Holy hell, the time has come…I leave this sandy shitsmelling dustbowl for my 2 week slice of life tonight or rather first thing in the morning. I shuold be home sooner then I expected because the East coast flights skip Germany and head strait for ATL. I have to wear my uniform the entire way home which is kinda upsetting but insures that I will be good and drunk on free drinks by the time I get home. I am sure that my time at home will be two or three times as stressful as it is here, I only hope that it is two or three times as enjoyable as well. I have all my stuff packed up real neat which seems ironic now that I find out that customs will dump it all out before I return. I guess they wanna make sure sure that I am not illegally exporting any of Afgansitan’s stuff, like scorpians or crappy ciggaretes, illegal money, or sand. As best I can tell that is all there is here beside maybe wierd rugs. Well now the anxious anticipation phase is gone and the looming stress over all the stuff I have to do when I get home is setting in. I have so many “errands” to do, and so much “crap” to deal with I think I will just alternate days to have fun and days to do “stuff”. Either way I am leaving on a jet plane, I love to travel, and for now…I am just content to know that tomorrow will be better then today, if I can keep that trend up for the next 2 weeks I will be very pleased.

Arcade

is

The inherit purpose or use of an object

What it does and why it is

Knifes are sharpened and hardened

So the arcade of a knife is to cut

Infinitely difficult it is to find

Arcade of man and his mind

Unlike the forged properties of a sword or knife

No man is formed the same nor is his life

As a piece of steel is before refined

Such is man when he is not defined

A knife formed in fire knows to cut

It has no desire it has no want

It’s bestowed at creation with purpose

Given an arcade

Enviable is the life of such knife

It cuts when swung and meets its fate

The knife does not love and knows no hate

Forged by a man from steel to blade

It’s given its purpose by whom its made

But how does man find his arcade?

This is something I wrote a while back, didn’t have much to add for this post so I thought I would just leave this up instead

     I really hate writing these posts without my camera. I have always thought the most important part of a good post is a good picture. Anyway, I have decided to finish writing a movie that I started about a year ago. I have spent a lot of time in the last few days thinking about new jokes and new special effect shots and everything. I would love to give everyone here the jist of it but if I tried to exlpain the plot in a few words you would think I was retarted. I am waiting on my brother to send me the old version of the script and then hopefully that will give me something to do for the week I have left here. I wish that I had more to write about but there isn’t a lot of new things here.

    Today I woke up…checked the time, and found out that I slept 15 hours. Can’t tell you how happy I was, just woke up and the day was already more then half over. That is why I need a project…that is a sad way to live. But the fact remains that I was more then happy to have 15 hours gone. So I walked down to the PX and bought some new shoes and a few other things…turns out the reason my foot hurt was because I was playing full court basketball in Walmart running shoes that fell apart last night. I forgot that I had gotten the cheapy shoes just to have everything I need for the list of things we needed to come here. Anyway after that I played basketball for about 5 hours, I got set up with a good team we won 7 games in a row. Which is like a new record because normally a team wins a few in a row and then gets tired and looses. Well I finnaly played like myself, instead of the average white boy that I HAD been playing like for the last few days. So that little redemption was the highlight of my day, feels good to get the respect, especially when you are the only white person on the court. So that was my day, I just went over to the chow hall and sorta “stole” a ton of ice cream, as soon as I finish here I am gonna limp back to my room, eat some ice cream, sleep 10 or 20 hours and hopefully when I wake I will have a script to work on.

   Alright well down, but never out…I found out a little scam to use the computers here in Control room at battalion. It is a complicated little scam that has saved my moral because the internet here works just a well at my old base. I figured out that most of my stress was coming from my 62 new messages and just generally feeling stranded without proper internet servive. So that is much better now. I am about to buy a 395$ Swiss Army watch for 43 dollars so that is pretty cool. I am trying to find ways to stay busy, I figured out that the more I work out the more I can sleep…so I just wake up, watch a movie, work out…take a nap. Then wake up, watch a movie, play basketball, then go to sleep. So far that looks like it is going to work out alright for a little while at least. Only problem being that I can never play basketball without getting hurt, no idea why that is. Anyways life goes on, still have the guitar and the tuner so now that I have the internet back maybe I will just learn a new song or something.

    Well, KAF sucks. I probably won’t make to many posts for the next week or two because I don’t want them to all be negative. My laptop is still broke leaving me with nothing to do here, THEN…THEN..THEN right after my last post, some ITT guy came in here to “fix” the computers and make them faster and now I can’t load hotmail, or ebay on them. That was one of the few things that I loved to do in my day was check my mail and see what was going on on ebay…DAMNIT! Did I mention that my laptop is still broken….

  Well I made it to KAF today, I figured that the best way to explain today is to give a sequence of events. (WARNING: this is going to sound a lot like whining…I had a bad day). First we arrive at the airfield where we are supposed to be met by our battery and taken to the rooms they prepared for us. Instead noone is there and noone knew we were coming so… no ride, no room. When we get settled into someone else’s room we walk about a mile (KAF is huge) down to the battalion area to check in, we have to walk back to the barracks to get a form from the supply guy, then back to the battalion and then back home again. Nothing like a 4 mile march in Afghanistan around noon to start the day, especially after carrying all my stuff almost half a mile to the find the battery area in the first place. Oh I almost forgot, the idiot unloading the stuff from the truck that thankfully carried my suff the last 30 meters to the room, threw my backpack off the truck…would have been no problem had my “backpack” not actually been my laptop bag. Of course the laptop is no longer operating. After refraining from punching this bozo and not getting leave because of it, I was told to just relax and wait to leave, stay out of trouble…so I take a nap and then head out to play basketball. Apparently I should have learned by the trend of the day and stayed asleep because I get hit in the jaw twice and can’t bite down now, amongst other things, I feel like I got jumped. Then just as I was about to head to do something else I was told that I would not be “relaxing”, and “staying out of trouble”…but rather would be waking up in the middle of the night to do prisoner guard detail. They make it so hard for me to want to be a recruiter, what could I tell someone with a strait face about how great the Army is. The laptop thing is what really breaks my heart though…that was my baby. Makes me wanna cry…oh well. “Momma said that there would be days like this”…(GOOD NEWS:) I am only 2 weeks from home and they have nothing left of mine to break..hahah

    Well tomorrow is the day I leave for KAF. Finnaly, it looks like it will be a month or more before I make it all the way back here for the last 9 months or so of the tour. I have discovered how addictive EBAY can be, I made over 300$ worth of bids today on Swiss Army watches but if they all go through without being overbid I will have like 2000$ dollars worth of watches. So I am not sure what to root for. The only problem with EBAY is that is feels the need to Email you everytime a seller sneezes, or you sneeze, or someone’s dog farts, or really anything that happens in between you seeing an item you want, and you buying it. I have like 23 new messages in my mail box. That is more then I had all last week. I secretly hope that I end up with all the watches for some reason…but really I just one one…look at them… sweet… and guaranteed for life.

   I also bid on a few things like this…5.00$ for an Abercrombie hoody…oh yeah, I think I will… I’ll take 2. (See what I mean…. addicting)

    Well the phones have been down for the last day or two so if you have been waiting on a call from me and not getting it that is why. But they are back up so I am gonna wake up in the middle of the night again and try and make the rounds to let everyone know I am on my way home. I just called everybody I know and no one answered the phone. I hate that. I actually called the lady from gateway just to hear a friendly voice. That was a joke… but that actually would make me feel better I think I will go call her now.

     Ahh yes, how sweet it is. I got most of the opening to Green Day “time of your life” down last night. The hardest part was cracking the tabulature…(its like guitar sheet music) The hard part is that he plays the beginning so fast that I didn’t even recongnize it at first in the tabulature. I practiced for a few hours until the skin on the tip of my finger was pushed up to the nail and I couldn’t push on the frets anymore and make the right sound. But I am learning at a pace that I am more then satisfied with for now. I am just waiting for the part where my fingertips harden up and get used to playing. They feel like I pressed the tips of them on a frying pan. Either way it is so sweet to hear one of my favorite songs ever coming from my guitar.

    In prepartaion for the trip we have started shopping around online for supplies…this is going to be like our own little mobile apartment. I got some Northface sleeping bags last night and picked out a tent that I like. We gotta get coolers, sweet (hiking) clothes, get Emmy a dog backpack so she can carry her own food, all the good stuff we need to camp in style. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. This is gonna be my new thing, anytime I get a few days, I am headed to the woods…the girl, the dog, the guitar, alchohol, steak, fire, all my favorite things.

   Oh yea, I figured out some media issues with the site, now I got it so that I can make my movies work, play whatever music I want, and a few other nifty things still to come. I got this song you are hearing down more and more. This guitar thing isn’t so bad, I am just waiting for my fingers to toughen up. This is the first thing that my left hand had ever been responsible for. N-E-way, I am off to sleep. I got a huge party to go to tommorrow night.(haah) Good times for all… goodnight.

(the new rating…turns out I am a sexy bitch…haha…who knew)