That doesn’t sound half bad there, Chief. Sir. No. I mean. I will tell you everything. I promise. I swear.” Panicked.

“Why were you on Inpatient Care in Building 31 in the first place?”

“I’d been having some really fucked up dreams and it got to the point where I just couldn’t walk along with the way things were headed out there. I needed off the ride.”

“Medical records show that you had been having violent thoughts against authority figures. Those same authority figures that are listed were later found dead.”

“That did happen.”

“But you couldn’t have killed them. Their deaths were determined to be suicides.”

“That also happened.”

“But you swore that you were responsible for their deaths anyway. The Doctors at the hospital institutionalized you on a routine visit for Paranoid Schizophrenia. Why did you think you murdered those people?”

“I made them do it.”

“You could never have met any of them.”

“It turns out I didn’t have to. Look, I’ve had this talk a lot of times back on the Ward. Could you please get to the why-the-fucks, and the what the fuck you wants?”

“It is clear from your speech that your mind surely is not that of a Free Citizen. You speak like a soldier still despite the reprogramming.”

“Yeah. Once and always, I guess. Couldn’t keep a job out there when every other word is full of hate and an eagerness to smite the wicked. That reprogramming didn’t work so good on me, I guess.”

“It doesn’t work on the insane.”

“I guess not.”

“Your military files show that you were classified as Psychological Operations and that you were deployed to this same Detention Facility during the initial phase of The War.”

“Ironic, no?”

“There is no irony in the War on Terrorism.”

“No. Of course not. You were saying?”

“I was stating. Your tour was that of an office technician, yet you claim to have been overwhelmed by the burdens of a soldier’s life.”

“My, uh, job… it had its own kind of Hell to it.”

“I’m pretty sure most would call you a coward.”

“They did. But I don’t worry myself about most any more.”

“My job is to find out how you got from coward to Terrorist in such a short period of time.”

“It didn’t feel so short at the time. I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to ask the right questions. I don’t put out for free.” I finally allowed a certain wickedness to pass through my eyes. There was a momentary delay and then I saw him invert as he gathered the news of my sudden change in character through his receiver.

“Why did all those people in the Hospital die?”

“They didn’t all die. Several of them survived the whole ordeal. Only to end up here, unfortunately. But they chose their side of the line.”

“What line?”

“The line between us and you. In your language the line between the Terrorist and the Freedom Fighters. We have different language.”

“Stop being vague. We can sit here until you die. You will not eat or sleep until this is done.”

“Don’t you worry. I’m aware of all of that. Even if I do die.”

“The ones that killed themselves… so did their families. Some of those family members committed acts of violence against Free Citizens. And from them it spread again.”

“And again. And again. Yes. We did that. I won’t deny it. Are you just looking for the right words to charge us with? Or are you scared that…”

“That is enough. What is it?”

“IT is nothing.”

“Evasiveness will not save you.”

“I’m not trying to be evasive. I am just growing sick of doing your job for you. I told you I wasn’t just going to hand this to you if you’re going to continue to be incompetent.”

He paused again to receive orders.

“What happened in the Ward?”

“Much better. We evolved there. The drugs helped. I personally couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have found the space without Thorazine.”

“What do you mean by evolved?”

“I mean we were a crazy generation. We’d grown up with the keys to the future in our hands. We were the first children of a new and violent Technocracy. We were drugged. We were turned into soldiers. We were the first veterans of a war nobody can remember the beginning of now. We were trained so intensively that we couldn’t make the transition with the rest of society over to the way that you have made things to be. We just didn’t fucking fit anywhere out there. We were all bound to end up in Building 31′s all across the country. But then we found it.”

“Found what?”

“It is pretty hard to explain. We call it “The Network”. We found it in our dreams. Somehow, in that building, the 13 of us… we found each other in our dreams. We found a new kind of space. Oh, it was fantastic, those first few adventures into the whole thing. We wasted a lot of time on acts of the most disreputable debauchery. We would snicker through the days each reliving the madness of the night before. The more we did it the easier it got. The clearer the picture came. At first everything was like how you would think a dream should be. It was hard to hold it together. But there is something about the mind of a veteran that makes it easier to hold all these pieces together. It is a little like putting one giant broken mirror back together. But there is a lot of anger in us too. We didn’t know then that when we go there, the anger can come here. We learned that when the suicides started.”

“You mean to put on official record that you and your friends began to collaboratively navigate a “Network” between your minds. And that this is how all of the violence began.”

“Well, no. The story is a lot more complicated than that. We weren’t visiting each others minds. Those places are extremely dangerous. The monsters that reside within the walls of tormented minds are for those minds only. It wasn’t about what we found. It was about where we found. Well, also about what we did when we went there. There is a place that is outside of here. Outside of you. We probably weren’t supposed to go there… but we probably weren’t supposed to hurt other people. And you probably shouldn’t have tried to sedate our monsters away. They will always be with us, you know. They are our burden to carry through all of our lives. They are the guilt of doing things… awful things… things we did under your control. They are the price that we pay for going to War.”

“You are rambling like…”

“A mad man?”

“Do you think you are clever?”

“I don’t know. I think an awful lot of things about myself. I think more than anything I am naive. I think that you should judge me for my hubris and self indulgence. Not my lack of cleverness. And anyway, it is proven that I was not clever enough avoid being caught.”

“But not stopped.”

“Of course not. You cannot stop this. And anyways, you have hunted and caught the wrong thing. You should have been looking for monsters. They have been looking for you.”

“I might have hunted for monsters if I were also a paranoid psychotic and a narcissist. But I am a practical man. The monsters that I hunt are delusional religious zealots who talk thousands into acts against the State. The monsters that I hunt threaten the safety of every human soul under my watch. You and your Satanic cult are my monsters.”

“I wouldn’t call us Satanists. I personally prefer Followers of Lucifer. Others prefer Anarchists. We are all fond of the term Terrorist. Whatever you want to call us, we were just the vessels for something much worst than ourselves. We gave birth to your societies children and your children were monsters and you people and your drugs opened a door inside of us that must have remained locked for all of our evolution so that these monsters don’t get out… but here we are. There is one monster in particular I am very eager for you to meet.”

As I stood up my shackles fell from me like dust. His metal desk fell to pieces like a house of cards. The edges started to disappear from everything. Finally his facial muscles twitched as the walls themselves dissolved into conversation and we were standing, just the two of us, in shear darkness. I could feel the deep, existential confusion he felt when he looked at me and could not tell if I had turned into a man made of broken mirror or folded paper. This was my favorite way to appear. I could almost feed on the confusion that coursed through his every fiber but he had not lied when he said that he was a rational man.

“This is the place I was telling you about. Do you believe me now?”

Without moving a muscled in his face he droned: “If I had not believed you from the beginning do you think I would have tracked you down and detained you?”

“It is hard to tell anymore.”

“I know that I need to kill your monsters. But I need to find them first.”

“You won’t find them. You aren’t their type. They prey on authority figures and you’re just a toy. But they did move through here. I can smell them. No, the only monster you’ve got to worry about is your own.”

Right then we could both feel it as everything seemed to break.

“That was the wall they have built around you. That is the wall that keeps all the bad, irrational things away. All your questions and your fears that maybe you aren’t doing the right thing. The weight of every life that you have ruined. As a special favor my friends and I have gone through the trouble of pulling all those things together to craft for you your very own super monster.”

The sense of order started to blur, strange fragments of memories started to play in various dimensions and a chaotic chatter began whispering in from the periphery.

“Now I’m going to leave you here to sort this out on your own. If you survive that is fantastic. If not I will see you bright an early tomorrow morning to welcome you to your new home for the next few years.”

“How do you do this?”

“Do you really think I know?”

With that I fell apart at his feet and left him to meet himself, making sure to close the door very tightly on my way out.

 

The rise of the Geek

Sometime around when I was five my family got a Nintendo for Christmas and I began my lengthy love affair with electronic distractions. Little did I know at that time that I was on the cusp of a global phenomenon. A whole society of people vigorously training themselves to deftly maneuver through the tight hallways of this new circuitry with plastic controllers in their hands. At five and amidst the crushing isolation of rural Mid-Michigan I didn’t think anything of it.

As Megaman I spent hours storming the mind-numbingly perilous labyrinth of Doctor Wiley’s elaborate mechanical death traps wantonly killing every moving robotic delight I crossed without blinking an eye only to get to the end and hopefully kill one of my own kind for doing his own thing down in some cave I invaded and kill him, too. What else is one to do with a gun for an arm and only one direction to move?

I formed a very unusual relationship with the space that was provided to me in games which evolved into a survival mechanism and a source of great comfort.

When I grew older I made friends based largely on playing video games with them. We would inevitably meet at Garrett’s house to play video games there or go down to the college library to play on the computers in the basement using Jake’s mom’s access codes because they had the fastest connection in town. At the time Counter Strike was our game of choice and every fraction of a second counts when it comes to the fast paced world of  shooting people in the heads in a constant international battle of who had the fastest coordination (and internet speed) on the www.

This introduced me to the world of social gaming in which one either cooperates or competes and was a hallmark of my integration into a technological society, albeit a kind of beta version for what exists now.

It wasn’t until I was deployed that I was forced out of my comfortable marriage to gaming for an extended period of time. But in that time something funny occurred which caused me to think very critically of this technological indocrination that had occurred to me.

As many people know I was deployed to a detention facility during the war and this detentions facility ran on a computerized system. Every bit of information that was necessary for daily operations was stored in one big program and thanks to spending a majority of their lives out in the most abysmal written off plots of land running field exorcizes most of the senior enlisted personnel and officers didn’t know how to use these new fangled glowing boxes. So they looked to the units out in the camp and they made a call for all the nerds, and low and behold I was transferred unto the Detention Operating Center to be a part of their new batch of computer monkeys. This unrestrained access to the neurology of this insane place gave us, as underenlisted and hardly professional soldiers, a kind of authority over many of our superiors because although we answered to them, they were still forced to answer to the computer in the end, and we were the heralds that brought forth the computers message.

All of this turned in me a great deal of distress and I found myself irresistably turned towards Dystopian science fiction and its eery predictions that all feverishly warn of the worst than apocolyptic futures could lie hidden behind the false promise of a technologically perfect utopia.

Being at least partially academic in spirit I found myself thirsting after some kind of hardened academic response to the rise of geek culture and its strange position in the military industrial institution but found the subject lacking any serious attempts to address the issue. In fact, the most serious source of video game culture is the online community itself, which is renowned for not being a credible source of academic information for very good reason. On the broader subject of the advancement of a technologically based society there was one voice which posed the important questions that were starting to arise in me. Herbert Marcuse captured in his “One Dimensional Man” the framework of the paranoia that was building in me. I would like to try to follow in his footsteps and begin a series of essays which may begin a more thorough critique of the modern era of technological advancement in our society with the soul goal being to try to contribute to a lacking philosophical deconstruction of how technology has come to alter our lives, changing us each fundamentally as human beings.

The Grind

I think I need this me now. As much as I ever have. The sacred oneness of creation and self-reflection. I hope to make words work again in my favor. So: be there now please, magic.

I’m doing my best to get right with the way things actually work. I found a job outside of Detroit of all places. There are a few blooming suburbs here where money grows fatly from happy vines, even in the bleakest of winters. I came here with a strange attitude for me. The lesson that I came here with is that if I could just get my hands on a few thousand dollars I could finally buy for myself that crucial place where I can afford to be myself and to make art without having to answer to anybody. To do so I have to rely on the skills that I have.

One of the skills that I have is that I am a rabid ninja busboy. Give me the most cramped and small floor and I will dance around it with my arms full of plates or coffee and water. I work well in chaotic environments. I have a strong sense of order which applies itself well on these floors. I think that part of me really flourished during my deployment when my brain was most taxed with how to make it all work… and the sense that people depended on me coordinating these things efficiently. The urgency and the calm that must be maintained. This dance quiets my mind. It also makes a lot of money.  Well, a lot of money for a guy who has grossed about five thousand dollars over the last five years. And how nimble I was with those five thousand dollars. All the stories those dollars bought me.

Learning to live cheaply is the best thing you can do for yourself.

So I came into this town with a few hundred dollars and by the second day I had a job at the hippest little lunch spot in town where the floor is almost always turning and burning. I should emphasize that we are very little. There are nine tables and eight seats at the bar and they are often all full. There is usually a line at the door during our lunch hours. People wait because the food is awesome. My job is to do the people at the door the justice of cleaning the tables as quickly as I can while maintaining all the shake and rollup duties as well and a million other things that come along. I work from six-eight hours a day five days a week.

It is incredibly demanding work both physically and mentally, but if you can figure out a rhythm between the physical and the mental there is an awful lot of money to be made. So I work my hardest and I like to think that I do a good job. I’m a little short if not sometimes downright unsociable.

I learned how to bus amongst the hispanic community in the hip joints of Chicago where we were paid to be unseen. We weren’t allowed to talk to the customers because some of us couldn’t speak English and we rarely talked to each other because talking was a form of wasting time in the sleak machine that is Wicker Park. We are calm faced and graceful and dressed in all black. The best of us are never seen and you never even said thank you. We didn’t mind.

But here I’m not a Mexican. I’m your status quot hipster with a background in art. And I’m saving every dollar to buy my freedom back so that I can return to my one true love without having to report for someone else s duties.  It might take years. I’m ok with that. I have to be. I have all the faith in the world that I can manage it.

I don’t know quite what this freedom is going to look like yet or where it will be. All I know is that it will have me with my machines in my hand and skin to work on. If I can make 50 dollars a day I can live well. I’m proving that to myself every day right now.

I’m sure there is a large market for people who would want a days worth of tattooing done for 50 dollars. I’m worth that.

I can make good lines and I can shade and I can change you forever and better yet I can guarantee you’re not going to regret it. I’m an artist. I take that very seriously. I have it tattooed on my neck. A paper bird and three paper flowers above “Lifer” so that I never forget who I am and why I came here to this place of creation to begin with.

I paid good money to have it finished. It looks beautiful now… like I knew it could be. Obviously I’m not saving every dollar. But the majority of them. Getting tattoos is part of my business now, too. It could potentially land me an apprenticeship at the local shop. Passing through their doors would guarantee a quality of work that could get me in in any city. Who knows. Maybe this could be a reality by the time I’m 30. Probably later.

But not having art in my life this last month as I’ve been adapting to the new job has been kind of depressing. I find that when we are just workers in some machine our lives are so simple they hardly merit any advanced thought. You are, after all, just performing a set of duties that you agreed to for some amount of pay. Some days I worry that I will inevitably be eaten by the machine, to become just some pacing drone like I’ve been running from for so long. To happily go back to that for a more comfortable, sedentary life. And I am happy now aside from being brutally ill for the whole last week. Every day there is the question:

What happens next?

Pure Michigan

It’s become pretty obvious that my magical fantasy had begun to wither and that my life was in need of some drastic changes. It became time for me to return home. Maybe to tell this story I’m always failing to tell. Probably to get a job, though.

I did. Two days after moving to a suburb of Detroit. Not quite home, per se. My home is deeper in the brambles of this offensively bleak state and like many people from Michigan, the word home is a pastiche of various trailers and the lots that they occupied. One plot will always stand out in my mind. I digress.

The first good job I ever hard, back before the war, was Tim’s Pizza in Olivet. I learned that small businesses were rewarding work places for a number of reasons, but most importantly because I could see how my work effected the community around me. It feels good to give somebody a pizza. And extra good to receive a cash reward for doing so.

What I’m trying to say is that I did enjoy working once. Really.

But like I said, that was before the war and Combat Paper. I wanted so much more then. Greatness. A way out.

I could give a damn about greatness now. All I want is a warm bed and some money for hording.

So like I said I got a job. I now work at a hip diner bussing tables. The owners of the restaurant work almost every day. The food is amazing. The staff is incredible. I am blessed to work with a handful of motherly waitresses who are all hardened professionals, seared in to the trade by years of turning and burning. They are molding a perfect bussing machine of me and I have given myself willingly.

I like to bus tables. I approach them as a ninja would. Graceful and swift, professionally. I linger in the small beauties. The lights flowing through the flowing water. The perfect pastiche of colors. The myriad stories happening around me every day. Always vanishing, leaving behind clean tables and full coffees. Maintaining a constantly changing list of priorities, always impossible but never letting on to a feeling of defeat. It is just me and nobody will help me. The day whirls by and I watch all the money change hands and while I’m there I almost forget what it is that I came for and then the day is done and the ninja gets tipped out.

It makes me ashamed to think that now I am ecstatic to be in life where I was four years ago, bussing tables. But there are all the things that happened in those four years.

Nobody knows that side of the story here. I like that. Here I can be whoever I want to be and for once I’m not interested in making a name for myself. I feel like I have a chance now to live a humble life dedicated to art the way that I really want to and with the means to afford that and a schedule to build a routine around.

There is a big part of me that worries and waits for the dropping shoe. What if I fuck this job up, too? I’ve had other jobs but I either quit or was fired in a pretty short period of time. Granted I saw working as an impediment to the life I would rather be living and now I don’t prefer that lifestyle. This has greatly changed my work ethic.

So maybe this is the end of the travellers blog. Lets all hope so.

The Flaws in the Convention as I See Them

I just got back from attending the Iraq Veterans Against the War National Convention and there are some things that I need to work through and to share or else I am going to lose my mind.

It will be easiest to address what we did not do during this convention, but I will also take some time to address what we did do.

Allow me first, though, to paint a picture of where our organization now stands: We have no chapters. We are losing our Executive Director and the person responsible for organizing our current contested model of activism, the Field Team Organizer, or leader. We are at the apparent end of a flawed campaign with nothing to move on to. Despite all of this we still failed to complete the following.

Firstly, we, for the first convention in our history, did not vote for new members in our Board of Directors. Our new candidates were not given time to elaborate on the positions that they will represent in the coming years of change. This error has left us with no idea of who will represent the direction of our decision making process in a time where we face nothing but hard decisions.

Secondly, we never made it around to discussing our budget. We have gotten used to assuming that we don’t have any money in our coffers for years but still transparency about how the little money we do have is used has always been a priority, and should be a priority, for a realistic understanding of what we are capable of doing. This year, however, we do have a good deal of money to discuss. More than 600,000 dollars. It is all gone now, of course. But all we were given was a sheet of paper to explain where all that money has gone. Between Operation Recovery, the Field Organizing Team, paid position and facilitator fees we spent nearly 450,000 dollars. Almost a half of a million dollars. What has that money gotten us? How could it have been spent to better serve our goals? Who is in charge of allocating this money? All of these are questions that remain unanswered at this point in time.

Lastly, for the first time in my memory, we abandoned a set understanding of process in order to expediate the agenda of the Field Organizing Team. It was agreed that if 3 people were to block any item or agreement then that issue would not pass. On the issue of our values statement three individuals, myself included, did block passing the document we were presented. Two of us blocked because we did not agree with the model of organizing that was nested inside of the language. Another disagreed for a number of reasons including how the document was created and changed outside of the parameters of process that were set to create it in the first place. The conversation we were promised to have to resolve this issue never occurred. Instead, we were formally told that we did not have the power to block, but that our concerns would be taken seriously by the powers that be.

All of this furthered to illustrate a leadership that doesn’t give a fuck about how we want our organization to be. They are more interested in keeping us silent as they make decisions and collect the paychecks that come out of the 600,000 dollars that I mentioned previously. It showed us that we are controlled.

In the past we would gather at these conventions and tell “our leadership” the concerns that presented themselves to our different local areas, to ourselves as individuals. To our community. I think these are critical roles for our convention to fulfill. None of this happened this time around. This convention was merely a means of dispersing this years party line and ensuring that the current propaganda and agenda are drilled into the heads of the membership. In short, instead of listening to us, they were there to tell us how its going to be. This is a critical flaw in an organizing model. And it is clear that any capacity to alter this or to critique it has been  taken from us.

There was also a nearly unanimous outpouring of agreement that our name needs to change, sponsored by a very touching and well constructed plea from our Afghanistan veterans. Instead of honoring their request and outright voting to put this conversation into action, the motion was shit-canned with a “straw poll”. We voted merely to appease the AVAW, but we all know that by next year nothing will have changed. We will be having another straw poll or something equally useless about the same subject. I have suspicions that the powers that be prefer it that way, much like the government prefers that people remain racist so that we will wear ourselves out fighting each other.

In fact, we didn’t actually vote on anything. No hard decisions were made. The only thing that was still clear at the end of this was that for another year we are the property of the FOT and the even shadier movers and shakers that decide how the FOT will behave, but that was not something that was voted on. It was something that was implied.

In conclusion I think it is time that we out organize these mother fuckers. They think that we gave up and that without them we are useless. I think it is time that we pull our chapters back together. Focus on the small battles and make the big wins that we’ve become acquainted with in our tighter networks. Don’t let them come to your town and tell you how it is going to be. Put your foot down. You ARE the IVAW and wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, only you have the power to decide how we should move on.

Your foot soldier in defiance forever,

Otis

with a grain of salt

You tell yourself that it is just one more lonely night. The end of one more day and all you’ve had to eat was your self and this same tired prayer. Please, Art, save me now. From the darkness and from myself to you. Tell me one more time why it is all worth it. You. Don’t get confused or you will fail. But for how much longer can you stave off confusion when you find yourself driving madly at it every day and the road is and always was so hard and all you can tell yourself is that you did this to yourself. You wanted this. All because you thought that if you prayed hard enough to this idea you once had that came to you in the light of a beautiful universe you would be rewarded for your dedication and you promised that you’d do everything you could to be an artist some day. Well now you have what you’d always asked for. Your voice. But this voice doesn’t make it any better. It is an outlet through which you can report only that it will continue to be a hard road because it doesn’t come easy.

Your hands shake in the coming cold of winter and you realized that you bet everything on them and this action you’ve trained them to do. This life of art. But you can’t lose your faith. Not in the future. To stumble for one day could seal ones fate. So every day you wake up and you devote these hands and hope that it keeps happening. You will do this every day. Please keep working.

But its not enough to pray. One must challenge weakness like a warrior. With absolute sternness.  You have trained every day. You’ve learned to set up shop, do the work you’ve set for yourself, pack it all up and move on again. You thrive on this. There is no turning back. But all these lonely nights do come to gnaw on you. And the worst part is you know that you must go through them alone. There is no sharing this place. Or at least you think so.

What if everything you thought proved false? What then? That would be convenient. It’s probably much more likely that some of the thoughts are wrong, some are true, and with most it doesn’t matter.

You’re a drifter set to the task of leaving beautiful things behind you and that is what you do best. That is the best way there is for you to share you. Because you are an artist and artists have to open up a whole lot of dark to open up one ray of light, one fragile little dream of beauty, and then they have to bring that little thing back into the real world. And oh the problems with the real world.

This real world which would have the artist turning cogs forever, thinking themselves to death in the endless tedium of some job. To make instead of music commodities. This real world that thinks only of how to sell it.

So you have to sell it. Or give it up. But giving it up just isn’t an option. Not now. You tattooed that on your neck. No going back now. Not nohow.

Always been a sucker for rash decisions.

So you’re leaving town again. And again and again and again. Always building towards nothing, constantly deconstructing everything just to have more pieces to play with. Living on the run from the one thing you know you have no power over, that thing you fear the most. The thing that you know the best. You.

The places you’ve been and lives that you’ve influenced for better or for worst. All the people that say they care about you and for all you know they really do. Waiting. For you to figure out what it is that you do. Maybe you’ve figured out what you do to make money and maybe that was the thing they were most anxiously waiting for. But you’re waiting for something more. For that step just past pure when you can finally relax because you did it. You got what you were praying for.

Thats what its all about, right? That’s what all the sacrifices were for even though your friends don’t think they’re sacrifices. From the outside it seems like a life of luxury. And you beg them to understand the beast that chases you so they will forgive you while you pardon yourself once again from another friend or lover. A wall you can’t drop always building up to stop them from getting in to protect them from what it is you know. Because if they knew where the wall came from they’d all build walls too. Don’t give them the wall disease.

You see clearly where all this is headed. You know you’re always going to be alone, drowning in a sea of affection for having done things that you have lost touch with. Every day make one more fracture between the you you were and the you that you are.

And now you’re writing letters to yourself on the internet. But that’s what it has always been, hasn’t it?

I love you but goodbye.

My first memories of my dad all involve the smell of his small, red tin which carried a smell I was too young to understand. I remember him sitting on a couch rolling something in a paper and I remember this sweet and musty smell that came off of him when he came back. I remember how much more I loved him when he had that smell on him.

I started smoking weed when I was 14 years old. I’d found dad’s plants drying in his shed and on impulse I stored some in a ziplock bag and hid it far behind our country home under a stone I used to sit on while I was thinking of robots and dinosaurs. I forgot about it until that summer when two of my friends and I decided to smoke it.

We rolled the entire bunch into a cone crafted of computer paper. Thinking of it now it was probably an ounce of weed. The whole paper seemed to go up in two or three enormous blazes that washed away my childhood and, as I thought, turned me into a man.

In the years that followed I found that having weed on me made people like me. Smoking weed seemed to make me funnier and my list of friends grew. That was the beginning of teaching myself to value my worth based on how much grass I had at any given time.

I loved the feeling. I loved how art didn’t seem abstract when I was stoned. Colors, shapes, lines were all I could see and it was enough for me.

My deployment was the first time that I had to be away from my security blanket. I hated it. I picked up running because I could feel the weed burning out of my cells. I could smell it on the Jamaicans that virtually ran the base. I asked them about getting some often but it was strictly against their code to share with soldiers as we could lose everything for them.

When I got home my mom, grandma and sister picked me up from the armory and took me out to dinner. I couldn’t even be bothered to act like I wanted to be with them. All I wanted was weed. I drove almost 300 miles that night. All over the state of Michigan looking for what I thought I needed. I finally found it.

That night I smoked with friends I’d had before I left and I realized that I wasn’t the same but they were. I got so scared I didn’t know what to do. So I smoked some more and soon I didn’t give a fuck about our differences.

That was the beginning of a true addiction for me. I never took the time to try to figure out why I felt different. I just kept smoking. I don’t know when I forgot why I was doing it and started instinctively medicating myself. I never took the time, despite being so “aware of myself.”

I had learned in a very deep way that weed was a way to make the gap between me and the people around me smaller. When I was angry because I’d been slighted, forgotten, ignored, looked over I smoked without thinking about it and soon I just forgot and rolled on happy to have any friends at all. When I was nervous that my words, my posture, my face, my inflection put people off I smoked and came back easier to deal with, without questioning why it was always me who had to change. But most importantly, when I started to remember all the things I had done and seen and could no longer tolerate the atmosphere inside of my mind I smoked so that I could see the colors outside of my head again.

Eventually a day came when all of the things I’d been hiding from myself made me feel like such an alien that I decided to quit. Not weed. I quit life. I quit my job. I quit my girlfriend Jaime who loved me in such a pure way that I never felt worthy of. I quit my friends who I was sick of feeling so far from, yet so understood by them. I packed up my life and moved away. But I had weed in my pocket. And when I questioned my decisions I smoked and the questions left me for a while.

As the tensions grew between friends as my lifestyle pushed their acceptance to the brink I was oblivious. I thought they liked me because I was fun and I was always extremely hurt when they asked me to go. Until I smoked weed. Then I didn’t give a fuck. Fuck em. Right?

I learned not to share my grass. I learned that I *needed* it. Without it my reasons to live were few.

It never mattered how beautiful my work was, or how important the things I had done with my life were. I had to find my next fix. I didn’t have time to enjoy things.

I spent a month in an apartment in Germany by myself. I had a beautiful veranda that overlooked a wonderful town but somehow I didn’t care. I couldn’t find weed and thusly the whole month was a wash. This is how I wasted some of the best experiences of my life.

For the last three years I have wanted nothing more than to go back to Europe to be with Nina, whom I had fallen in love with in a way that I could not quit. I could never afford the ticket. But I could always afford weed. Now the distance and time between us is so great I have doubts that she could still love me. She seems sometimes to love me like a friend who is concerned about me. But I worry she no longer loves me like I do her.

Now, three days into quitting marijuana, I have a hard time seeing the future. I don’t know what will carry me through. I don’t know what to turn to. And worst, I feel as if emotions which have been hiding and growing inside of me since my childhood, since my deployment, since all the friends I grew apart from disappeared are just now starting to emerge and they have grown to terrible dimensions. I am having a lot of “suicidal ideation”. I feel like getting back at all the people who have let me down. I feel so much anger. At my dad. At the friends who let me down. But mostly at me.

If I had all that time back. If I had all that money back. If I’d only….

Maybe I’d be with Nina today.

But I’m not.

So maybe tomorrow.