Hello? Is this thing on?...

Ah, well, here we are. And where is that, you may ask? Well check it out. This is officially my first post-Iraq blog entry. My unit and I had actually left Iraq some time ago, and after various stops around the world finally finished a frustrating two-week demobilization process. I've been on Guam for the past two days, decompressing via conversation with friends over beer and shots, live music, solo, aimless drives at 2:00 a.m., a late Sunday morning at Java Junction, and just today (my third day home) an early morning stop at Winchell's for two donuts (one glazed, one a chocolate-covered french cruller) a cup of coffe, and a complimentary issue of the PDN. Life is good. So far. You see, right now I'm in the "honeymoon" period of my homecoming. A few days of doing damn near any old thing I feel like. And yet, I already feel the nagging feeling of things that need doing. Plans that are waiting to be set in motion. My time in Iraq was one of those experiences that teaches-or perhaps more appropriately-reminds you of something you've known all along. Something you knew intellectually as an abstract concept but didn't really know in your bones. Kind of like how someone can tell you all day that basic training is tough, but it isn't until you've heard the wheezing of your lungs as you furiously try to take in what never seems to be enough air, until you've seen the bottom of your feet after a roadmarch covered in what seems a single, large, continuous blister, until you've felt a drill sergeant's boot in your back as he wrenches up the side of your kevlar helmet to inform you that you've fucked up, that you can really know. I'd like to imagine that I was some sort of fully aware, highly cultivated human being pro-actively engaged in directing his own destiny. Of course I would, we all would. That fact, however, is that I've lived much of my life like some sort of tragic protagonist in a story about modern alienation and soullessness in a consumerist, media-sedated society. I had become become a cubicle drone, tragic in my mediocrity and insignificance (well, I suppose not tragic in the Aristotelian sense, but work with me here...). The bitch of it is that it's not news to me. It never was. I had known it the whole time, and yet I got all comfortably numb and cruised along on autopilot, partly out of fear that I wouldn't be perceptive, smart, and resourceful enough to deal with any major life change, and partly out of sheer laziness. Anyway, without engaging in further analysis of personal flaws (which could easily mutate into a self-pity session) suffice it to say that spending 18 months compulsorily removed from life as you know it is quite an impetus for change. Hey, I'm not perfect. I guess sometimes life has to kick you in the ass a little before you wake up. When I was sixteen years old, I had read that forgetfulness was our fate, that all the lessons of life we gain and lose and gain and lose again. I had also heard that we need new experiences, for they jar something within, something that sleeps. May we all strive to be awake and remembering. I'll try my damndest...