My Favorite Escape

It seems to me that every now and again time slips, which is to say I am rarely aware of how many days have passed since we last spoke. Or since I last spoke to you as it were. I will do my best to remember all that has transpired since my last post but bare with me as there are far more memories than there are words to describe them. I should tell you that my Ka-tet (as Stephen King’s character Roland Deschain of Gilead would call us.) or team, if it pleases you, are all doing as well as can be expected. RFG, Barbie and Lucky Charms had an interesting encounter a few days ago but I know very little of what transpired. Suffice to say that they are fine. I do know that while they were on a patrol they had an unknown vehicle get too close and had to deal with it. They handled the vehicle correctly given the parameters of the Rules of Engagement. There were no injuries. I honestly don’t know the details but when I do I am sure I will share them with you all.
As for the Mexican he is doing fine. I run into him every couple of days or so. I think he was having a hard go of it for a while, but I believe he has found what ever it was he thought he had lost. This, if he and I have as much in common as I think, was probably only his sanity.
The Invader is as big a pain as ever, today while I slept he did his best to make as much noise as humanly possible. We have found a somewhat peaceful middle ground where we no longer fight and bicker at every given opportunity. Mainly because I speak to him as little as possible and use as little sarcasm as I can which for me is ever the accomplishment. And there is the fact that we see each other one day in six. Today happened to be his down day and I can not blame him for the noise he made as most of it was necessary. As he was merely cleaning and organizing his side of the room. The 15th is scheduled to be our billeting pre-inspection, one more little thing that must be done before we leave this God forsaken country. I just wish he would have chosen to do it while I was at work.
Hard Hat is as high strung as ever, recently he is not one of my favorite people as he does not seem to be able to fight for his soldiers when it matters. He is one of those that is far more concerned with covering his own ass. To be fair we have given him a couple of reasons to want to cover it recently. Last week we were outside the wire on one of our patrols and in an effort to stay awake began playing catch with a chem.-light. Unfortunately as we were directly in front of one of the security cameras and only a mere 400 meters away from the fence. They watched our entire game. Which more or less evolved into a makeshift football game in the dark. I’m sure if we had been wearing our gear (flack vests, kevlars and silly little things like that.) It wouldn’t of been a big deal. But out of the four of us that were actually playing, two of us were not even wearing our dcu tops. (We were in our brown under t-shirts.) Obviously the higher ups were less than pleased. And then as though we weren’t in enough trouble we did something that can only be described as very stupid. There is a building on the out side of the wire that is sort of an oddity, no one really knows what its purpose was before we bombed it. But it is suspected that it was some type of chemical lab the Iraqi’s used prior to the war. Anyway over the last three years this building has been written on by pretty much every unit that has passed through. And as we are about to leave we decided to leave our names as well. We wrote a lot of different things.. I left my initials “AJJB” and the obligatory confession of where my heart lie. (I.e. “Rocky” and James 4-ever) Anyway suffice to say that the powers that be were less than pleased. And made a big effort to show us just how disappointed they were. They put us on the fox patrol until we hand over the security detail to the new unit. Which is more or less a punishment but really it’s just an inconvenience. The fox patrol limits our freedom at work. But doesn’t really affect anything more than the fact that instead of eating at the d-fac we eat out on the perimeter. Which is what I did for the six months prior to us taking over all the other patrols. So it really wasn’t too big a deal.
“Rocky” and I have been talking about the future a lot recently, we talk about marriage, and we talk about the idea of children. She is adjusting to her new career and I think she is starting to actually really enjoy her job. She hasn’t had it easy, but I know she will continue to do well. Today she had some weird problem with her voice. It was sort of like laryngitis except her voice would only squeak. I told her I am going to start calling her “Squeaker” but I don’t think she would appreciate that very much. I wish I could put into words how excited I am about our relationship. She is truly beautiful both in body and in spirit. She is wonderfully unaware of how amazing she is, I believe she is aware that she is attractive but I don’t think she realizes how she affects everyone she encounters. The thing that never ceases to amaze me is that she chose me. Self esteem issues aside I honestly never dared to hope that I would one day meet someone this amazing. And never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that someone like her would be able to love someone like me. Truth be told I had actually accepted that maybe the single life was an authors only choice. (Never mind that every one of my favorite authors is married with a family of his or her own.) The point of this little rant is that for the first time in a very long time I am excited about my future, no strike that, I am excited about our future together as man and wife.
So in a completely different train of thought I wanted to talk about the book I am reading right now. As you are probably aware I love to read. I have since I was very young. It has always been an escape for me, similar to my movies. Anyway I told you about the Dark Tower Series a couple of times before. The fourth book in the series was the inspiration for the “Riddle Me This” section of this blog. I am currently reading the final book in this series. This book is huge. At 835 pages it is not the largest book I have ever read but it is daunting none the less. The reason I bring it up now, is that last night the damn book actually had me in tears. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a stranger to becoming emotionally involved with characters that share their stories with me. But for the life of me I can not think of any story that has ever had me fully in tears. I have laughed with their jokes and even worried when their situations seemed dire. But I have always been able to separate their fiction from my reality. The Dark Tower series took Stephen King nearly his whole life to complete. It infects many of his other works. And I am sure that as he wrote two of my friends deaths within a fifty pages of one another he to wept. Stephen King broke a lot of writers laws with his Dark Tower Series. For one the author himself makes not only an appearance in two of the books, but a huge impact forever changing the characters involved. And secondly he openly speaks to the reader as the author, apologizing for the fate that he placed upon our companions, not in an authors afterward as some might but right in the midst of the story. I have not yet finished this adventure, I have a little less than three hundred pages left. But I know that this is one of the most powerful and exciting stories I have ever read. I am not going to tell you that you have to read these seven books but I will tell you that you should. And hopefully you will agree with me when I say that while some stories are a distraction some truly are an escape.


Random Quote of the Blog.
Do to the current power struggle in our government I thought this was appropriate:

"A second flood, a simple famine,Plagues of locusts everywhere; Or a cataclysmic earthquake I'd accept with some despair. But no, You sent us Congress...Good God, Sir! Was that fair?"--John Adams in 1776
And the Countdown continues....
8 Days