Anthologies of Awesome

“Why did you quit? Was it your girlfriend?”

No. My girlfriend has been very inspirational in many creative outlets, maybe not as much in writing, but she’s not the reason I stopped. I read through the archives and saw in them, at least at the supertextual level, a narrative of great conflict. The best writing plumbed it fairly well, the worst is immersed in it.

The conflict, simplified, is a real need I must have had to reconcile who I was, am, to a larger theme of conscious creation that was not allowing me to enter. That sort of melodramatic sounding sentence is exactly what I hate most in bloggers.

It sounds like a great over-supposing of the importance of who I am to myself and others. It’s that sort of narcissistic bullshit that I hated. But it is valid to the question I had to answer from several people, and sometimes the truth, like sex, is embarrassingly affected. That is the nature of both acts, obviously.

The conflict was with violence. Not anger, as anger is lauded, generally. Not with passion or zeal, as both of those are also lauded, therefore of no real consequence. It was the violence. Violence has defined the greatest moments of my life, but I hated violence.

I can think of the times my parents, both loving and beautiful people, beat me down. I can think of the times me and my brothers fought and bullied each other. Being the youngest, I had a distinct size disadvantage, but I had ruthlessness. I won a lot of those fights. The defining moments of a short and somewhat legendary attempt at marriage were explosive and angry and physical. And that physical violence was so detestable to me that the fights took on an aspect of spiritual battle, a somewhat vaporous concept.

There were times in my life I loved causing death and harm to other human beings and the creations of their hands. Then I spent years feeling guilt over my complicity. I spent years getting in fights in bars, at random public events, a couple of times in sanctioned arenas, and in a lot of alleys. And I hated that moment when the fight is over and all you can see and feel and know is the great pain and guilt and a misplaced helplessness.

I was struggling so hard for peace, when I was writing all sorts of polemics about the value of natural people and natural places. I surrounded myself, physically and intellectually, with peaceful, harmless people who wear natural fibers. I detested anything dishonest and forced upon nature, like guilty chastity or teflon coated cookware, which to me was a disavowal of a person’s humanity, and thus Nature, the final greatest deity.

Last summer, on a sort of relationship drama fueled whim, I joined the Army, what for I could go to Afghanistan with a deploying unit. So far in my life, the only thing I’m any good at is war. I can be a warhorse, and I understand the environment of the militant. I don’t understand scholastics, I am terrible at most jobs, but I get the military. I get that feeling.

And somewhere around the fifth time I wrote her off forever and gave her away to the whims of hers I could never control, I was knocking down anthropomorphic targets in a field with links of 7,62 flowing out of a M240B machine gun and I felt peace. There I felt at peace with myself, surrounded by warriors who never needed me to explain why I trained to destroy. I never had to explain how slogging through mud a foot deep and learning the finer points of killing someone with a bayonet was fulfilling.

And I have rectified* nature with violence. If I am being honest, I am acknowledging my desire to enforce my dominance onto others, and to back my opinions with lightning and blood and the absolute rush of anger powering movement. The honesty killed the conflict. And I slowly quit feeling any sort of need to write.

I still write, but it’s songs about shooting people and irresponsible drinking. Usually in the same song. I’m in an Electric Hillbilly band. I play guitar to people that want to hear, and we are achieving, slowly, more success than words would ever gain me. And so, I quit writing words.

But: I drive my girlfriend slightly insane with just the sorts of questions the former readers hear would love to read. I realize what a piece of crap this whole rambling, inconcise spill of words is, and I hate it. I hate that I am so far out of practice.

And all I can do is miss it. And I miss it. As surely as blood.

*Rectified can be taken many ways, in this case I mean it in more of the mathematical/engineering sense than the crass and assumptive literal definition.