A Rant

I should probably first state that I'm taking these four days before I go to meet my new husband's family for the first time for Christmas, of which I am deathly afraid and extremely nervous, to spend with my grandparents. Around Thanksgiving, we kids (my mom, my gay uncle, and I) found out that my grandmother had bought bus tickets for my other uncle, who hasn't been home for over a decade because she wouldn't let him come home as long as he was an addict, and his girlfriend to come visit after my grandmother, crying, told that uncle that she thought it would be my grandfather's last Christmas and he did say that he'd like to see my grandpa. Now, first of all, no doctors have said anything to that effect. Second of all, it could be my last Christmas. Hell, last Christmas could be my last Christmas if I walk out the door and get hit by a car standing in the driveway. Third of all, she did this without making sure that this uncle could get off work. Fourth of all, she did this without thinking to ask us kids how any of us thought about him coming home for Christmas, kinda last minute, without any amends or anything being made for previous wrongs. (This doesn't really apply to me, as I was too young, but I think does really apply to my other uncle.) So, it could be argued that being here could be awkward. And, as I'm here before my mom and other uncle can come for the holiday, I'm on my own to deal with all this. Ok, ok, fine, fine, fine. Awkward, but I can deal.

About a half hour ago, Gram gets up, just like she did all summer when I was here, because she's slept enough in a regular bed and now must sleep in her chair while "The Closer" plays in the background. "You're STILL up?!?" "Yes, Gram." She smokes a cigarette, then comes up behind me while I"m at the computer. "Tomorrow, will you either stay home with Grandpa while I go to Wal-mart or go for me?" "Well, I was going to go pick up some stuff at Target anyway, but I could just as well go to Walmart. Sure.--------- But Gram, if you want to just get out of the house, it's not like Dave and Christine aren't here. They can't really go anywhere." [They don't have driver's licenses or a car here.] "But they're GUESTS here." Thus ends the conversation.

And I sit here and think. And think. And then I start to get mad. My mom and I worked our asses off all summer trying to care for my (other) uncle and my grandparents. Once he was well enough, my other uncle came out as often as he could to help out with things as well. My mom still works her ass off, coming out here almost every other weekend, to do all the shopping for my grandmother on Saturday, after working a full work week, taking care of the house, making sure that I'm not about to kill myself, and driving the four hours out here (and then back the next day). It's not that I mind doing these errands and it's not that I wasn't going out anyway. It's that this uncle gets a pass on the responsibility that the rest of us have had for half this year, longer if you count the last time my grandfather got sick and was in the hospital for several months after the flu kicked his ass or if you count my grandma's knee replacement surgery or her back surgery, that we were all here for and took care of them for. But that is what family does. That's why you have kids!!!! To take care of you when you are too old to take care of yourself. People start their life with their parents changing their diapers and their parents end their life with them changing their diapers. It's the circle of fucking life. And, the more kids you have, the more that responsibility can be spread out. So just because he's been a deadbeat addict for most of his life and he has finally been allowed to come home for Christmas, he should not be devoid of the same responsibility that the rest of us have shouldered while he was away living/wasting his life. Hell, all the more reason why he SHOULD be helping to do these fucking things. Guest? Guest?!? No, fuck that. He's family and he should be acting like it. And she should be making him. She makes the rest of us.

Oh, and she won't let the rest of us drink because of him. To paraphrase my mother and my other uncle, "How the fuck does she expect us to get through 3-4 days there if we can't fucking drink? That's bullshit!"

Oh, yeah, and, just for good measure, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

Just for you Sir

Remeber when we were trying to find this song to put on a CD for me? Half of those fucking CDs didn't even come out because your Dad's CD burner was going out. I think the only one that actually came out right was the Slow Dance CD, which is still one of my favorite mix disks ever. But I was on a youtube streak and found this one so I thought I'd share it with you. You know, I think hearing this song way back then made me realize we'd never make it? Because I'd always want to be the one calling you to come to Boston or Denver or LA and you'd never want to leave home. Kinda funny to look at where we are now, huh?

Please Come To Boston- Dave Loggins
Please come to Boston for the springtime
I'm staying here with some friends
And they've got lots of room
You can sell your paintings on the sidewalk
By a caf矷here I hope to be working soon
Please come to Boston
She said no, boy you come home to me

She said hey ramblin' boy, why don't you settle down
Boston ain't your kinda town
There ain't no gold and there ain't nobody like me
I'm the number one fan of the man from Tennessee

Please come to Denver to see the snowfall
We'll move up into the mountains so far that we can't be found
Throw I love you echoes down the canyon
And then lie awake at night til they come back around
Please come to Denver
She said no, boy you come home to me

She said hey ramblin' boy, why don't you settle down
Denver ain't your kinda town
There ain't no gold and there ain't nobody like me
I'm the number one fan of the man from Tennessee

Now this drifter's world goes 'round and 'round
And I doubt if it's ever gonna stop
And of all the dreams I've lost and found
And all that I ain't got
I need someone to cling to
Somebody I can sing to

Please come to L.A. to live forever
A California life alone is just too hard to LIVE
WE'LL live in a house that looks out over the ocean
There's some stars that fell from the sky livin up on a hill
Please come to L.A.
She said no, boy you come home to me

She said hey ramblin' boy, why don't you settle down
L.A. ain't your kinda town
There ain't no gold and there ain't nobody like me
I'm the number one fan of the man from Tennessee

I'm the number one fan of the man from Tennessee

Original http://youtube.com/watch?v=1PX5t9VJweQ
Kenny Chesney (country artist) http://youtube.com/watch?v=JgP1t_Ydeag&feature=related

There Is No Arizona

I was reminded of this song when someone else used the title as the title of one of their blog posts and it really made me think of Mon Parrain. Earlier in the week, I was going through some old text messages that I hadn't deleted from my phone and i came upon his last texts to me. They were on November 9th. Ironically, that was also the one month anniversary of my marriage. I suppose I was never really promised anything, persay, but I always felt like he offered the promise that I could have a new and better life if I just hung around long enough to really learn from him. And everytime I think about his complete disappearance from my life, so sudden and without any good-bye, I'm reminded of two very contradictory things that he often said to me. One was that he didn't just up and leave his friends, but the other one was that everyone should feel like they are free to just walk away from a person or a situation if it was either in that person's best interest or their own best interests, without anything more being done or said. I have to assume that he did the latter.
What's really poignant to me in this song is how she finally responds to the people around her, telling them what she has finally figured out. I have the same experience. There are things that my husband knew I wanted to do with Mon Parrain, things that were especially special to Mon Parrain and I. When I try casually to make plans to do those things with my husband, my husband always brings up "But what about Mon Parrain?", as if he's defending Mon Parrain, or vicariously offended for Mon Parrain that I would bring up doing this thing with him instead. And I finally just had to tell my husband that he's not coming back, that there is no Arizona. I'm not really sure if it was harder for me to have to put that into words for the first time or harder for my husband to realize what that meant to me, how that broke my heart. But, here's the song and the youtube. It's a good song, even though it's going to make me cry for the second time tonight.

There Is No Arizona- Jamie O'Neal
http://youtube.com/watch?v=22tktN87ASk
He promised her a new and better life, out in Arizona
Underneath the blue never ending sky, swore that he was gonna
Get things in order, he'd send for her
When he left her behind, it never crossed her mind

There is no Arizona
No Painted Desert, no Sedona
If there was a Grand Canyon
She could fill it up with the lies he's told her
But they don't exist, those dreams he sold her
She'll wake up and find
There is no Arizona

She got a postcard with no return address, postmarked Tombstone
It said "I don't know where I'm goin' next but when I do
I'll let you know"May, June, July, she wonders why
She's still waiting, she'll keep waiting 'cause

There is no Arizona
No Painted Desert, no Sedona
If there was a Grand Canyon
She could fill it up with the lies he's told her
But they don't exist, those dreams he sold her
She'll wake up and find
There is no Arizona

Each day the sun sets into the west
Her heart sinks lower in her chest and
Friends keep asking when she's going
Finally she tells them don't you know

There is no Arizona
No Painted Desert, no Sedona
If there was a Grand Canyon
She could fill it up with the lies he's told her
But they don't exist, those dreams he sold her
She'll wake up and find
There is no Arizona

He promised her a new and better life, out in Arizona

Fucking John Mayer!

So I’m sitting here, flipping through channels on this Saturday night, just managing to come out of the funk that’s kept me in bed for the past three days, and I stumble upon his latest Austin City Limits performance, which is mostly just stuff from his latest album Continuum. Now, I love John Mayer but this probably wasn’t be best night to get me all introspective and shit. I probably should have picked out a big-budget movie from the box of cloned DVDs that I haven’t watched yet and seen some shit blown up. But as soon as I hit on him singing “Belief”, I knew that I had to write a blog post. For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking that I should write something for my blogs but I couldn’t really come up with anything ‘appropriate’ to write. I’m sure regular readers of my blog are wondering what I might write that I would consider inappropriate, but it isn’t really about me. A great deal of it is about other people, people that I don’t want to hurt or endanger by writing my truths and my feelings.

But listening to him sing “Belief” brought up something that I probably should write about, something that I might be in a unique position to write about, though I don’t claim that my position is right or wrong-it’s simply mine.

While I’ve always had a passing interest in politics and a passing idea of what was going on in this country and a slight idea about things in the rest of the world, I started paying more attention to the bigger picture (i.e. things other than just those issues that directly effected me and mine) after 9/11, though mostly because of Sir’s interest in those things. It brought me another thing with which I could discuss with Sir in a semi-intellectual manner. Fortunately, this interest in politics didn’t go away when Sir and I broke up. Actually, it allowed me to more freely express and pursue my political ideas, which were and are much more liberal than Sir’s are.

But it is in this context that I assessed and constantly reassessed my beliefs and feelings about the current Iraq War. But no matter how much information I have read, I always feel like I’m coming up short. I feel like I still don’t have enough information to make an informed decision. In my mind, I would think that any leader and/or politician without an agenda might feel the same, though they do probably have some information not available to the general public. From the beginning, I really didn’t know if I felt the United States (and our Coalition of the Willing) should start a war in Iraq. And as we have not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and fighting continues in Iraq, which gets closer and closer to civil war, it becomes harder and harder to support this particular war. And, while it has never been one of my favorite songs on the Continuum album, I think that “Belief” does bring out that sort of ambivalence about the war, about anything that is supported by ‘belief’ because everyone believes in something and no one is just going to change their mind because someone else yells louder. In the song, belief is not necessarily good or bad: “Belief is a beautiful armor/ But makes for the heaviest sword.”
But what really gets to me, especially now, comes at the end of the song. “We're never gonna win the world/ We're never gonna stop the war/ We're never gonna beat this/ If belief is what we're fighting for//What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand?/ Belief can/ Belief can/ What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand?/ Belief can/ Belief can.” On the one hand, I recognize that ‘the war’, especially what radio commentator Michael Savage would call the War on Islamofascism, or hell, any fight that is based on beliefs, will never truly be won. But I also don’t think that our politicians keep us involved in two wars overseas that aren’t going very well because they believe it is the right thing to do or because they believe that they are making the world a better place. Personally I believe that the only things they consider are their political futures, their bank accounts and the bank accounts of their friends.

And, despite feeling this for quite awhile, despite knowing that this war was/is killing children, not only Iraqi and Afgani children in the war zones, but also our children, the 18 year old boy- and girl-soldiers that we are sending to do our dirty work, despite knowing that pretty much everyday at least one U.S. mother loses a child to this war, I never really cared. I have to admit that I was just as ambivalent to it as everyone else. The first song on and the first single from Mayer’s Continuum is “Waiting for the World to Change”. In it, he discusses how people of his generation are viewed as uninvolved but he tries to give reasons for this, saying that people of his generation, and I think people of my generation as well, feel disempowered. Even my mom identifies with the lines “And when you trust your television/ What you get is what you got/ Cause when they own the information, oh/ They can bend it all they want.”

So, why do I care now? Why do I feel like I should write about my ambivalence now? Because now I’m a soldier’s wife. I’m the wife of a soldier who is leaving for Iraq in less than a month. That child buried in the sand would be my husband, who’s never really grown up, who has a foot-locker full of Star Wars figures. That folded flag would be in my hands. The night I met him, he told me that he would be shipping out in January, so I knew from the start of our relationship. But it wasn’t until a few nights after we were married that I ever knew how he felt about the war he was going to fight or the man who was ordering him to fight it. As a pinko, liberal, queer, feminist, etc, etc, I never got into a discussion with this man who I was having amazing sex with about his political beliefs, mostly because I was afraid of finding out that he was a hardcore neoconservative. And I didn’t want him to think that I didn’t support him or what he was going to do, because I do support him. I have a great deal of respect for him, for any and all men and women who choose to fight for our country, especially because I know it is something that I could not do, for many reasons. Imagine my surprise when my new husband revealed that he did not believe in this war and that he doesn’t like his Commander-in-Chief, but that he asked for this deployment because his military brothers and sisters were out there fighting and he should be as well. And, for as hard as it is sometimes, I will do everything and anything in my power to support him as he is fighting.

But that doesn’t mean that I think we should just continue to fight, ad infinitum, in Iraq, especially as it seems that nothing is getting better, but I don’t have any answers. Should we “cut-and-run”? Should we put even more of our soldiers there to stabilize the region? I don’t have these answers. I’m just the wife of a soldier who is proud of how well-trained he is but would be much happier if he never had to use that training.

[Oh, and why I titled this “Fucking John Mayer” is because I started this right after he sang one of those songs that I can never hear without crying- “Stop This Train”. I have a previous post with this song in it, but no matter what I’m going through, it speaks to something in my life at that point. I could never sing this song in concert. Hell, he didn’t seem like he could make it through the song without a few tears. I suppose for me, I have a great deal of reasons why I would like to “stop this train” and keep things like they are. And so I started crying. Then, he followed it up with the other song on Continuum which makes me cry a good deal of the time, “Gravity”. So, fucking John Mayer: making me cry! Oh, but I love him so!]