Duality, dichotomy, dualism, and diphenhidramine. So I said no to the halucigenetics, I never said anything about avoiding prescription strength antihistamines. Although I'm not sure if taking large quantities of these little fuckers is going to do much more than make me piss myself after falling asleep. No this isn't a cry for help, it's a Friday night and I no longer have the fortitude to endure the bar scene. When did it become cool to drink PBR? If you are at all curious about my current mental state just know that it's as good as it's going to get. I am not here to make people think that I am a bag of almonds but I am not going to walk around answering "Fine" to the bullshit question How are you doing? The truth is I'm not fine and most likely neither are you. Let's put on a happy face kids so that the strangers in the grocery store think that we are a great family. No, it's cool, I'll ring myself up and then bag my own fucking mac 'n cheese, you want me to stock the shelves while I'm here too? No wonder little Timmy is pissed off coming in this Unicorn forsaken place! What am I talking about? Half of you knows. The half that's pissed off. The half that doesn't think that you should ever receive an $85 ticket for not putting on your own seat belt. You're a grown ass man!! You should have the right to jettison through that windshield if you want to! You paid for that windshield! and this is AMERICA! There is another part of you though, the part that is scratching that patch of grass between your ears. I like to call that person, Johnny do what ever the fuck someone tells me just because they said to conformist. No, wait... that's too long. Let's just call that part JC. JC doesn't ever want to rock the boat. I get it, no one likes to get their fancy dockers and boat shoes wet. Hell, I even have a little JC in me. (A very little) but it's still there, it still exists and I still struggle with it sometimes. Not because I give a shit about rocking the boat... Fuck your khakis! Plain and simple, being excepted makes life easier. We have evolved into a species that celebrates easy. I want a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich but I don't want to have to open TWO jars. Ruffling peoples precious little feathers, or worse yet telling them that their feathers look stupid with those shoes is a sure fire way to get yourself ejected from the cool kids table. That's where the good ketchup is! PERKS man, I'm talking about perks. Look if I have to explain every time I make an absurd, random analogy with the faintest of connection to which I am talking this is going to be a lot longer than either of us wants to put up with.
So what's wrong with us? Grab your PBR hipsters and let uncle Leroy explain a few things from his twisted polarized world view.
You see, there are these people called bad guys, commonly refereed to as the villain. Now the fun part about being the villain is that more often than not you don't have to wear your seat belt, you do what you want and that is to be expected because after all, you are a bad guy. Or do we have it backwards? Are you a bad guy for doing what you please? As I just said, we gravitate toward anything easy, in turn, things that make our lives more difficult are perceived abominable and should be discarded. The thought of disrupting the herd is terrifying to us. It's not that we give a shit about the herd, if we did no one would spend six grand on a pair of shoes. That's a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for those lazy people in the bad side of town. But uncle Leroy, I worked hard asking for the money for these kicks, and those people don't do anything. So who is the bad guy now? Just because someone is so indulgent (read selfish) to consume such a gratuitous amount of resources on something as trivial as a pair of shoes or jeans while their fellow human beings starve doesn't make them a villain. I would say that their priorities are just a little twisted. But that's the rub, if you were never given the tools to calibrate your moral compus then you wouldn't know that you were being a total asshole buying those shoes. Six grand!! Really??? Fuck!
Focus. Diphenhidramine... who would have guessed it?
Two beers later and we are back on track.
Good and evil. That is an easy one right? Hitler = evil, Mr. Rogers = Good. But wait, even the most extreme characters in history were not all bad or all good right. If someone would have bought some of Adolf's paintings after WWI then WW2 might not have ever happened. It's possible that all the guy needed was some attention. Now I'm not justifying his actions. His actions were the definition of pure, unadulterated fucking evil. Here is where I am going to loose a few of you. Even one of the worst human beings to ever convert oxygen to carbon dioxide couldn't have been 100% evil all of the time right? In turn, I'm sure that good 'ol Mr. Rogers had a skeleton or two that not even Mr. McFeely had knowledge of. I just refereed to him in the past tense with absolutely zero knowledge if the man is still alive. Don't do that kids, it upsets people with formal degrees.
Let's set this up a little different. Let's take someone who is not quite on the shit head level as the Fuhrer but not nearly as saintly as Mr. Creepy sweaters. Let's place one of my favorite subjects in the hot seat and see how they stack up. This is a person of known brilliance, wash board abs and a degree of narcissism that is rarely matched. I'm talking, of course, about good old me.
All things considered I consider myself a good person overall. I've never cheated on or laid hand to a woman. I give money to homeless people even if I am pretty sure they will use it on cheap booze. In fact, I am typically more prone to do so if they tell me that they are going to buy whiskey. The most I have ever stolen was a pack of gum when I was 11. Yeah fact checker, I went to jail for burglary once but they threw that out didn't they! Besides, it was my dog to begin with! Damn it! Now you've got me off track again.....
These Oktoberfest are going down like water....
Where was I? Right, me. So, I'm a pretty decent guy. In addition to the things stated above, I served my community as a fire fighter and my country as a combat medic in two different wars. And now we have some material for the devil's advocate. Without getting too terribly deep into it, there is really no such thing as a good guy in war. There are guys trying to be hero's, there are guys trying to survive, and there are guys who look at war as an opportunity to wreak havoc upon whomever is in their vicinity. I was a combination of the three. I can honestly say that I did not join the Army in an effort to win medals, but I would also be lying if I said that I wasn't envious of the honor that was affixed to them. That is, until I received a couple. I am going to tell a story right now. This is a story that has been told many times. The only difference between right now and all of the other times is that this time it will be the truth.
It was a hot summer night in 2005 outside of Tikrit Iraq. I was a medic on my third deployment. I had three huge stripes on my uniform that screamed "Big dick Sergent" A rather sophomoric rank in all reality. Between this and my other two deployments I had already conducted well over a hundred missions without ever really killing any one. You might be thinking, yeah but you were the medic so... In all reality most missions, regardless of importance or danger should result in zero casualties. The fact is we get more from taking people alive and the group of guys that I worked with were as good at grabbing a guy asleep in his bed as Bernie Madoff is at ripping people off. We were after a high value target, like we were on most nights. We flowed through the house with a precision that an accomplished surgeon has wet dreams about. We found a hoard of women and children on the roof top. That's where they slept when it got too hot to sleep in the house. As we back cleared the house I found myself in a room of particular interest. I made it my personal mission to scour this room.
Here is the first inaccuracy in the way that the story was initially told. As it is known to others, I was looking for any anti-American material, some bomb making material or anything else that could lead us to the next bad guy. In reality I was pillaging, I'm not proud of it and I am certainly not fucking bragging about it! But it is the truth. The threat had been neutralized now it was time to see if I could find something cool. It was easily justified because, after all, our intelligence confirmed that this was the home of not just an evil terrorist asshole, but one of a "High level enemy leader." So here I am, left alone to go through cabinets and drawers without the slightest concern that someone lives in this place. I actually found a great deal of material that connected the occupants to Saddam Hussein. Good for me, pat on the head. So when all of the drawers had been tossed, I focused my attention on a basket of cloths near the window. I knelt down to sift through the soiled white tunics. Just as I did my left ear picked up an odd sound, it was a type of buzzing that I was familiar with but had not heard in a while. I looked left but it was too late, the buzzing was gone. So naturally I went back to sifting. No more than ten seconds later I heard the noise again. This time, I immediately look left and see a glow just above my head. FUCK! That's a cell phone! That is a cell phone in a terrorists pocket!! That is a cell phone in a terrorists pocket in a hidden location less than a foot away from me! I am on my my feet in a fraction of a second, weapon orientated on target, safety off, finger on the trigger! ...But I don't squeeze.
Now the story originally went, He lunged at me and I fired. Not so much.
I actually called for the guy in the other room, we will call him Steve for the sake of the story. Steve was in the room in an instant. I very briefly told him what happened and both of our M4 carbine assault rifles were fixated on the corner. We couldn't see the man because he was hidden very well behind a closet door. That's when it happened. Steve said, "Doc, we should shoot this guy." No sooner did he utter those six words, I let a volley of fire loose on that man's concealed position that would impress any fan of early 90's Schwarzenegger movies.
Fuck, I need another drink. Whiskey this time...
Immediately after that man's body hit my feet, a call came over the radio to determine where the shots came from. I remember loosing my composure a little. My superior officer asked who fired the shots and all I could say was, "It was me." now that seems like a reasonable answer except that there was about 40 of us all connected on that channel. If you knew this guy, you would know that his response was something close to, "yeah, and who are you asshole!" Then I broke another cardinal rule by saying my name rather than my call sign. (for those who don't know, a call sign is simply a number or nickname assigned to help soldiers maintain anonymity) I gave my location and within seconds a good friend of mine entered the room and gave the lifeless man two more shots to the head for the sake of being fastidious. One of my superiors gave me a high five, and like that it was over. I told my story, or at least the slightly modified version of it that I believed wouldn't get me brought up on charges to my bosses boss and then his boss. They were all giddy. I didn't understand. Later I found out that the man that I shot was one of the primary high value targets in all of Iraq. He was a "bad guy" a really bad guy, by our definition. So why should I feel bad, I eliminated a total villain. Here is where the dichotomy comes into play, and a twisted piece of fuck it is really. I get a medal announcing to the world that I am a hero for eliminating a threat to our nation. In reality, I become a murderer while giving this man martyrdom. Or did I have it right the first time? I guess if you ask my family they would say that I am the hero, if you ask his family they would say that he is. But then again my family has never heard the real story... but his probably hasn't either. They likely didn't know that he was responsible for the death of hundreds of people. Does it matter? I don't have the answer to that. All I know is that as I sit here typing that Unicorn forsaken award hangs from the wall over my right shoulder. And if I did not covet honor so much I would burn it like the piece of hypocritical trash that it is.
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