Monday, January 31, 2005

effective? check...

Vulnerability. Worth the thought investment. So I do. Then i come across this...

A passage from A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius:

These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake's long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it's of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it frew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.

Reconciliation...

In attempt to rekindle my online flame...a pretty weak attempt, but one nonetheless. Its effectiveness will prevail.
An email just sent to Rose: (in response to an article from Democracy Now: Amy Goodman talking with Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu Ghraib.)

Well, hell, I made it to the end, alright. I genuinely thank you for putting a damper on my day. I forget sometimes, and just go about it. But I greatly appreciate it when I put my era into a contextual perspective.
On that note, I made dinner for a soldier the other night. He got abck in December from over a year in Iraq. Yup. narly. They come back different. and they are coming back by the thousands...and this is not going to have a huge, long term impact? And what a miniscule aspect of this chaos... Anyway, what's pretty scary now, is that they return from over there, contemplate what they could have done differently, and now they can expect to go back! No regrets, just actions! Because they ARE so protected by numbnuts. Not many consequences for crazy, and I'm talking CRAZY, actions. Just from what I've heard, we really don't know anything. Know nothing about what we're doing over there...just doing things.
So I talked to this lad for quite a while about his experiences. Pretty ethnocentric way of thinking operating over there, first of all. "they need help, get them out of the huts they live in, can't even read..." yada yada...So what! Shit, man... And this lad was just saying how weird it feels that he is an expert...that he goes around and makes orders, as like a civil engineer, a police man, a social consultant...and he doesn't know what he's doing! They spent a couple months building a prison for this town so that the town would tell them where the "bad guys" are located, he tells me, only for the next day to have the towns people blow it up! The people are scared! and lost. Shit, man.
So, this semester, I'm taking two global classes. One on peace and one on gender wars. Heavy. Think I'll either come out of it wanting to be forgotten about in Mexico for a while, or batteling it out in some international non-profit agency. Who knows...how can you predict? You can't.
Can't really plan, just prepare yourself for oportunities.
I love you, Ro, come see me.