I am not in Afghanistan.
If I could do it all over again, I’d be a corpsman. I’d justified my direct participation in war as a machine gunner by pointing out that I was going to Afghanistan, which is the operation I believed in more. But hadn’t I always been staunchly against the very principle of war? Why was I [...]
Self-Consciousness
I’ve been teetering on the precipice of success through social good for a lifetime; I’m coming closer to the edge. I’m nervous about how the world will view me and whether or not I’m ready.
“Plans”
When I was six years old, I kept a notebook with all my plans for an imaginary country I called "Wacky World." It was basically just one one giant roller coaster, because my idea of what made a country great at that age was based on roller coasters. After I put the finishing touches on [...]
The Replacements
Christopher Cosgrove was my bumbling bunkmate in boot camp. I remember always having to help him make his bed, military style, because he could never get the hang of it. He would panic some nights, because his was inevitably the last bed unmade and he didn’t think he could take any more of the drill [...]
Irreconcilable Differences
Excerpts from my conversation with Katie the following day as a result of the Adriana incident. “I really got nervous yesterday. In public, like that. “I just harbor such resentment for people. I really wish I didn’t. “I feel like every generation which experiences war suffers from a certain shame. In Vietnam, that blame lay [...]
Society Kills
Last night, I fell into a bottle that just wouldn’t empty. At every social setting, I’m finding more reasons to drink and be isolated in New York. My friend and summer roommate, Kyle, and I are very different people. Understand that we all create a fantastical image of the people we meet. In time, such [...]
The Sacred and the Profane
A friend told me that we use the mundane to distract us from life’s deeper problems, and I found some comfort in the possibility. But it regularly seems to me as though the mundane is what everybody lives for and those other problems don’t really concern people. I felt so alone in the world until [...]
In medias res
Sometimes I fear I am too ordinary to expect that I am capable of greatness.
Self-reflection and the anxieties therein
Anybody who’s had more than a few drinks with me can gather it’s a Messiah complex which guides my unrelenting desire to be a father to the world. This predilection has been perpetually involved against personal happiness in a war for my own sense of fulfillment. As the years pass, the former is only becoming [...]
An Architecture of Exaltation or Defeat
In these early days of my life I am less human than weary embankment. There’s more than a decade of passion inside me, locked behind the pain-forged walls of reluctance and self-destruction. I am becoming the Great Flood; when the levee breaks, there forth will my newest form ravage, and with it all of my [...]
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