What a weird year

This was a weird year for me personally. Emotionally, I've been on the extreme end of both sides of the scale for time periods that exceed the healthy limit. I'm fairly certain that the seething anger I had for the first six months of the year shortened my life span by at least a little while.

New Year's Eve last year found me in New York City, the heart of it all. It was the first and only time I've been there and I walked around with my head craned upwards and around. Thousands of memoirs and novels have drooled on about the awe that New York City inspires in its newest arrivals and I've nothing to add to it other than to say that the feeling hasn't changed much. We were at Madison Square Garden at a Wilco concert when the year ended. I felt part of the world for once, not like I was watching it on TV. We wandered through the city, stopping at bars and getting stuck at Penn Station until 6am when the trains started running out to the 'burbs again. The next day we saw Twelve Angry Men on Broadway, watched a movie at the AMC in Times Square and rode the subway all around town in the futile search for MOMA (turns out that there are FIVE of them and the main one is not in Queens).

But I was sad. This was a few weeks after being informed that I would be in the army an additional 15 - 21 months beyond the end of my contract. Those college acceptance letters were no good. Those plans I had for travels in Europe, road trips across the U.S., fabulous punk rock shows in basements... all gone. I was going back to the middle east with leadership that hated me, no hope for advancement or a pay raise, and all for no reason. Any unhappiness I expressed, I was told, was not because I was being royally screwed, but because of my negative attitude. This trip to NYC was filled with over-the-top greatness, but it seemed to me like a steak and lobster dinner before my execution.

The rest of that first half of the year was a serious of pretty good things on a backdrop of shittiness. I met a wonderful boy who was actually nice to me. I went to a few great concerts - Flogging Molly, Reverend Horton Heat, the Supersuckers. I went to Montreal, and Washington D.C. Parked my car on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.

I was also a little ball of rage that fought bitter and hopeless battles against the people that considered themselves leadership. I lost nearly every single one of them, but I learned to feel good about it. They were bad people and thus if they said something bad about me, I saw no reason to not take it as a compliment.

April through June I was involved with running a training exercise on how to search Enemy Combatants. Together with a team Military Police we were to teach the entire brigade. And when I say "we" I mean the MPs were teaching - the rest of us were human training devices to be exampled and tested on. Every female in the brigade got the opportunity to shove my face in the mud, put her knee in my back and twist my limbs at extraordinary angles. The male MPs thought this was great entertainment and would come up with a new procedure everyday, usually involving searching the bra area. I hated them. This was, by far, in a career of humiliating experiences, the most degrading detail I had ever been assigned to. It was so spectacularly bad that I couldn't even be mad at my platoon sergeant. I mean, shit, that's impressive!

Then one humid day in July, my platoon sergeant called me into our caged "office" (a corner, surrounded by chicken wire fence, in a concrete room ) and informed me that I wasn't going to Iraq. And just like that I pulled my stuff out of the quadcons and moved units. I left the army the day after they left for Iraq, taking that nice boy I mentioned earlier with them. That was also a strange feeling. I had invested so much hurt and bad feelings into that group that NOT going to Iraq seemed like kind of a letdown.

The rest of the year I've set about doing nothing strenuous, stressing or the least bit army. I wandered around Britain and Ireland for awhile, spending all kinds of money I didn't have on grocery store sandwiches and Murphy's Stout. I drove from New York to Oregon and visited a few National Parks along the way. I stepped on a moutain goat on a trail in Montana. I watched thunderstorms come after me in Minnesota, hoping they didn't decide to become tornadoes.

I now have, for the first time in my life, a place to live that I don't share with anyone else. My boss doesn't live down the hall and can't come in and tell me to clean my microwave or he'll dock my pay. In fact, I don't have a boss at all. Or a job. I have no furniture, hardly any utensils, and no real desire to change that. Occasionally I go grocery shopping and pay the rent.

Ya know what's really awesome? I have no idea what's going to happen next year!