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We’re actually a day premature, but since I have to work tomorrow and I’m feeling the need to say this TODAY, I’m exercising my prerogative and writing this a day early. My Alive Day is actually 26 April, and it’s been 15 years since I got blown up and my military career ended (kept on life support for roughly another year plus while the process unfolded). This one finds me in an especially bad place, one of the darker ones I’ve been in in quite some time. Normally I try to keep my personal stuff out of here, but this is one of those times where you find out the reality behind all that sterile plastic destruction. The reality is that war takes a toll on living, breathing people – and not just those whose life it ends.

There are also the family members and those who were there and saw the events that lead to the deaths. You find yourself wondering why him and not me? Why do I get to go home and not so and so? What makes that even worse is when you’re injured and sent back Stateside and you see the names and faces of others pile up in the casualty reports while you sit all safe back in the world. All because you were “too broken for us to fix”; I tried unsuccessfully to keep my brokenness hidden (although I managed to for a week).

Now I see and hear things that trouble me beyond belief. All this fighting and squabbling about race and ridiculous bullshit, with it being pushed hard by politicians and people who call themselves journalists but in reality are instigators more than anything else. Back at the beginning of my career we were all told we were all worthless and useless, and that we were all going to suffer for it. We did, every last one of us. Something about shared adversity taught us that the color of someone’s skin or what version of God they worshipped didn’t amount to dried crap; we learned to depend and rely on each other because we had to. It was the same way in combat, yet now I have some asswipe in congress telling me I’m a racist because I don’t care what someone’s race is? Who the F are they to tell me something like that? I spent the majority of my adult life in uniform to have idiots spit on the values I had instilled in me and the brotherhood others died as part of because it somehow advances their perverse idea of a rational world.

These are the things that make me question strongly why it wasn’t better that I shouldn’t have been the one who went away, because the world right now is a pretty shitty place thanks to some of the people in it. That being said, I do have things that make things in MY world better – my dogs (one of the best things God ever created), my family (SWMBO is a saint especially when I hit a rough patch) and my Fortress of Solitude (aka my workshop). I choose to exist in the world around me only because I must, and stay in mine as much as I can because it is preferable to what I see. Remember this – The more people I meet, the more I love my dog!

Don’t like what you just read? Tough. My blog, my thoughts. End of rant.