I Scream Until You Scream

I’m in a bar and everyone seems to know me. Not everyone, but enough people that it’s ok to say it like that. The bartender hands me a beer over the top of someone waiting and shouts, “Tab’s open.” I do the devil horn sign because a thumbs-up feels to Top Gunny. I find a place to listen to the music and burn through a pack. 

I’m mean to my parents now. Not now, they’re not here. At this time in my life I am mad at them. I’m dying and they keep throwing plastic trinkets at me and tips for how to die without bothering people. 

If we were to look at a calendar and mark down my good days and bad days as a kid, there would be far more good days. Something was wrong with me though because I didn’t feel loved and although that bothered me, I also felt it was my responsibility. 

It wasn’t my responsibility to be unlovable but, disposable. Through my destruction, I might find purpose and love. I was just there to clear the way for better kids to come. Less fussy and complicated ones.

I know they did and do love me. I know shit like that hurts them deeply. I know it’s not true—later, I learn. Now I wonder why everyone is so ok with me dying right in front of them. I later learned it’s because the “Me Generation” that gets called the Boomers are one of the first and largest cohorts of nearly feral humans. The true Lords of the Flies.

It’s fucking fascinating. You people are like wild animals raised in a fast food playground. I am an animal. While you herd in the pasture, I hunt wolves.

This kid with the guitar over here; he’s singing about something real whiney and you can see that he thinks he’s feeling something. I’ll bet you he’s on his way, but you can’t feel in here—not from within the palace walls. What does a king care how the mice are feeling? What do the riders see outside the gates of the Shakya palace?

None of my skills translate to what you people call “the real world.” Most of you are too inept to function in a professional setting. Most of you would die in my shoes. 

One skill set works well and I hate it. It makes sense, seeing as most of these people haven’t been conditioned to use their minds for something other than comparing prices and developing opinions on the geopolitical affairs of fictional places. 

Sergeants are people who can talk a pack of teenagers into conquering another land.  I won’t have you conquered. My hemlock tattoo says I will if I must. I can be the Pied Piper of Hamlin if that is needed.

Fight. Let’s peel that word down. Fight. Sure, it can mean fists. We know it can also mean words and weapons, and money and time. To fight is to endure great harm for a great purpose. 

What do you fight for? What do you endure for your great purpose? Are you enduring it for someone else’s great purpose? Is your fight your own?

War. War is not a fucking joke. War is not fun, cool, neat, boss, tits, or any other descriptor for a good time. Some veterans’ closest friends are people they met in the war. It’s not because of the volleyball. It’s because a rocket ripped the sky in half and as they stared their own death in the eye they held each other through the blast—each protecting the other. Each loses others in the blast, each losing themselves in the war. 

They’re close because their spirits were spot-welded by the fire of enemy weapons and pure violent hate. It’s cool that they’re buddies, but damn. War is no place to make friends. At least, don’t start one just for the yearbook pictures.

War is the last excuse humanity has given itself to be an animal. In Ukraine, the Russian forces use rape as a military tactic. Among some of the crazier tactics, they’ve rolled out. The Z Army has units that make a habit of having male soldiers rape, torture, and kill every man, woman, and child they see; including their own deserters. In whichever order they see fit.

That’s war.

In Gaza, there is no safe square of land to be seen. Heaps of bodies. Tens of thousands dying. One American quoted their support for Israel in this matter because “The Jews are better.”

That is war. You will be killed, left to rot under a black sky of smoke. If you’re lucky you’re covered with rubble or trash, or ideally buried alive. Photographers in cool vests will circle around the tangled knots of corpse limbs that make up your mass grave. 

In some foreign land, a passerby will see your grotesque pallid face on a newsreel and say, “Thank God.”

That is war, and God has no part in it.