and The army goes rolling along (Part 1)

2005.

Both fronts on the War on Terror are going poorly. Nations around the Indian Ocean are recovering from the worst tsunami on record. Coldplay is dominating the radio. Times were shit and they were only getting shittier.

I was 17 years old.

It was February.

While being a public menace in the local mall, I suddenly had a thought. Wouldn’t it be funny if I joined the Army? So that’s what I did. Not because of any sense of duty or patriotism. I simply thought it would be hilarious to dedicate the next few years of my youth to something I didn’t understand. There’s no other explanation.

Then came summer. June specifically. I was shipped to the cushiest boot camp that the US Army had to offer. Fort “Relaxin’” Jackson , South Carolina.

What follows is a recounting of that summer. Truth be told, I go days. Weeks. Months, even, without ever thinking of my Army days. It’s only come front and center thanks to this YouTube video

Some of this may be fictionalized. Some of it fact. The only thing that’s true is that can’t distinguish between the two.

But first things first: Getting sexually violated at MEPS. It’s a ritual all recruits must face. First you must show your butthole to the disinterested doctor. Then you must pull out pecker and piss into a cup in full view of a very annoyed (male) nurse. If that wasn’t bad enough, the man who takes your piss cup laughs at your thousand yard stare.

This is only the beginning of the humiliation process.

What follows is an even stranger ritual where a group of about five recruits strip down into their underwear and perform strange and nonsensical movements for a needlessly pissed off sergeant. I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted. It felt like hours.

Afterwards, you sit in a room for hours on end waiting to speak with an admin professional about your MOS, i.e your job in the military. Being me, I picked the easiest and least likely to get me killed. Human Resources.

For a lot of states, at least in 2005, there’s only one MEPS location per state. And they process recruits for all branches of the military. There, you will meet future marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and whatever you call people in the Coast Guard. Then they make you take an oath to uphold the constitution, the 10 commandments, Sharia law, the code of Hammurabi, blah blah blah. I was ready to go home by then. While MEPS isn’t physically demanding, it does give you a taste of the psychological warfare that will deployed against you in basic training.

Afterwards, all us recruits were driven back to our hotel. I had never felt so degraded in my life. But while all us young bloods were shootin the shit, I was shocked to learn that most of the recruits ENJOYED MEPS. All that kicking and jumping in your underwear? They found it “fun”!

Only the sexually deviant could have found something like that “fun”. It was clear that this wasn’t the life for me.

I should have backed out right then and there. I didn’t. Instead I boarded that plane to Columbia, South Carolina in June of 2005.

TO BE CONTINUED….

lonesone dove

Some shitty media site made a list of the top ten greatest western novels ever written and it ranked Lonesome Dove at number one, Blood Meridian at number two, and Butcher’s Crossing somewhere farther down the list. Obviously the list errored in not adding another McCarthy book and failing to place a Louis L’Amour at all. But it also fucked up by again comparing Butcher’s Crossing to Blood Meridian.

While both novels could be classified under the “anti-western” genre, the fact remains that these are two very VERY different books. Butcher’s Crossing, written by John Williams, is actually trying to tell a real story. Cormac McCarthy, meanwhile, is trying to haunt your dreams. Their goals are very different. William’s vision of the old west is very much grounded in reality. We also have something called “sympathy” for the main character. In Blood Meridian, every character is a piece of shit and they all deserve their horrible fates. One is telling you how the old west actually was. The other is using words to paint a picture of their nightmares.

And because McCarthy wrote the way he did, his books probably find broader appeal outside of the western genre. He’s a strange taste that a lot of readers have acquired. Which is why it’s not fair to compare Blood Meridian to Butcher’s Crossing. I’m not saying that John Williams was a lesser writer, but I am saying that he’s telling a much more straightforward story with Butcher’s Crossing while McCarthy was aiming more at the abstract and alien. So if you read and enjoyed one and get recommended the other, you’re probably gonna be confused or disappointed.

And now Lonesome Dove. I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t finish it. Larry McMurty’s style goes against everything I believe in as a writer. But clearly the problem is with me and not the book. It consistently ranks as the greatest western novel ever written. Yet I prefer a more focused approach to storytelling; excise unnecessary characters and plot lines; show, don’t tell by revealing the character’s emotions in the moment and not by describing their thoughts or past; every setup must have a payoff. McMurtry is a different writer than me, I get it. But does the book hold a special place because we all loved the mini-series?

Mer Rouge (Part 58)

The Honcho came to a complete stop at the property entrance. Rifle shots lit it up until DuPont and the others sprung up from the brush to return fire. They raced toward the Honcho unleashing bullet after bullet until their guns were depleted. Hutch carried Moses to the bed of the truck and climbed inside. Oren and the priest were close behind. The sheriff, with the chamber of his .38 empty, pulled out the .44 and fired. The sniper was in clear view. The bullet struck the sniper on his cheek, blowing it clean off and exposing his teeth, and he recoiled. DuPont climbed into the cab and ordered Chaz to step on it. It was probably three hundred yards from one side of the field to the other. The sniper attempted to readjust to hit his moving target but he gave himself up. Everyone in the bed of the truck saw him shift closer to the road. “I’m out of bullets!” Oren yelled.

Moses, struggling with his gun wound, saw the sniper and thought. “I can hit him,” he shouted. “Gimme something sharp!”

Oren looked past the mounds of dynamite and found a discarded harpoon. He didn’t know how it got there. “Here!” he said, handing it to Moses.

Moses stood up in the bed and cocked his left arm with a harpoon in hand. The sniper swiftly shifted into a kneeled position and placed the scope squarely on Moses’ head. He was too late. As the Honcho sped past, Moses hurled the harpoon and speared the shooter right through the chest. The object hit him with such force that it blew him back several feet into the brush.

“Goddamn old man!” praised the priest. “How did you learn that trick?”

“Just saw Apocalypse Now,” he said.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Mer Rouge (Part 57)

Hutch grabbed his downed comrade and pulled him into safety. The others were all hidden behind the treeline. “I’m alright! I’m alright,” Moses reassured Hutch.

“A rifle round went clean through your shoulder! I gotta stop the bleeding!”

“Don’t worry about it!”

Squatted behind a tree, the sheriff reached for his .44. He peeked out through the sweltering heat waves and scanned the flat grassland. “Did anyone see anything?!” he shouted.

“Man I didn’t see shit!” Hutch yelled.

DuPont squinted harder and deduced that the shooter had to have been posted up in the treeline on the other side of the field. He shook his head and spat. “I should call in an airstrike,” he said.

“That’s not an option,” Oren told him. “Radio Chaz. Tell him we’re calling it off.”

“No!”

“Sheriff, between the explosion and rifle shots, they already know we’re here! We should abandon this route and find another way in!”

“There’s no time.”

“Sheriff,” the priest interjected. “He may be right. That rifle shot was from a Mauser SP66. There’s only one man I know of who uses that weapon.”

“The nine?” Oren asked.

“You betcha.”

“I don’t give a goddamn if it’s Lee Harvey Oswald up in them trees,” said the sheriff. “This is the only way in!”

DuPont poked back out from his position. Rifle rounds rained down on him kicking up mounds of dirt and grass. He swiftly took cover. “Fuck!” he yelled.

“We appear to be trapped here, sheriff,” the priest said while gnawing on a carrot.

“We ain’t trapped here!”

DuPont looked away from the direction of the sniper and towards the east just off of the judge’s property. He could see the cloud of dust barreling towards them with the beat up Honcho leading it. He had seconds to think. “When Chaz rounds the corner,” he said to the others, “fire every round you have towards that treeline.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

take a seat

After watching all 24,000 hours of Chris Hansen’s investigations into online predatory behavior (in one night) I’ve arrived at a radical conclusion: Chris Hansen is not a journalist. That’s a view for the simpletons. He’s something a little bit more.

He’s a provocateur. A performance artist.

I’m not throwing shade at Hansen necessarily. Indeed, if my interpretation of him is correct, he’s the greatest to ever do it. Unlike all the other firebrands, Hansen didn’t rise up through stand up comedy or cheap political punditry. He captured the public trust by doing legitimate investigative journalism. But as usual, the times make the man. And Hansen stumbled upon a subject matter that was alarming, darkly provocative, and timely. After the Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger era of the 80s and 90s, followed by the intense paranoia and entrenchment of the surveillance state during the early 2000s, Hansen invited us to take a seat and peek into the world of online predatory behavior towards children.

As mentioned in the video above, To Catch a Predator always had its controversies, specifically regarding the media’s relationship with law enforcement, entrapment, etc. Initially, the program dedicated time towards educating parents on how to protect their children online. So there was, in a sense, an educational component. But then the show kinda morphed into something else. Something a bit unsettling and much more difficult to put your finger on.

We all know the setup. After baiting a predator, a “decoy” (usually a paid actor playing an underage girl or boy) waits at a sting house for the individual to show up. The predator comes into the house, the decoy disappears, and out comes Chris Hansen asking the man to “take a seat”. What follows is an uncomfortable conversation where Hansen attempts to understand the predator’s motivations and intentions. The first few interviews, you’re like “hahaha fuck that guy.” But the more you watch, the sadder it becomes. Eventually you have to ask yourself: “what are we accomplishing with this?”. Even in the rare moments where the predator is calm and honest, we really don’t learn anything that we couldn’t have deduced ourselves. So the interviews are like watching a trapped animal. The predator spins their tires until the interviewer gets bored and says “I’m Chris Hansen of Dateline NBC”. The man panics and tries to leave until they are busted by a whole squad of cops. It’s the strangest and most unsettling bit of television you will ever see.

Sure they catch a predator. But Chris Hansen presents himself as a predator of a different beast. With his access to primetime television and absence of a court of law, Hansen becomes the judge, jury, and executioner. You and I, as viewers, are his co-conspirators.

But as with any good art, there’s an undercurrent of themes presented but left to the viewer to ponder on. Male loneliness. Declining social mobility. Mental health. Rarely, if ever, were these subjects outright discussed but were nonetheless screaming at us through the television. Moreover, the pretense of journalistic intent was addressed only in the most halfassed way. If Hansen was truly concerned with online sexual predators, more attention would have been paid to victims of it.

Instead, Chris Hansen chose to turn a disturbing subject into spectacle. That’s why it’s not fair to call his work in the subject “journalism”. Not to knock To Catch a Predator and its successors though. It not only provided spectacle but it also gave us insight into ourselves and our times.

That’s what good art is supposed to do.

Mark chapter 1

I’ve always said that three things have influenced my writing the most: Cormac McCarthy, Columbian cocaine, and the Gospel of Mark. The first two are self explanatory. The last requires a college dissertation.

The Gospel According to Mark is my favorite ancient text. It’s weird. It’s esoteric. And I believe it caused a massive shitstorm when it reached the ears of early Christians. For those who don’t know, Mark is the oldest surviving Gospel. Matthew and Luke made liberal use of it. And it is thus seen as the first ancient “biography” of Yeshua aka Jesus of Nazareth aka Jesus ‘H’ Christ. Sure, it is attributed to a guy named “Mark” but no one actually knows who wrote it and where and why it was written. At first glance, you might think it was composed poorly in Greek. Yet if you move through the text with that assumption, the author will make you look like a fool (which you are). But for ears willing to listen, Mark packs one thematic punch after another. It’s on par with any of the other shit floating around the Greco Roman world at the time.

But I think it was controversial. Like all good art, people weren’t ready for it. After all, there’s a reason why two other versions of the same story were composed 10 to 30 years later (Matthew and Luke. Plus John if you think there’s a synoptic relation). They had to explain some of the “problems” that Mark posed.

And the first problem is that of John the Baptist. John was apparently a real guy. The historian Josephus discusses him roughly 20 years after Mark. There’s a lot of academic speculation about what Jesus’s relationship to John was. Was Jesus a follower? Was he high up in John’s movement? Or was he merely passing by the Jordan River when he decided to get baptized by the preacher? It is common for scholars to declare Jesus’s baptism by John as an actual historical event. And why do they think this? The answer is something called the “criterion of embarrassment.” Mark states that John preached baptism for the repentance of sin, leading one to wonder what sins Jesus committed. Sounds like blasphemy, eh? It makes no sense. What’s funny is that Josephus states that this is specifically NOT the reason why John preached baptism. Nevertheless, John baptizes Jesus and, as Mark writes, he came up out of the water and “a Spirit” “descended” “upon” “him” “like” “a” “dove” and said “thou art my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” (or something like that). A clear reading of this would lead one to believe that Jesus was “adopted” as God’s son and his powers only activated after John’s baptism. Keep in mind, there is no birth narrative in Mark. This is literally Jesus’s first appearance and I’m assuming that this was a big ass problem because “birth narratives” were subsequently added to later canonical gospels. Therefore, theoretically, you can read in Mark that Jesus was a normal living sinner before his encounter with John.

Hence the “embarrassment”. Mind you I don’t think that criterion of embarrassment is sufficient enough to establish the baptism as a historical fact. Through this reading, it’s possible that the author of Mark (or his sources) was using John’s movement as a way to legitimize his own nascent Jesus movement.

Nevertheless, I think it’s an odd story to include. As mentioned, Mark was written in Greek. Presumably this meant it was written for a mostly gentile audience abroad and not for the Aramaic-speaking followers of Judaism in Palestine. There’s a very low chance of a Greek speaker in Thessaloniki during the 1st century CE, for example, having ever heard of John the Baptist. If one wanted to extol Jesus’s authority as the son of god, I imagine it would behove one to excise the story altogether. In fact, if you recall, baptism plays no role in the rest of Mark. Jesus baptizes no one. In my view, the best possible reason to include this story is because John’s movement was interwoven, somehow, with Jesus’s ministry and it was too big of a fact to ignore. And Mark, without the development of higher Christology by later Proto-Orthadox churches, simply didn’t see this as an “embarrassment.” I think that this is a better argument for Jesus’s baptism by John as a historical fact.

Mer Rouge (Part 56-I’m just trying to get through this story)

The deputy walked a few yards from the road and stepped behind a tall southern pine. He barely managed to get his pecker out before a knife slid across his throat. Piss and blood sprayed every which way. DuPont let the body drop and he knelt down. The five remaining deputies were facing the opposite direction. The priest meanwhile, covered in camouflage from head to toe, drew his Walther with a silencer. He fired one shot and it barely grazed his target’s ear. “The hell was that?” the deputy cried out. With little time to consider his options, the priest popped out of the bushes and ripped off three shots at the officers. All of them landed and killed their targets. The priest was shocked. The remaining two scrambled to reach for their weapons before DuPont hurled his Bowie knife into the back of one. He screeched and collapsed dead to the ground and the last man hopped into the squad car and squealed away.

“Fuck!” DuPont shouted.

The priest lowered his Walther and closed his left eye. The vehicle was a hundred yards away. “Fire goddamnit!” urged the sheriff. The priest pulled the trigger and the bullet smashed through the rear window. A car ramp was inexplicably on the side of the road and the vehicle went up it and into the air and crashed upside down in the grass.

Then it exploded.

“That was close,” DuPont said.

“That was one hell of a shot!” Oren shouted to the priest as he climbed out of the brush.

“Where the hell did you get that Walther, padre?” asked Moses. “What the hell else are you hiding under that cassock?”

“It always helps to be prepared,” said the priest.

Oren glared at DuPont and spat. “One hell of a body count you’re stacking up, sheriff,” he said.

“There’s no time for justifications,” he barked. He pulled out his walkie talkie and radioed Chaz. “All clear,” he told him. He reholstered the radio and placed his hands on his hips. He glared at the car explosion. “It’s only a matter of minutes before they see the smoke.”

Then a rifle shot rang out and struck Moses on the shoulder.

TO BE CONTINUED…

MySpace

It was 2006.

The US was stuck in a military quagmire. Justin Timberlake was bringing sexy back. Cialis was popping off. And I was spending half my waking hours talking to chicks on MySpace.

Times were good.

But then came September.

The Crocodile Hunter unexpectedly gets got by a sting ray. And three weeks later Facebook opens its registration to anyone and everyone. Little did we know that it was the beginning of the end for the internet. It was the second worst September in human history.

To say that Facebook’s impact on the internet has been a catastrophe would be an understatement. And the sad thing is that it just didn’t have to be. No one in their right mind, then or now, could say that Mark Zuckerberg’s platform was the superior product. In hindsight, Myspace’s collapse is the great enigma of our time.

But 20 years later, MySpace is attempting a triumphant comeback. I tried to register today but I only ended up crashing my browser. So some things never change. And I hope they never do. Yet this poses a difficult question: can the wheel of time be turned back?

The age of social media might be dying. Should it be saved?

Under normal circumstances, my answer to both questions would be no. But we live in a strange nexus. The pushback against AI and social media algorithms has been far more successful than what I could have anticipated. It has made me wonder: can we turn back time on the internet? Is this where the people set their foot down and reclaim the worldwide web?

Could MySpace renaissance be the harbinger of this new era?

Probably not. But I’m still all in on MySpace. At the very least, we have to right the wrongs of the past and make the internet cool again.

Mer Rouge (Part 55)

The gravel road was about a hundred yards away. It’s entry point was guarded by a half dozen deputies. DuPont lowered the binoculars and radioed to Chaz. “Stand by,” he ordered. Hidden in the treeline, the priest threw on his camouflage smock. “Is that standard issue in the Orthodox Church?” Oren asked him.

The priest nodded. “Yes. Strangely,” he said.

DuPont met with the men huddled together in the wood. He pulled out a .44 Magnum and checked the cylinder. “There’s six guards,” he announced. “We’ll maybe have a minute to take them all out before the other deputies are alerted. Chaz is on standby with the dynamite.”

“If attacking them don’t alert the others, that .44 sure will,” the priest said.

“Will we have to kill em?” Hutch asked.

“Oh yeah,” said the sheriff. “BIG time.”

Oren shook his head. “Hutch and me never killed no one. So you guys go on ahead.”

Moses slapped him on the head. “Fool! And you think I have?!”

“Oh I know YOU have,” the priest interrupted.

Moses thought. “Ohh yeah. I’ve killed a lot of people actually.”

“Alright, the Priest and I will take the lead. The rest of you follow,” DuPont declared. “Remember, this is like Loc Ninh. Keep your eyes peeled and your weapons ready.”

“None of us were there, sheriff,” Oren said.

“Shit, I was,” the priest told him. “Got my testes shot clean off. Of course, that was last year though.”

“Enough,” DuPont barked. “We’ll ride the treeline then take cover in the grass,” he said. Then he unsheathed his Bowie knife and gave it a long hard look. “I’ll take out the first guard. Once first blood is shed, you must move quickly. No hesitation. If you hesitate, you’re dead.”

“Except for me and Moses,” the priest said. “But yeah, the rest of you would be fucked.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Stories No One Should Read

Sorry folks. Been sick all week. Sick of this SHIT that is. Sick of this summer heat!

That is until I got a phone call. I cleared my throat and picked up my old rotary phone. “Hello?” I answered. “May I ask the name of the asshole calling me?”

“Uhh, hello,” the voice said. “Is this a Mr…,” then the voice trailed off.

“Uh huh?” I asked.

“Beau Mantegna?”

“Montana,” I said. “You know. Like Al Pacino in that one movie.”

“Oh I see,” the man said. “Well I’m calling to tell you congratulations!”

“What the hell for?”

“Our editors have your stories 2051: A Space Monstrosity, The First Coming, and A Shot at the Title. First they notified the FBI about a possible serial killer on the loose. Then they lit the manuscripts on fire out of fear they might conjure Satan himself. Then, after they thought the nightmare was over, they found the manuscripts in pristine condition, as if they were never torched into a blackened dust and cast into a deep pit where no man could ever lay eyes upon them again. So, not wishing to unleash the power of Pazuzu — or whatever Child of Hell you might possess — we decided publish your works into a single collection.”

“Oh wow. Gee. I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“Well I guess we should extended our gratitude to you for not casting our souls into eternal damnation,” the man explained. “But we figured that we would do humanity a disservice by not providing a warning to the consumer. That’s why we’re titling the book Stories No One Should Read.”

“But do you think that will sell?”

“As a business, we hope so,” he said. “But as moral beings, we hope that we haven’t unleashed the Apocalypse onto the world. Satan awaits his kingdom. So may god, if there is one, have mercy on our souls.”

You know what that means right?

This is great news! The good folks at Dead Star Press have agreed to publish Stories No One Should Read. So be sure to check out their website to purchase books from other great authors and buy some merch while you’re at it! Support indie publishing!

Needless to say, the news has made my summer a whole lot better. Heh. It sure does put things into perspective don’t it? I guess this summer heat isn’t so bad compared to the raging inferno that is hell 😏