I Work With Knives

I’m a chef now. This isn’t the cockiness of some dude by a grill; I’ve got the tall  hat and everything. 

I used to be in the Air Force. May still be at this point. What year is it? Who’s the President? Does it matter yet?

“No Airman Left Behind” turns out to be a joke. Calcium begins to leech from my bones and my muscles tighten up like ship’s ropes. I’m put on profile and told I can’t work. I can. I can still outperform many of them. I should be in there training. The Unit doesn’t want me to. 

Some individuals in there may, but the Leviathan that is an Air Force Squadron has it’s own dreams. I am totemicly stricken from the floor. Symbolically put to pasture as a warning to all others. I’m made to sit in a fish bowl to be stared at. I am decorated in drugs and canes and left without the sense or language to advocate for myself.

After a year and a half of getting fucked with in comes the final fuck-yous. I find out my last day in the Air Force on my last day in the Air Force; my honorable discharge is printed in Comic Sans. It really was all a joke. Air Power. Space Power. AEF.

Fuck the Air Force. A pack of pretentious people with the role of sticking children to the sidewalk with their own bones as glue—and the heat of all the suns we can condense into a pinhead—but none of the stomach to say it, to see it, to live with it. To look me in the fucking eye.  

Vicodin is bitter when you chew it. I wonder if they do that thinking it will prevent me chewing it? The sweet and sour filth smell of an unemptied kitchen trash can. The needless clang from skillless cooks bumbling around the fires like it’s a TV show. 

Do they even have TV anymore? People out here love to brag to me about not having TV anymore. They also bore the shit out of me with their passionate tales of shows about zombies and dragons. 

Ask them about the wars. Watch their dopey face contort when they ask “Wars? I thought there was just the one.” 

This one here, across from me, she’s nice enough and well-meaning enough which is nice but ultimately meaningless. She likes to shit on the military for the evil we did. She may love it—find it as some sort of exercise in self-elevation from this menial half-slave horseshit she’s otherwise up to. The wars are fought by the military but the wars are all picked by the civilians. The goals of the war. The timeline of the war. That shit is a back-here problem that just gets farmed out over there. 

I get why Rome fell now. People are too lazy for big ideas. There was probably some other shit involved in that too.

I’m jealous of her tattoos. Regs aside, I don’t know that I’ll ever have that kind of money lying around. After drugs and smokes and booze—plus I have to buy a new set of those fucking medals—it’s wild to be abused by someone who in real-time is putting no thought or effort into it. If she calls me a war criminal one more again for being a cook I may have to turn into a real criminal here in a second. 

My knee-jerk reaction is to flinch when calling Americans lazy, or anyone for that matter. So many people literally slave away and don’t understand how I can call them lazy. They are right; it’s a problem of nuance in language. It’s not that they won’t do anything, it’s that they won’t do the right thing.

So many people out here have such a drive to not do the right thing that they will put in exponential effort to do the wrong thing. Need to feed the poor? Spend millions on putting them in jail at a 100:1 rate of what it might cost to feed them, clothe them, or house them.

We blow money on the wrong shit and then get so invested in that wrong shit that someone makes it a point of personal pride to keep doing the wrong thing. It’s tradition. It’s nearly all traditions. They spend too much money and don’t want all their weird hats and food to go to waste.

I go out back for a smoke but I’m driving again. I may have quit my job. It’s dark, so maybe I just got out. The radio is on a mission to make me flip this bitch. In another three years, I’ll be out of the Air Force. I don’t know that now. Right now I assume I’m still stuck with this shit for life. Smile for the camera. Blood blood blood. Etc. 

I’m fine with what we do, right now, as this thing. For any number of reasons though, a great many of my comrades cannot fathom or comprehend what our missions are. I’ve sat in rooms and heard us describe how we were going to kill a great many people without ever using the words “kill” or “people.”

The Marines change fortunes on the battlefield. They are injected into moments no one else could suffer or endure on the off-hand chance that they can defy God and turn the tide of war. They do it all the time. That’s why God loves Marines. It’s a respect thing. 

The Army changes politics. They move themselves around the globe and sit on the chest of the world like the big brother they worship. God is mostly fine with soldiers. 

The Navy changes the day. Sliding the globe beneath their feet, the US Navy injects sovereign US soil and US air and firepower across the seven seas. Poseidon loves the Navy.

The Air Force changes maps. It doesn’t change them like the Army, with lines and dashes. The Air Force turns hills into saddles and cities into wastelands. Sure, there’s a great number of ground pounders in the Air Force, but the bulk of the Air Force’s method is to save money by spending money. Kill two flocks with one stone. 

It was our Enola Gay that lit up Japan. It was our F-117 and B-2 and B-1B that lit up the Iraqi night—and every night thereafter. The Air Force loves the Air Force.

I’ve thought about killing everyone in town, but only because I have been instructed in some of the methodologies used in killing everyone in any town. I’m not going to hurt you; I will think about it a lot.

There was a strange period of nearly two decades where cops would complain to me about how dumb their job was in comparison. How they felt emasculated around veterans and were terrified of us. Ask a veteran and they’ll have at least two stories of someone bending their ear for way too long about what “they were gonna do.” Admitting that they failed military entry and as a runner-up to their childish dream were given a gun and immunity to exercise their fears on the public.

I had no idea they thought they were bragging. I had no idea when they told me about their juvenile tactics that even get cooks to cringe that they were bragging. There were points of pride for them.

Sure, it wasn’t all of them. Just the ones we relied on and the weaklings who stand by and watch. All of them whispering too close to my ear with the stench of whatever booze they throttled. All of them doped out of their minds on either confiscated drugs or a list of prescriptions that would dazzle a hospice nurse.

This is the place I came back to. I come back to. I stand here with a knife in my hand. I am breaking larger animals into smaller parts. I am surrounded by fire and steam and boiling oil. I could dunk my head in the fryer and check out of this bitch in half a heartbeat – ideally. No.

Warriors. Veterans. That is not you, that urge. You are a thing programed to be among other things. You feel not just the pain in your own body but you can sense the pain in those you love. Then you come home.

This darkness in you is not yours—nor is it in you. You feel their despair. You sense their next move. You feel the lemming call—followed or chased. If you are surrounded by darkness it is because you are a thing of light. 

When they sent us off to the war on terror, terror snuck around back. Not the bombs. Not even half the madness. What made it in was terror pure and clean. Uncut and completely corruptible. Any fear became the justification for destruction. Soon enough the phrase “better safe than sorry” was used to pack graveyards like stadiums and fill the seas with tears.

I love cooking because it lets me feed people. I hate the restaurant business because it gets in the way of me feeding people.

I’m offered $13 to be an executive sous and quit the business altogether.