LaurieWrites

Head Like a Hole

It's my third week off and I am restless. I am also keyed up and ready to do something except I'm not sure what it is. There are too many loose ends and options right now and it is imperative that I remain calm. I am compulsively looking for freelance jobs which is taking up a great deal of my mental space and not helping me make the most of any kind of relaxation/down/woohoo I don't really have to go anywhere today time.

It's not going so poorly, actually, the making contacts part. I am just out of practice at quantifying my skills and experience because I've just been dawdling along doing a whole bunch of things with no pressure for the past five years and now here we are. Well, except for that whole journalism school thing where I had to justify every fact of my existence every single day for almost two years. Hey, yeah, come to think of it that was pretty stressful. And also I've been on deadline for something real or imaginary in my brain pretty much every minute of every day since 2002. I am not so much about the mental vacations.

So, okay. Scratch the no pressure. But, really, what can I say when people ask me what I can do? I can write things, a lot of things, effectively. I can speak coherently. I can help you figure things out, tell you what looks good where on your website or where all of your typos are, really quickly. I can take pretty pictures.

That is not specific enough, I'm afraid. And so I re-learn how to package this package that is me, and that makes me nervous because I'm constantly red-penning everything, especially myself, and I'm out of practice with resumes. I have watched some really terrible television. I go for the occasional walk. I try really  hard not to spend money, which, in the summer? Ugh. So I've been staying home a lot, in a house in a city that decided to skip May and head straight for August and our air conditioner is broken.

I did go to New York for a few days, on the Bolt Bus. That was really fun. I saw a really good, old friend who let me stay with her at her conference hotel and some newer blog friends and spent time kicking around the city. It felt good. I have pictures for months backed up or I'd show you some of the better ones, but here's my  new favorite bar near Union Square from my phone.

The bartender was standard issue no-nonsense New York pub but he talked about the oil spill and made me cry.

I can't really look at many of the pictures of that, speaking of which. I feel like I'm not witnessing but I have to really limit myself. I found myself calling up some of the images in my head while I was driving yesterday and it is hard to drive when I'm crying. I am unsettled by the state of the world in general. I don't know how you can't be. I want to write something for the Love the Gulf project (via DebontheRocks) but I'm having trouble finding the words. 

I want a new blog. I need to carve out a few days to understand SquareSpace.

Speaking of walking, which I believe I did up there somewhere, the exercise is going so-so and that has been the big come-to-Jesus this week. When my routine changes things tend to fall apart in that department. I had been going to kickboxing at L.A. Boxing three times a week for over a month. The scale wasn't really moving, although in either direction so that was almost okay, because I was loving it. It wasn't boring and I felt like I was getting back in some kind of shape, then I stopped working and one excuse led to another and there I was on Thursday night, blocked and afraid to go back because I knew it would be so difficult. I cursed myself because for the thousand-millionth time in my life I'd done it, I'd fallen off of an exercise schedule that was really working, that was making at least one part of my life feel in good, stable shape, and I'd blown it.

Stupid schedules. Stupid brain. Stupid stuff that I can't break through sometimes no matter how hard I try when the inertia takes over.

So I went back to the gym, doing the thing I know I need to do in this mind over matter situation and got in the car in spite of the fact that I didn't want to and didn't feel like it. It was hotter than it is in my house in there but I got my favorite bag in the corner and kicked out a lot of the stress and frustration and anxiety of the week. And I didn't die. I felt a little less stressed, even.

Look, face all sunshiny like the hand of HEAVEN blesses exercise.

Not really. Just flare.

I felt a lot weaker during and after class than I had felt even two weeks ago. I need to go back regularly. I need to recommit. The instructor looked at me quizzically but didn't ask me where I'd been and I still felt compelled to babble an excuse at the end, anyway, like he was my platoon leader or something. I take things too damned seriously. But how many times have I said that I can't stop because then it's so hard to start again, unlike other things that I can't stop if I tried forever? How many times has this happened? I know I'm strong. I know I have endurance. I know this isn't even entirely about my body, that my mind is so much better off when I'm burning off all of the nervous energy and feeling good about meeting physical challenges.

And yes, it is a kick to see my arms have some definition.

I am mad, I am so MAD that I've gained back 23 pounds, even though I know how hard it is for me to lose, I know how much harder it is, even, for me to maintain, no matter what the motivational police say. This is a difficult, difficult process for me. I know it. I know it. I know I can't get all negative and crazy about it or I'll stay on the downward spiral. The shame diet, as some idiot broadcaster said on the news the other night, does not work for me in any way. But still? Mad mad mad.

And then my sister and my mother reminded me of a race we'd been planning to do for awhile. It's tomorrow in Annapolis, with a bunch of our friends. It is a 10k that my mother and I -- at least -- will mostly walk, but it's a 10k anyway. My nurse practitioner (who is way better than any doctor I've ever had besides the one who fixed my face, by the way) said a few weeks ago that I should walk every day for 15 minutes just to remind myself that I was moving forward, or maybe just so I could say that I was. I haven't been following that direction either and I'm not sure I can make it all up in one day, though.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ten kilometers. Tomorrow. I don't even know how many miles that is.

But you're reading some ramblings of a sucker who's about to get into her car and drive to Annapolis, yeah you are.

Rolling Thunder

My father and I don't agree on almost anything politically, so we really don't discuss it much. I am not of a mind to change those of other people, especially those who I know will never be on the same wave as I am by way of life experience, generation, fundamental belief system or change in the weather. 

It's usually a waste of time and I am a fan of harmony. My opinions and beliefs are my own and generally speaking I don't ask others to reject or change theirs, although understanding isn't a bad thing.  

During the last election I did get involved in a conversation with him about John McCain. I had recently been to Hanoi and visited La Maison Centrale, aka the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain had been imprisoned. It helped me make sense of what I interpreted as the man's crazy eye and his random outbursts, because I felt antsy in there after ten minutes and couldn't imagine being trapped there for five years, much less under the watch of Vietnamese programmers who made me pretend we had an awesome time at Christmas dinner.

It still didn't make me any more interested in having him serve as my president, though. And I can't remember much of the content of this conversation with my father, but I think I must have asked him why in the world he would find him fit to serve? Why would he, a relatively apolitical person for most of my life, find the need to come out of voter hiding for this guy if that was what he was going to do? 

"We served in the same war, Laurie." 

That is all he said, and the way he looked and his tone shut me up. I knew that it was something I couldn't understand, a shared experience I have never and will never know and wasn't fit to judge. And although my father enlisted in the Navy and was on an aircraft carrier rather than a fighter pilot who ended up imprisoned for years like McCain, I can get the relationship. I may not agree, but I can understand. 

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Yesterday I went downtown to watch the Rolling Thunder motorcycle run. It's something I've wanted to do for years and in spite of it being hot as hell outside and no one within earshot being able or willing to go with me, I did it, and I am so, so grateful that I did. I believe in honoring holidays like this in the way that works for you, and this was it for me this year. 

Walking towards the Mall I questioned my sanity. It was so incredibly hot I started to think in exaggerated terms that I was going to melt or die. But as soon as I hit Constitution Avenue and saw the bikes roaring down, and more to the point heard them, I began to weep and more or less quit complaining. 

I was unprepared for how I felt. 

These were the first people I saw. I listened to them yell hello to the people on the bikes and I stood behind them and cried behind my sunglasses.

 

I am a liberal person who hates war who cries whenever I see an Honor Guard. My patriotic buttons can be easily pushed in spite of my open scrutiny of government and growing cynicism. I believe I am lucky to have been born here but I can separate a love of country quite easily from blind obedience and one of the easiest ways to piss me off is to equate my liberal views with some kind of scathing indictment of my Americanness or validity of my citizenship. I believe that it is wrong to tell anyone anything about how they are or what they believe about the place where they were born and where their family is rooted. 

I know that freedom isn't free -- whatever that really means -- and I don't need anyone's rhetoric or stupid forwarded e-mail or Toby Keith's boot in my ass to accentuate the point, put it that way. 

Anyway, somehow I happened in spite of the fact that I was raised in part by WWII vets, one grandfather in the Navy, one grandfather who had a "Once a Marine, always a Marine" license plate. My grandmother's only brother, my Uncle Joe McGrath, died in WWII, his remains never made it back and I think about him all of the time. I am fully aware of the impact that the travesty of Vietnam and our treatment of its veterans upon their return home -- or not -- had on my parents' generation, and therefore on mine. 

Yesterday I felt the weight, there on the edge of the National Mall. I saw such pride in the people by the side of the road cheering and the people waving back from the motorcycles. I wanted the streets to be as packed as they are for a Redskins parade or St. Patrick's Day around here. I had images flash through my mind from my mom's old photo albums, the guys she knew who went over and died and the ones who came back but were forever altered for worse. 

I talked to a Vietnamese-American guy named Mike, sitting there on a curb that burned my ass through my pants it was so hot, although I would have had to burst into flames to cut that conversation short. His dad was a Vietnamese Army veteran who ended up in an internment camp for ten years after the fall of Saigon. Mike, his mother and brother made it here, supposedly because his family had information that someone wanted. 

He let me take his photo.  

   

He told me I should have gone to Saigon, not Hanoi, which is what every Vietnamese person tells me when I say I went to Hanoi and not Saigon. He turned his nose up at the very mention of the North, the way people were treated, how the people in charge destroyed everyone's lives. He said he goes back but he will never stay. He listened to me babble on about how the Vietnamese don't seem to think of the war. After years of conflict with France, China, us, between North and South in-country, they live in the now. They have moved on. 

It destroyed Saigon, though, he said. The effects will never not be felt, not really. He spoke with insight about the economy, and agreed with me that in general they are a good people with a beautiful culture. We talked about our fathers, on opposite sides of a losing proposition. 

"So many die," he said. "My father die a few years later. He never recover." 

But he would stay here, I said. Oh yes. This was his home, he had a wife and a child now, a little boy who ran around in circles in the heat, laughing.

Back walking through the heat of the day I transformed these thousands of gray-haired men in black leather vests and jeans in my mind into young guys in t-shirts and camo. I imagined every cliche, a guitar player busking For What It's Worth (Stop, children what's that sound?) instead of the Army Band covering Witchy Woman by the Lincoln Memorial, which was the only blight on the afternoon, I say with apologies to the Army Band.

I thought of how, on the shuttle from the airport into the thick Hanoi evening two years ago, I had watched signs go by in a language I had no prayer of understanding and imagined a young man from Kentucky or Nebraska or Arizona, landing in this country he'd never seen 40 years before. I could tell already that it was a landscape unlike any I had ever seen and could barely imagine from movies, and how surreal it would be to be sent there to kill or be killed, an overall sense of mission and liberation underscoring it but to kill or potentially be killed all the same. 

I wondered why we didn't do better for them when they came home. I wondered and doubted if we were doing any better now for troops and vets from Afghanistan and Iraq. 

I saw a grandfather in a POW/MIA vest lean down to his grandson in a stroller and tell him to wave as the bikes rode by. 

I left the main road as motorcycles kept streaming down for hours and walked through the World War II Memorial on my way to the Wall. I cried again when I saw a young girl pushing an elderly veteran -- probably her great grandfather, it occurred to me -- through in a wheelchair, leaning down and shouting out the states into his ear as they passed the name of each engraved on one of the columns. "Connecticut. Indiana. Texas. New Jersey. Nebraska. Ohio." A tall bandanna'd motorcycle man leaned down and shook his hand, said "Thank you for your service, sir. I appreciate it." The man looked up, shielded his eyes, and told him where he'd served. 

I missed my grandfathers intensely in that moment, both dead for 20-plus years, wished they could have seen this. 

I ended up at the Wall, black granite engraved with thousands of names sloping down for some distance. I saw children and grandchildren and old buddies rubbing names onto paper with pencils.

There were cans of beer and letters from children never seen. 

There were people whose t-shirts told you that they'd ridden from all over the country on the back of motorcycles to see this for the first or the fifth time. Some people had lists of names -- from their town, from their platoon, from who knows where. 

It is thousands of names of people who died in a very long war.