Ferocity Mill

Just about two weeks to go in the Ultimate Iraq Escape countdown. As cliche as it sounds, I can’t believe it’s almost all over. Six weeks from now, I will be, for all intents and purposes, out of the Army. And then I will never ever again have to walk outside and see this:

YUM. And you wonder from whence comes the derisive snort I give people when they tell me smoking is bad for me.

or this …

The days aren’t exactly flying by, but I stay busy enough to keep from spending too much time glaring at the date/time block on my computer, begging it to change, goddammit, I want to go hoooome (what? I didn’t say I don’t spend any time doing that). But you know what? As long as the weather report isn’t “Beginning brown, with an increased probability of orange, plus explosions,” I think I’ll be okay.

There has been much rejoicing on my part since I was informed of my more-imminent-than-previously-expected return to the Land of the Shoeless Shower, but along with that? STRESS. Holy mother of Christopher Guest, the stress is eating my intestines (although not, sadly, my love handles) with the voracity of a thousand crotch rats.*

*Did I never tell you about the crotch rats? Slap me and my poor updating skills on the wrist for that, because the crotch rats are actual rats and/or mice which sneak into your tent and eat crucial portions of your underpants, rendering them quite unwearable. Not, thank god, while you are wearing them (ARGH, is what I would say to that), but still — gaping holes. In underpants. The crotch part. Very Ew.

Anyway, yeah. The stress encompasses me. My main freak-out, that of “Hmm, where am I going to LIVE when I get home? NEED HOUSE NOW” has been solved thanks to craigslist and its handy room-to-rent listings (I’m living in downtown Savannah for the summer, can we say close proximity to bars and beach?), but there are many other dominant worries racing recklessly around in my brain:

• Packing. Will I have time to finish it, as the days fly by and are consecutively filled with horrid public affairs work? And, once the packing is done, will I be able to mail everything I have to back to the States in time for me to retrieve it upon arrival? I have to have clothes, you know. Which reminds me,
• Where in the blue fuck am I going to ship my stuff? I have a friend or two back there, but seriously — along with the clothes, I have a footlocker which is stuffed entirely with BOOKS. That is not a nice thing for anybody to receive in the mail. It’s like sending someone their very own hernia. They might as well be lifting a damn
• CAR. Eventual Ex-Husband has my car. He is going to be bringing it to me in Georgia, but when? This has yet to be determined. The commute to Fort Stewpid from downtown Savannah is long and tortuous, and impossible by foot or bike unless I want to leave for work the day before I have to be there. Why do military bases have to always be built in the middle of goddamn nowhere? I’m blaming all of this on
• The Army. Just, you know, in general. Blargh.

So yeah, the stress is intense, and I Do Not Approve. It’s not like my natural state is hovering anywhere near Zen, but it would be nice if mental stability would throw me a frickin’ bone. Oh, and the quitting smoking thing? HA HA HA HA HA not so much. I have, however, solemnly sworn to cut back to four a day. That should at least help prevent any major breakdowns.

In case of emergency, change subject.

Not a crotch rat … yet. It just hasn’t found its way out of the latrine.

Sometimes, you have to cut across the runway, and just hope the engines are off.

An Iraqi plane lurks behind the motor pool. Get out of my damn country, is what it is saying.

The building I work in is officially deemed Safe From Zombies.

To all of you beautiful people who have followed my trail of bread crumbs over to this blog, by the way, I want to say … well, hi! I am pants-wettingly pleased to see you again, and hopefully I will fail to disappoint you this time, what with all the let’s-go-six-months-without-updating malarkey that was going on at the old place. That song “My Biz-nitch Is The Shiz-nit”? Is about YOU.

And yea, the heavens did open, and the gods of the Army did smile through the dust which coated everything — yea, even the eyelashes — and the perpetual Despair did then mostly vanish.

Because, you see, I am going home EARLY.

Due to the fact that I haven’t used any of my accrued leave (except for my October R&R) and to the pleasant moving-up of my Official Last Day In The Army WOOO!, my terminal leave is scheduled to begin May 24. That means that I have to be stateside several days prior in order to do reintegration training (where I will presumably be taught how to function as a reborn civilian who says “okay” instead of “Roger” and who does not have an entire brain portion devoted to the proper assembly/disassembly/general usage of an M16A2 semiautomatic rifle), turn in all the gear I’ve been issued over the past six years (including that which I am thoroughly unable to find, because when was the last time anyone needed an entrenching tool? 2003? Thank you), and wave a sad goodbye to my medical insurance.

I’ll be winging my way home in roughly three weeks. More to follow!

… except, one more thing — I seem to be attempting to quit smoking. How this happened, I am not entirely sure, but please wish me luck nonetheless, and maybe yell at me if you happen to see me dragging lustily on an American Spirit and mumbling something about it’s all natural so it’s good for me etc.

Oh, and the fucking Notify List has shat itself, so, um, any suggestions? For my technology skills, they do suck.

Well! I seem to have picked up a few stragglers! Isn’t this fun; we can all sit in a circle and massage each other’s temples and chug sip sangria while the pool boy oils our backs and compliments our muscular, yet feminine physique and –

I’m sorry. I just woke up, and there was some denial involved regarding my dream — namely, it being over.

So! Let’s jump back into reality for a moment.

For the first eleven months of this deployment, my job here in the asshole of the world was to produce and distribute our division’s daily newsletter. This was all kinds of soul-draining, and I went from being relatively cheerful most of the time to Fear My Glare of Death before much time had passed. One can only handle being a parrot of The Man for so long before one crosses over to the dead zone, you know? Oh, and also there was the delightful perk of the job known as Stop Loss, which is a tremendous morale-boosting tool, plucked directly out of the activities list which must be hanging up in the pit of hell. That meant that although my original active-duty contract was up in June, I got to stay and hang out for a while — fun! — or else go to jail. And although I’m sure jail would be a rollicking good time, there are some words I never want to use while describing past experiences, and “shank” is one of those. Also, “orange jumpsuit.”

After nearly a year, I was sent to an adjacent camp to temporarily replace a soldier in her job, which was similar to mine, except on a smaller scale. In other words, it was still propaganda-machine-related, but there was a much lower risk of running into the commanding general on a daily basis (who, apropos of nothing, is fond of calling some of us female soldiers by our first names to show he “cares” or something. He often asks me, in passing, how I’m doing, only to chuckle uncomfortably when I reply, “I’m wonderful, sir” in my best twins-from-The Shining voice.).

That job lasted three weeks, and now I’m back in the belly of the beast, preparing to go home next month.

Oh, did I say I was preparing to go home? Ha! Ha HA! No, my bad — that is what I thought I was going to be doing. Instead, I am preparing to go to Kuwait next month to be on a detail involving manual labor. A happy surprise to return to, eh? Now, instead of being stateside by mid- to late-May, I will be back sometime in early June.

The result of it all is that sometime in June, approximately one year after I thought I would be getting out of the Army, I will actually (hopefully, OH GOD PLEASE) be getting out of the Army. That would have been accompanied by a drumroll, but I try not to get too excited about these things anymore. Agony of defeat, and all that.

I realize that these few paragraphs can’t really make up for the fact that I’ve managed to go almost an entire fourteen months without relaying any substantial information (sorry, friends and family; the part of my brain devoted to frequent correspondence seems to have shat itself), but consider this to have been a Noble Try.

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Before I saunter off into the shadows, perhaps you would like to hear how I have recently managed to ‘Tard it Up, as they say. What the hell, I suppose you deserve it for sticking around so long.There I was: outside, in the dark. I had walked out of the dining facility in order to utilize the nifty high-stank port-a-potties, as is my wont post-hydration. It was An Emergency. I rushed past a number of waist-high concrete barriers, nestled in the gravel and ready to protect me from flying shrapnel or anything else that was unlikely to injure me in that particular location, and proceeded to the facilities, whereupon business was conducted. I exited the latrine, took advantage of the squeezy-sanitizer-dispensing apparatus, and took a left, because that was the direction in which I knew (I knew!) I would find the dining facility.

Let’s talk about the way I walk. It is a purposeful, aggressive walk. It is a walk that has somewhere to be. It is a walk which slows down only for the purpose of stopping. Have you pictured it? It is fierce. Keep this image in your mind — you won’t regret it.

I turned left. I walked. And then I suddenly remembered the presence of the waist-high concrete barriers — one in particular. Because I crashed. Into it. With a vengeance. And as I toppled forward, my rib area became acquainted — intimately — with the metal sticky-out thing (which I have been informed is actually called a rebar, which sounds like retard, as in, I looked like a) on the barrier. And there was pain.

People, I knocked the wind out of myself. And as I looked around, gasping, to make sure nobody had seen it happen, I realized that this would call for many pain pills. And there was much rejoicing.

On that note, enjoy your Friday, and tip one back for me and my rebar-edness.

From a recent e-mail to a friend:

“I have gotten NOTHING done today. Nothing. At all. Am like sloth on vicodin.”

This pretty much sums up the past year for me, writing-wise. The immense pleasure I get out of seeing my own words, written down, laid out for the world to see, has not made much headway in its ongoing battle against The Drive to Vegetate.

I mean, seriously — for fuck’s sake. I have been in Iraq (AGAIN) for more than a year now. The possibilities are endless, when it comes to blog fodder (which term, incidentally, makes me think of the internet as a giant, slobbering cow, chewing relentlessly on its anecdote-cud), yet for some reason, the stories I write in my head never make themselves into any concrete form. And I am too lethargic to do it for them.

So, I thought I’d start over. I’ve “maintained” a couple of different journals around town, and I think that subconsciously, they were beginning to intimidate me. They were all “UPDATE ME” and I was all “OKAYYY SHUT UP” and one of them was all “BUT DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THE DIRTY WORDS OUT FIRST” and the other was all “AND MAKE SURE YOU FORMAT ME CORRECTLY OR I WILL TAKE A DUMP ON YOUR CHEST” until I finally just decided it was all just too much and fuck it, I’m going to sleep.

But then I realized that I was composing all of these stories in my head, and they were being forgotten and I wanted to write them down, but so much work blarrrgh and now I am Resolved. I am going to give this one more try, with a new site and a new name and the same old insanity — because some things never change.

The new blog is named Ferocity Mill because it is a partial anagram of my name (Anagram Generator! It helps you waste time! Or, A Wheelie Tips My Touts!), and I thought it suited my overall tone: I manufacture strong emotion, which is then used to generate words for people to read and think Has she, perhaps, Lost It? And perhaps I have. But at least It is now visible, which makes me feel much, much better.

Stay tuned.