Life to me seems to flash like a projector screen. Most of the kids these days wouldn’t even know what the hell those are. A projector, wow, that’s like a record, of which I still love to listen . But at any rate so here is this sweet movie you cant wait to see. It could be any movie; a classic western, a comic book movie, a love story what ever. But in my movie theater there is a fucking prick that is stoned out of his mind laughing forgetting to change the reels. And when he does switch the projector and the reel, unbeknownst to most of the viewers he places single images on the film of penises or vaginas or some perverted shit that when watching some cartoon movie it looks way the fuck out of place. It would flash on the screen in an instant and then be gone with the blink of an eye. Well this long drawn out metaphor- the image that is here one second and then gone- represents my life. If I sit and try really hard, I might scrounge up some pathetic memory of something I probably shouldn’t be thinking about anyways. Or my memory is akin to the theater in that if it’s a good movie it usually goes by too quick. I have noticed that greatly that when shit sucks. For normal people time flies when you are having fun and drags during shitty, suck-filled times. Not for me, strangely I love the suck. It makes me who I am . The suck motivates the shit out of me. If you don’t know the suck ill try to explain it as much as possible.
So there you are 25 years old, college graduate looking at a relatively successful future. You have more than just a few job opportunities that are incessantly calling you because you are in high demand. Any normal levelheaded person in the given circumstance would have taken the highest paying job and began their life. Maybe have that sweet colonial style brick house with a half acre lot and a fenced in back yard for your boxer to run around at full sprint after it takes a crap making massive loops sounding like a thurobred at thistle down. And maybe you have some sweet hard wood floors and a lovely dining room. And if your lucky you married your sweetheart and call her your own. Pretty sweet and plausible. I chose the following route. Two days following graduation from college (job offers still on the table) I stepped into a US. Marine Corps recruiting office. Logically I would be an officer because of my degree. But again logic has been flushed down the proverbial toilet and yet again I made a decision to go with the suck. I enlisted in the USMC on May 16th of 2005 and was promptly shipped to Marine Corps Recruiting Depot Parris Island. For the following months I spent doing moronic bullshit to the tune of “sir, yes sir”. Ill get into all of that in a later chapter. But fast forward through all of the various schools, my unit check in and stop 1 day before my first deployment. 50+ hours of sitting and waiting on the tarmac for the flight to be cleared. Loading and unloading and loading again the plane. Then flying for 18 hours to land and off load the plane. Then you have the moronic illogical Marine Corps methodology to organization. All the junior guys, Privates through Lance Corporal were busy working their asses off bent over in the belly of the plane, unloading all of the bags for some 300 Marines, each weighing nothing less than 50lbs, and throwing them to a conveyor belt. You then load them on to the conveyor belt which then stacks them in a pile. The pile gets transitioned into a 7 ton , a very large truck. Then we off load all the bags from the 3 separate trips and place them in a pile in front of our temporary homes; tent city. All the while it is sunny and a 140 lovely degrees, a dry heat though. For 3 days we wait and play gear guard and smoke retarded amounts of cigarettes waiting and waiting. Hurry up and wait. It seemed like every 15 minutes some fucking officer would say that our plane has landed and we are ready to leave, but after the first dozen “boy-who-cried-wolf” scenarios we pretty much just sat and did nothing. It was too taxing to keep getting up and getting all our shit ready to leave. Any ways, so this whole 3-day period is a wait period. Waiting to go to Iraq. Waiting in some cases to die, get hit by an IED, spend days with out sleep, patrolling for long hours with little sleep, weeks with out showers or real food, or wait to sit in an air conditioned room playing video games. It all depended on how smart you were when you enlisted. By this point you could infer what direction I went. So after all the nonsense which is days and weeks worth you end up in the suck. I enjoyed all of this. The long hours, the lack of sleep, the cups of coffee to keep you awake. The sound of mortars and explosions in the distance created a mellow atmosphere. The cartons and cartons of Miami cigarettes. The stale dried out cans of Copenhagen. Chai from the locals accompanied with hate from the locals. The feel of pure sweat on you for hours on end chafing and sticking and smelling. Hating life for all its worth. Loving to hate. Loving to feel pain. Loving to see misery. Your euphoria is derived from the hate of everything. You become programmed to love to hate. If you feel anything its anger, if you taste anything it’s the rage towards everything, if you see anything it is the red of blood lust towards the enemy, towards your hometown, towards civilians. You breathe just to see someone is in more pain and more misery than you and this enlivens your spirit. Knowing that others are experiencing your pain makes you hyper aware of all. You gain your energy from the degradation of all. You are a nihilist and you have become one with the suck.
