signon

The biggest issue remains that I'm looking at a black & white photo of her girlfriend. Next month, the Ex flies off to meet her for a couple weeks. Not a foot to my left is a stack of stuff relating directly to this trip. There's a very real possibility that the Ex's gf would not approve of us. I'm pretty sure that, between the slacker bf from 13 years back (whom she can't fuck for the foreseeable future, if ever) and the gf she's been missing for the better part of a year (and whom apparently has a sexy accent), I know which the Ex would choose if necessary. I'd have no room to complain, either. It's not even two weeks past 30, and I couldn't care less about something that's been fucking my head up for the last year.

I never expected to care so personally about the war as I do now. I've seen a b&w photo of a pretty butch lesbian, a woman I now love a little simply because I know she's kept the Ex sane and alive. I've also got a creepy feeling deep down, and I know why the Ex doesn't like talking about the woman she loves right now. I've seen a lot of Vietnam movies, and the Ex is the girl waiting back home. I remind myself that this isn't a movie. I do it often. I also do my best to avoid thinking that cliches exist for a reason. This woman had better come home okay. I'd much rather shake her hand and never be able to lay a finger on the Ex again, then have to fulfill my promise to drop everything at a moment's notice to be here purely as a friend. The thought of needing to do that terrifies me. I can't imagine how the Ex lives day-to-day, worried what the ringing phone or doorbell might mean.

I want this war over. Now. I want it so no longer for a vague idealism that I still hold to, but because I can barely tolerate being two degrees separated from it. I sent some RPG books over there to a father and a husband. There's a kid over there that pissed me off on a net-forum once. I worried about those guys when I thought about them, but I cannot fathom it... over a hundred thousand people over there. All of them have loved ones back here.

After 9/11, my first thought wasn't that those people should be avenged, or that those responsible should be brought to justice. It was that those were people who kissed their kids good-bye, and who had arguments with their SOs over breakfast, and were fantasizing about make-up sex on the way to work. It was that we owed it to those people to make the world a little better, and now, the shit being done in their name...

If any of those fucking bastards in DC still had a soul, they'd issue recall orders, then perform a time-honored tradition beginning with a white kimono and impromptu poetry. I've done some seriously fucked up shit in my life, but... I don't know. I never liked Bush. I always thought he was a fucking prick with a god complex and an unwillingness to hear anyone else's opinion. Now, I really do hate the man. I've never hated anyone like this before. As Elijah Snow once said, "I don't like hurting people. I want to hurt these people." One of the things I was happiest about leaving behind in my childhood was the willul cognitive dissonance that, whenever I hurt someone, I knew it was wrong and didn't care that it felt good. Bush... is someone I now view as evil. I could work him over horribly, modern horror movie-style, and not feel a pang of guilt, not even about not feeling guilty. I might even enjoy it. The things this man has done, he has no fucking right to ever smile again. It scares me thinking about all of the above, but one thing scares me worse.

The above is how I feel because I worry about a woman I've never met. All those people with friends and family in Iraq, those soldiers there or en route, and the Iraqi people themselves... all of those people have a greater right to their anger and fear than I do to mine.