THE MISSION IS ON

THAT’S WHY THEY PLAY THE GAME







I know weddings are supposed to be stressful to the nuptial couple but why is this event so stressful for me? Even solving for my personal feelings toward my sister and how inconvenient it is going to be for me financially (can you say HARDSHIPS! Ooh!!), the even still is a spiral of cracks across the windshield of my life.






One of the things I have been straining hard not to allow myself to say is that ‘I hope this… (Or that since it is related)’ to anything. Hope is a last refuge, and I think if I start ‘hoping’ for things that I should have made sure was planned for, then it is a slippery before I would begin to fall prey to thoughts…






I will be waking up and walking down the block at 0430 hours Friday morning so that I can catch the bus to the Dan Ryan Terminal in Chicago. One of the reasons that I shaped this as ‘duty’ instead of a joyful trip’, is because of the uncertainties that will result as a result of traveling to ‘walk the walk’. What I will end up doing is exactly as I had initially planned, which is to go and make the rehearsal, the wedding and then back on the bus.






Nebraska had loose strings that caught her up. That is a ‘hit’, but I will manage. My sister will be picking me up and I will be running around with the bride-to-be for the rest of the day. Don’t know who is going to take me from the hotel to the church, but after that is confirm, I will put my head down and grind away.ed





If you want to know, I sort of prefer things shaking out the way that they are. All I wanted to do was go perform in the ritual, anyway. I may take some pictures and I may not, we will see.






Please, oh please, no one remind me how much better it will be that I go, because it won’t feel that way, though objectively, it clearly is. But to hope this is a benchmark for the renewing of a sibling relationship would be to hex me. I don't want to push this too far, you know?  I am not hoping for some great reconciliation, not with the 'et tu Brute?' me and this one have between us.





IT IS NOT AN ‘AVATAR’






The guy in my Face Book status box to the right of the text, ‘he’ (make NO freaking mistake, there is nothing asexual about HIM) is a CHARACTER. More on him later, but I wanted to make it understood that there is nothing related to ‘Manga’ or any of the other simulation role playing symbols that have exploded in media over the last decade or so. He looks the way that he does for a reason, and that reason is why he is there.






DO NOT TAUNT ‘HAPPY FUN BALL’






In the movie, ‘Saving Private Ryan’, before Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) goes off on his newest mission having survived the landing at Normandy, he asks an admin soldier if he spoke French. Once he affirms that, he orders the soldier to accompany him and his other soldiers in his small squad to go look for the titular character of the movie. The unwilling draftee was quite craven and cowardly. Since he did the same job as I did, with my smattering of high school French, I could not stand the guy, because he was me at the same time, he was NOT me. I would not have been such a pussy in combat. I know this as a fact, because I WAS NOT a pussy in combat. End of freakin’ story.






Am I a nice guy? I don’t know and there is a reason for this. Getting picked on for a variety of reasons, being ‘pleasant’ was a calculation. I reasoned that if I came to you with an open palm, you would eventually reveal more about yourself than if I eyed you warily. In short, I gather more information about you being nice than I would if I was suspicious and frightened. That said it is unlikely that I intend to do or say anything offensive to you, especially if you are in that amoeba-like structure that is my circle of confidants.






It has been a while since I have spoke on the slang of false confidence, those words or phrases that are used to explain larger concepts that I think people cannot process in their own minds. “It is what it is”, “And I am just being real”, are a couple of phrases that come to mind.






Now it is not too far of a leap for one to go from my dislike of ‘hood vernacular’ to being able to guess that ‘how’ you talk to me is as important as ‘what’ you are talking about. I think people confuse my general pleasant demeanor for being meekness and will say the most insensitive and unthinking things to me. What usually leads to misunderstandings between me and folks, is that, they don’t realize that they have created a ‘track’ in my mind, and from there is where I base how I speak to THEM. Because I have NOT responded to what they may have said that I felt slighted or demeaned by at the time, do NOT mean that I am not capable of being cruel with my words. A lot of the anguish I feel about this weekend is because of that. Were they not my family, how would I have approached the dilemma I am in?






Remember, I was a soldier. Because the counter-strike did not come when and where YOU thought it would, does not mean that it isn’t COMING. Perhaps more baiting is necessary, to make one forget that there are consequences to their words and that the mistress who judges what they are, does so very harshly.










I appreciated the comment DB left on the anxiety I am feeling and what it signifies. The emotions roiling inside of me is the cost of being able to feel free of my past. I do believe that is true for me, and I am in a place where I honestly think I can make a new life for myself.






Another overlooked aspect of my character is that I was a boxer. That is important, because I would tell anyone who ever saw me fight that they would get to know more about me than I could ever tell them. Thing about that is, I am retired and no longer fight. How do I get people to understand what I am trying to share about myself, then?


The sister in the Army famously said about discerning when I am angry from my usual obfuscation, is that ‘I will tell you’. Meaning, when upset I tend to speak in short, clipped phrases, and they are direct. In my mind they are also impersonal but sometimes that is not the case, at least, not when they are heard.






Does it matter? Why should it, when at the end of the day, it is all going to be on my shoulders anyway?