Plagues and Old Lace

A plague sweeps the globe. Too many people are either surprised or pretending to be. I hear excuses and conspiracies all day. People frantically reach for why they shouldn’t have to help other people. Why they shouldn’t have to be personally bothered in a global catastrophe. 

It’s hard to root for the home team when they surrender the fights before they’re over. It’s hard to root for the home team when we’re at an away game and you’re back here shooting the pep squad.

A retired deputy sheriff said, “I think you should all be put down like dogs in the street when you get home.”

I storm out of the Fourth of July party silent beyond much more than my shouts of “fuck you!” If I say another word beyond those two it will end in funerals—and I don’t want to dig in my closets for a suit.

I’m not better yet. I feel the past so much. I exist in it now. I always exist in a state of always. 

My time in the war didn’t fuck me as bad as getting fucked before and after the war, but it did break me. The excuses to avoid righteousness. To avoid doing the right thing. The war did exactly what it said it would. Before and after, they had the most difficulty fulfilling their promise. 

The REDACTED boy toys of the REDACTED that we flew from REDACTED to REDACTED. Hopefully, they didn’t make those poor boys sit on the cargo nets. Give those lads memory foam for Christ’s sake. Little dirty hand outstretched. Bad memory. It was all disappointing, but it was a horror I was briefed about to some degree.

At my home unit, I was a Human Trafficking Monitor. The test had a video game—it was pure insanity. Here I am simply forced to watch.

No, I’m not, I’m back. New Orleans, 2019.

I escape the coughing fit travel blocks and return to the new home. This is my ninth home and it also doesn’t feel like home. Waterford, Michigan. I’m not home yet.

I’m writing, penciling, inking, and lettering a comic book and it’s dog shit. The comic itself is probably good. What’s dogshit is that it’s not doing the thing. The thing I need it to. I see it getting close. I’m close to something but what?

I look up from my drawing screen to another screen in the cyberpunk space shuttle of a home office I work from now. 

I’ve switched to Dr Pepper Zero, Marijuana, and Mushrooms. The days of chewing pills from the bottoms of purses are over. The days of waking up surprised that I woke up are over. The video clips autoplay end-to-end, over and over. 

The one that catches my eye is new. An intel report dated today says Orangy Poarngy is surrendering Afghanistan on our behalf. The war is over and we fucking lost. We surrendered the longest war in American history as a political stunt between two bickering old fucks.

In frustration, I buy a pack of smokes and a rack of beers for the first time in nearly six years. Both taste like shit. I miss pills. Swallowing the night away and pretending I wasn’t killing myself. That was living. Choke me, Daddy; 100 milligrams at a time. 

It wasn’t living. It was pausing death. This death. My first honest attempt at non-lethal suicide. The killing of “Self” but not myself. Something I joke about carefully. Something I shouldn’t joke about at all. I feel my notion of Self dissolve in anger. I hear a door open but no one is there. I still see them. The shape of who they might be.

I’m sitting on the shitter in a house I forgot to mention I hate until too late. That’s not true, but it sure looks that way. Sometimes when I blackout I find that I have bought a thing. Sometimes this is something simple like a pen or a dress. Other times it’s a split-level house that can run a full tour from the front door. 

It’s cute but that’s another word for claustrophobic.  I’m blinking back and forth. Days disappear as this swampy shitbox falls apart. They’ve done this since well before the Plague. Days have always been slippery and now I just seem to notice more with such an open schedule.

Scrolling through a dating app, swiping this way and that, I say out loud in a voice that sounds mostly like my own, “I shouldn’t bother these ladies with my shit.”

I’m caught off guard and ask what I think is the next most immediate question, “What is my shit?”

When I was younger, I was meant to get ready for war and there was no being gay, trans, crippled, or communist. 

So here I am, neck deep in a comic book about war and gore and David Bowie songs and glitter and mermaids and … am I gay or something? 

Fuck. 

Sure ‘nuff. I’ve got an “I told ya so” or two coming from the women in my life.

The rules for me were clear. It is fine. People are people and people are allowed to be who they are. I cannot. I am restricted to the gender norms required by the Department of Defense to streamline things like paperwork and other paperwork. 

Oh yeah. We lost. We quit. We surrendered. Like three or four fucking times.

The Global War on Terror. Operation Enduring Freedom. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Operation Jumpstart. Operation Bladdy-Blah. Operation Ted Highjacked The Operation Naming Machine. Operation Oh Shit We’re Really Doing This. Etc. 

We quit.

I quit.

Fuck you.