Frey’s Day, May 30 2003

Fall from grace

Well.

Long term readers will remember me mentioning back on my old blog, Major Attitude Adjustment’s Webblog, that I dreaded having my current lease run out. And I’ve mentioned it a few times here on this blog… the closer June came, the more I’ve been living in fear that my landlords would simply refuse to offer me a renewal. Two years ago they did so, and I managed to bluff them into giving me another lease. Last year they just renewed it without a struggle. But I’ve had a bad feeling about it this year, and that feeling has gotten worse with each passing week, as Sondra (the office rep) kept putting me off vaguely over and over again.

I woke up this morning… well, this afternoon, around 12:45, I’ve been sleeping better lately and I was going to mention that, too… and looked out. Nothing on my door, but a folded up piece of paper from the management on the door across the hall. I tiptoed over and bent one corner back to peek, and it was the standard ‘are you renewing your lease or moving out’ notice.

Hmmmm. So… Sondra was all the way down at the end of this hallway to put a renewal notice on my neighbor’s door… and I don’t have anything…

A lot of ways one can interpret that, I suppose. My mind immediately went to “they’re going to terminate and she doesn’t want to let me know when I could still walk into the office today and throw a fit”.

I worked at the computer here all day long… doing some light blogging, writing a little on some projects, like that… and my desk chair is three feet from my door. I’ve heard people putting up notices on my door before this, or hanging restaurant menus on the doorknob, etc. And I was keeping an ear cocked.

Didn’t hear anything all day long. Finally, at 5:02, I opened the door.

Like magic, something had appeared there. Whoever had put it up had obviously been at enormous pains to make no noise at all.

I took the single sheet of paper down, unfolded it…

NOTICE OF TERMINATION, it said across the top.

I had a couple of hours of stress. Sent out emergency emails to my entire family (well, siblings, the cousin who’s like a sibling, his wife, and my mom). Wondered what I was going to do, where I was going to go. Made tentative plans, hoping that my youngest brother Paul would stand up to an assurance he made me months ago that if this happened, I could crash with him.

Just got off the phone with Paul. He seems happy to have me move in. In fact, it’s fortuitous for him; his seasonal job just ended. His rent is half mine, so my Unemployment benefits (as long as they continue) suddenly, effectively, doubled.

There are certainly downsides to this. I don’t share space well, and Paul has some vices not in common with mine. The small city where Paul lives (40 miles from here) has very few clerical or office jobs; it’s industry is mostly retail; it lives off seasonal snowbirds. Paul, of course, has no access to a pool. (That will profoundly suck; I’ve gotten very spoiled by my pool.) Paul’s apartment has a lot of roaches, but I’ve dealt with roaches before; we just need to take a trip to Wal-mart and get some heavy duty roach motels. I’m not sure Paul is ready for the amount of use I tend to put a phone line to with my online stuff, but I guess I can cut down on that.

Plus, Paul’s apartment is small. We’ve worked out that he’ll move into what has been his living room and I’ll take the bedroom… the way it’s set up, that gives us both separate entrances and we’re on opposite sides of the large kitchen so that will actually work well. But still, his apartment is small… it will be an adjustment for both of us.

Nonetheless, just knowing I have some place I can go to is a huge relief. And there are upsides too (every bad thing has some upsides, just as every good thing has its drawbacks; those of you who have regular sex lives know what I mean). First there’s the money thing. Then there’s the fact that I’ll be physically closer to some of my family. Also, Paul has some friends his age (he’s in his late 20s, but I have to keep reminding myself of that, he seems like a teenager to me) who like to roleplay, so I may be able to run my campaign again. I’d enjoy that a lot.

Now that the worst has happened, and I know more or less what’s going on with my life, I have to admit, it’s a vast relief. I’m actually hoping to get out of here as soon as possible, since I don’t plan to pay the June rent here… the standard lease forbids using the security deposit for rent, but screw that. If I have to, I’ll give them an official notice telling them to use the security deposit for the rent and let them sort that out, but I’m hoping to be gone from here within a week, which is about how long it will take for them to start sticking notices on my door asking for the overdue rent.

However, I don’t have to pay the utilities here next month, or the phone bill, since I’ll probably be out of here by the 15th (when it’s due) and if I’m not (but I hope I am) I guess I can live without a phone for little while. If I can get out of here fast enough, I can roll on out to Paul’s place with a healthy bank account, which will be a huge help.

Haven’t done much else today, and have to go out and over to Wal-green’s and the local liquor store in quest of boxes, which I’ll do as soon as I post this. Little else I’ve even thought about in the news today, so I’ll leave the Wizard and Jessica Lynch pieces up for now, in case anyone wants to continue the discussions in the comment threads.

I’ll be packing and triaging stuff all weekend. If anyone needs furniture and wants to stop by, I’ve got a lot of it I won’t be taking with me. ;)

Anyone can insult you, degrade you, humiliate you, and mess up your life for free. And there are a lot of willing amateurs out there happy to put in some time at it, too. But the real professional assholes will not only manage to jam a tire iron into the whirling spokes of your life, they’ll find a way to bill you for the service, too.

And your little dog, too

Kim from Dayton, a recent correspondent of mine, wrote in response to my movie postings yesterday to ask me what the hell my problem was with The Wizard of Oz. (She didn’t put it that way, though; Kim is a class act.)

Herewith presented is my emailed response to her, which I thought some few of you might find amusing, although more likely, it will simply make every WOO fan in the universe gather together in a frenzied mob outside my patio, waving pitchforks and torches while chanting ‘beezlenut rah rah BOIL that dust speck’.

But talk is cheap when you do it through a modem. Here, then, is what I think of nearly everybody’s childhood favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz:

It's a horrifyingly bad movie. It's a bad adaptation of a great kid's fantasy, it's a bad movie entirely in its own right, it's so goddam cloyingly cutesy it makes me want to vomit just thinking about it, it stars Judy Garland who could not act drunk if you poured a quart of schnappes into her through a siphon, the characters are all morons, the songs suck, it looks terrible, the dialogue blows, the acting is resolutely bad, it has dancing midgets, the winged monkeys look stupid, and the only character I found remotely appealing in the whole film melts when she gets hit with a bucket of water.
And, ultimately, what's the message of WOO? My favorite movie in the world, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, is, admittedly, very corny and has been broadcast about a billion too many times at Christmas. But at least its message is clear: one should count wealth by how many friends one has, and success by how much one has done to help others in his or her life. I may find that message a little simplistic, but it's pretty straightforward, and it's pretty positive.
WOO is beloved by millions, and I'm goddamned if I can figure out what the hell its message is. Real life sucks because it's not in color? If something is green we're allowed to kill it, either by dropping a cottage on it or by throwing a bucket of water at it? Good People Are Pretty and Bad People Are Ugly? Or, maybe, Midgets Can't Sing And We Shouldn't Let Them Dance On TV Either?
A film doesn't have to have a point to be good, I grant you, and many bad films have messages. But WOO is a really lousy film that is also, apparently, utterly pointless.
The only reason so many people like this film is they saw it for the first time when they were 5 years old and it scared the shit out of them. However, opinions one forms in response to extreme emotional stimulus while sitting in front of the TV wearing footie pajamas are generally not particularly intelligent or reasonable. WOO is just a lousy, lousy film. And if millions of people didn't adore it, it wouldn't bother me as much as it does. But when millions of people adore crap like this (and, you know, crap like FORREST GUMP) it makes me despair for our culture.
But then, I despair for our culture a lot.

Quick! Somebody stop me before I type again.

PANEL ONE:
Man sitting in restaurant with remains of large meal on table in front of him, raising a hand to his mouth as he burps.
Man: Uurrp.
PANEL TWO:
Old West gunslinger with sheriff’s badge, sitting at another table, looks up.
Cowboy: Yeah?
PANEL THREE:
First man waves dismissively towards gunslinger, who is off panel now.
Man: Not you, Wyatt.
Cowboy: (word balloon comes from off panel) Oh. Sorry.

Saving Private Lynch

The BBC is reporting that the various Iraqi doctors and other medical personnel involved in Private Jessica Lynch’s care state that her ‘rescue’ seemed to be elaborately staged for purposes of generating the maximum melodrama. That the soldiers involved shot off their weapons when there was no need (pretty much constantly) that they refused the hospital staff’s offer of a master key to the complex and a guide to take them straight to Lynch’s location, and that, in fact, the hospital staff itself had tried to transport Lynch in an ambulance to American controlled territory the day before the raid, but the American sentries had started to fire on the vehicle when they came into range, so they’d turned around and gone back.

As a good, solidly committed invasion-opposing, Dubya-loathing, hippie-yippie left wing liberal Amerika-hating freakazoid who pretty much loathes the entire military-industrial complex en masse (while respecting a lot of the individual people within it, like my cousin Ashley), I am, at this point, pretty much duty bound to leap to my feet and vociferously support every idiotic thing the Iraqis are yowling through their BBC mouthpieces. I should denounce the American military as thugs and this infamous ‘rescue’ as a cheap piece of utterly unnecessary theatrical showboating. I should, as all my liberal left wing brethren are now doubtless doing, once more make cogent, witty references to the movie Wag The Dog, and nod, and wink, and look sagaciously down my nose at anyone who could possibly believe that the John Wayne style melodramatics of Lynch’s ‘rescue’ had any actual validity to them at all.

Here’s the thing about that. I wasn’t there. Much though I hate the military as a concept, and much though I loathe Dubya and all he stands for, and however vehemently opposed to my nation’s unprovoked, immoral, and illegal invasion of another nation I was and still am, nonetheless, I’m also an agnostic, and I have to admit, I don’t know what went on in that hospital. I’m just reading reports written by people who also don’t know what went on in that hospital, based on, admittedly, eyewitness accounts… by people who, very likely, have no reason to like the American military any more than I do (considerably less reason, actually.)

One of the Iraqi doctors even notes that while the American troops were firing their weapons everywhere, nobody was getting hurt, and he accuses the American military of using blanks. This seems kind of ridiculous to me. Pentagon spokespeople, in fact, have said it’s ridiculous, you just don’t load blanks when you charge into a possible combat zone. I have difficulty imagining anyone in my training company at Fort Benning even acknowledging such an order, or any officer ever issuing such an order. “Okay, men, we’re going to rescue a captured female soldier from an objective that, an hour ago, was held by heavily armed enemy troops. We don’t know exactly where she is or what’s been done to her, but we’re not leaving without her. Now… load blanks in your weapons. And if they offer you any kind of help or a master key, refuse it, we want this to look really really dramatic.”

Yes, Colonel. Right away, sir. This is me loading blanks into my weapon, sir. Oh, they look a lot like live rounds? Well, the new blanks are like that, sir. They do look just like live rounds. Don’t worry about it.

In fact, I’m wondering exactly where Our Army At War would just happen to come across blank M-16 ammunition in the middle of a live CZ. Every ounce of weight, every square inch of space, on a massive troop deployment is carefully accounted for. Somebody actually used some of that space and weight capacity on BLANKS? When they could have carried BULLETS? That, you know, actually WORK? That’s… that’s… well, I want to see the armorer’s log where that was listed, I really do.

I will note two subjective responses to what I’ve read, in addition to the one above:

(a) The Iraqis sound kinda whiney to me. Their complaint seems to be that when Special Forces troops stormed a hospital that had, only an hour before their arrival, contained a great many armed and uniformed enemy troops, they weren’t very polite. Apparently, a lot of big burly aggressive men armed to the teeth hurling themselves into their hospital without warning scared the Iraquis inside shitless. Now, I don’t blame them, I’d have been turning my Fruit of the Looms into a fudge factory, too, in the deathless words of Teddy DuChamp. But these rather plaintive accounts don’t mention anyone dying, or even getting hurt, in the assault… and I’m going to assume that if so much as one noble Iraqi medico had picked up a scratch from diving under a bedpan too fast, it would be mentioned forty seven times in five paragraphs. So I’d call this a triumph of restraint on the part of the rescuers, given that, you know, Special Forces troops aren’t exactly trained in diplomacy.

(b) Disturbingly… because honestly, the notion that our troops carried blanks into combat is simply completely deranged… the Pentagon spokesperson who denied these reports did so by lying. One of the things they claimed made the ‘they were firing blanks’ observation stupid was that M-16s need a special attachment to shoot blanks, and none of those attachments were seen in any of the video taken during the rescue. Plus, those attachments take time to attach and remove, and you can’t fire real bullets with them on your weapon, and it would simply be ridiculous to expect troops in combat to have to unscrew an attachment before they could make their weapons effective at need. And all that is more or less true, except that M-16s do not need blank suppressors to fire blanks.

The purpose of blank suppressors is to keep the discharge of a blank cartridge from being dangerous. We had them on our weapons all through Basic Training. The M-16 will fire a blank just fine without a blank suppressor on it (I saw a range sergeant detach the blank protector from a recruit’s rifle and use a blank to blow a large snake into two quivering pieces so I know this is true).

What most people don’t understand (I didn’t until I went to Basic) is that blank cartridges are not harmless. They are simply rounds of ammunition with the actual bullets (the projectiles meant to be propelled by the explosives in the round) removed. The explosive is still there in the shell, and it still goes off, and when it does, it creates a focused burst of heat plasma and compressed air that spikes out of the barrel of the gun and is quite dangerous for a distance of from six inches to maybe three feet in front of the barrel. Our drill sergeants told us over and over again that blanks were dangerous, and after Basic Training was over, I once mentioned to an acquaintance of mine who was very knowledgeable with firearms that I had seriously contemplated taking my blank suppressor off during Basic, sneaking up behind my chief tormenter in my training platoon (a complete dick with ears named Armstrong), putting the muzzle of my weapon an inch behind his head, and discharging it. My acquaintance told me I’d have certainly profoundly fucked Armstrong up and would almost certainly have killed him, and given the way that snake blew into two pieces from being ‘struck’ with a blank discharge, I believe him. (My acquaintance also told me that had I done that I’d still be sitting in a cell in Leavenworth, and maybe he’s right. I suspect even a lousy lawyer could have got me off on insanity, though. Anyone who knows me at all also knows that for me to seriously consider murdering someone else, even a dick with ears like Armstrong, I’d have to be in a severely altered state of consciousness.)

Anyway, the military uses blank suppressors to keep recruits from hurting themselves or each other with blank rounds. The M-16 does not in any way ‘require’ a blank suppressor in order to fire blanks. That’s just a blatant lie.

Which bothers me a lot. Why would our military lie, unless…?

Private Lynch, demonstrating remarkable intelligence, continues to state that she has no memory of any events of the actual rescue. Good for her. If I’d been at the center of a military operation that the brass were lying about (as I know they are, in at least one small but puzzling respect) I damned well wouldn’t remember anything that had gone on, either.

Give me one last chance
and I’m gonna make you sing
give me half a chance
to ride on the waves that you bring
you’re honey, child, to a swarm of bees
gonna blow right through you like a breeze
give me one last chance
we’ll slide down the surface of things

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man