Stabbed in...

She's been my best friend (arguably) for two decades at this point, and I still don't know specifically why knives are a terror to her.  I noticed it first as we discovered our weirdly coincident attraction to action movies.  Guns and explosions were nothing to her, but the silent blades of Crouching Tiger and Kill Bill drew gasps that shocked me at the time.  Even now, I don't know the source, I only know that it's a thing for her. 

The closest I've gotten is a story from her childhood in Jakarta.  There was a man, of course, in a horse barn that she and her baby sister inhabited or frequented or ghosted in their unsupervised existence on that island.  I have only gathered that he had a blade of some kind and the intent of drawing both blood and pleasure from one or both of them. 

In the time I have known of this vaguely whispered occurence, I have finished the tale with Mary as the heroic savior of her little sister.  Somehow, her tiny eight-year old self was already the kind of warrior who could best a full-grown, armed savage of a man.  And, knowing the woman she has become, this is not so unbelievable.

But what is most likely, considering the violence of her recoil at the sight of any blade being raised, there is a more violent end.  At the very least, this man has become a spectre that terrorizes her subconscious.  Maybe the man himself never got the abject satisfaction he sought from those two girls, but, knowing them both, I can tell you that he left his scars on them nonetheless.

Not Drinking

In the middle of my tour, I had an abnormal TB test.  And, since it's the military, there is no "wait and see" about anything.  It was straight to the full six-month long treatment referred to as INH.  To this day, because of my general disregard for things affecting my body, I only know vaguely that it had to be rough on my liver because the exclamated point was that there could be no alcohol during the treatment.  Also because it was the military, that was a memorable time span to survive sober.

So I stole a chance to cheat when I got a TDY assignment to New York City and my bag with the medicine was lost in transit.  I'm pretty sure I knew better at the time, but I decided to nuzzle into my ignorance and say that any day I wasn't actually ingesting the INH poison I could imbibe as much as I pleased.  And I pleased very much in that city.  This was my first and, to this day, only experience of the Big City, and I hit every jazz club and pub I could in that two days alongside the alcoholic colleague that had scored the trip with me.  I didn't know at the time, but we were both on benders of sorts albeit for very different reasons.  My abject hedonism matched up quite nicely with his "just found out his newlywed wife was using her job as a hotel clerk to have nightly one night stands with everyone but him" sort of off-the-railsness. 

For once, the ending is happy as far as these things can be.  My liver has continued to test healthy, continued hedonism aside.  And my alchy friend found a good one after his none-too-soon divorce and has a couple gorgeous kiddos and clear eyes to boot.  I think that New York trip was an oasis for both of us that rerouted our lives in more ways than one. 

I can't wait

There is always a risk to deferring one's time.  As a whole, we have consistently made the decision to do so, and it has cost us almost the entire energy we are allotted.  Forty to Eighty hour weeks with the constant fear of the edge that is always so fucking close.  One serious (or not so serious) illness; one accident or mistake; one unplanned pregnancy: only thing between most of us and ruin. 

Millenials seem to have taken the stance that nothing matters and therefore consequences no longer exist.  I suppose I still have the optimism of the 80's in my backdrop, because I can't get around the idea that some things matter very much.  Beauty.  The Unknown.  Experience.  And, of course, Love.  When we are so occupied or so apathetic that the value of these things is lost, maybe it is time to say the risk and the consequences are too great.

Trial

My brother knew he wanted to be a lawyer when he was twelve.  We were home-schooled and my parents went for the super, high-tech "video school", which ended up giving my brother his inspiration.  These were pre-recorded classrooms from an ultra-conservative school in Florida that we watched subject by subject, day by day.  I remember very little except being out-of-my-mind jealous of the children that had experienced these classes in real time and with each other, but, for my brother, the videos changed his life.  In particular, the government teacher he had for his sixth grade recorded lessons. 

And he never wavered, except for his foundational political views of course.  When he was twelve, it was all Reagonomics and holiness doctrine, but that quickly changed.  Even in his teens, he was starting to experiment with Nihilism and borderline heresies, but Wheaton and then Carrel helped him settle into an edgy Liberal jaunt. 

He is now a registered and active Democrat and a fucking poor civil rights' lawyer.  The case that has occupied his decade revolves around health benefits being denied to Texan kiddos by the unwieldy bureaucracy and greed.  That one is quite simply going no where.  The process of appeals and circuits and endless self-referential documents will probably occupy the next decade at least.

In the wings has been a slam dunk of a racial discrimination case...had it been tried anywhere other than East Texas.  We spoke today in the wake of the case being lost and he seemed near breaking when he summarized the opposition's winning remarks: "Talking about race is hard in East Texas because they don't mean anything by the hateful words they have learned to use."  And what do you do when a full jury has lived here long enough to buy that executives in East Texas are just too ignorant to be held accountable for the ingrained injustices of the institutions they oversee?  So a poor black man pulled through the maelstrom of habitual and generational bigotry will now probably die before he sees anything close to recompense.  And my brother inches just that much closer to being proved right that nothing really matters.