Eat Letters, Shit Words

I always thought my life was weird, but never Fictional Spaceship and Fantasy World weird, but then again, here I am doing front flips off the side of a warship with Achilles... After a normally boring day of work I had dinner with a buddy at an authentic German diner, then upon getting back to my room I promptly fell asleep for a short nap. I really needed to clean my room... But when I woke up, I was in the TARDIS with a buddy of mine, Ritchie. I just kind of took this surprise in stride instead of doing a fangirl shriek about being in the most badass ship of all SciFi. Our trip, however was really short, since the very same ship decided to dump us on the coast of what I assume to have been Greece. Along the beach was forest that was partially in flames, and a rather odd group of people, dressed in an assortment of ancient clothes and armour that I could only assume was from Ancient Greece. There were about eight of them, three women, five men. Two of the women wore common robes of

So it was the ass end of February, and Your Humble Narrator was deploying to Afghanistan! What a momentous moment! Of course, it wasn't too exciting at first. Gathered my bags, got in line, put my bags in a pile, got on a giant scale so the pilots would know how heavy the load would be on their 747, and eventually got on the bird for a long ass flight over the puddle..I mean, Atlantic Ocean, to land in Shannon, Ireland. The flight was cool. They had movie screens all over the place, TV on the back of the chair in front of you so you could watch cheap programming. It was the bombdiggity, and I slept through all of it. Absolutely wonderful! The plane landed, we shuffled through security, leaving our rifles on the plane, naturally, and were told we had a whole eight hours to kill! Well, Shannon Airport was small, and we were not allowed outside of it. Awesome. Managed to kill an hour eating some kind of delicious beef sandwhich, while completely mesmerized by the waitresses accent (

So, this morning, for the first time in a long time I had a nightmare. It wasn't as crazy as most people's nightmares, and thankfully not deployment related, but Holy shit, I was one unhappy camper when I woke up. Note: Some of the finer details are gone from my memory, but considering how damn vivid it was, I still remember the majority of it, quite well. So it started out like any other dream. Me doing random shit in a random place with random people. The usual. Trying to race people but can't move fast to save my life. A bad omen. When I returned to my room from my adventure and running debacle, I open my door to see... My room covered in spiderwebs, and IN the spiders webs a bunch of good sized and fully functional beehives and hornet/wasp nests. Naturally, I freaked the fuck out. especially when I noticed that most of the bees/wasps/hornets were the size of my thumb, a few bigger, a few smaller. The spiders ranged anywhere from tiny to tarantula, all kinds, shapes

So, I think I may know why I have insomnia. At least, I partially know why. Partly I think it's my need to be doing something. Even when I'm being a lazy do-nothing, I'm still getting something done. Planning something. Talking to someone. Usually several someone's. Reading.  Something mildly productive. Well, not always. But usually. I'm just restless. During the day I'm always trying to be getting something done. My weekend's are thoroughly planned out by Thursday, even if those plans will continue to change, even after they happened... But to bring this back to insomnia, all the time I spend sleeping is time I spend not doing pretty much anything else in the world I could possibly be doing. It's lost time. I don't do it on purpose. When I lay down to try and sleep my mind just gets overloaded with everything else I could be doing at that moment, what I'd be doing the next day. Week. Month. Year. Lifetime. What death would feel like (a real

So, for the longest time I was thought PTSD was a myth. I mean, I've had such good control over my mind and body I figured that those who claimed to have suffered from it were just weak-minded pussies. What I didn't realize was just how some things could affect you, and why they affected you that way. If you go by my former opinion, I am indeed a weak-minded pussy, though I'm far from killing people in my sleep, as is the case with some of the further mindfucked Vietnam vets, but I'm messed up in a handful of other ways, which as my friends can confirm, I am definitely not the same man I was before I did my rotation in Afghanistan. Usually when people hear "PTSD" they think of vets getting super vivid flashbacks whenever they hear loud noises and whatnot. I can somewhat relate. Loud banging noises still make jump, and there were a few times where I dove to the ground here on Ft Bragg because of unexpected explosions. Only once did I actually have a flashback

So, as a paratrooper we're expected to jump out of airplanes every now and then, possibly for training, possibly as an undercover experiment to see how much it takes an individual to break a leg. I had a jump yesterday with full combat equipment (meaning with my rucksack and weapon). First off, I have a damn near paralyzing fear of heights. I'd much rather be in a gunfight, give a speech in public, or ask a girl out on stage at a concert and have her say "No" than jump out of a plane at 1000ft. Hell, my uncle used to live on the 31st floor of a skyscraper and it took four years of visiting him before I could sleep in a room with windows. Jumping out of planes is Hell for me, and I often loathe my choice of going airborne. Secondly, the parachutes we use were made in the 50's and 60's, with minor fixes here and there when they tear or get damaged. Using a 60+ year old parachute when jumping at said 1000ft isn't too thrilling, regardless of being scared

I wrote this awhile ago. Figured I'd put it on here. What exactly happens when you die? Your body rots in a pit, or your ashes sit in a cabinet... But is there more that's not related to your physical being? I'll go into the "Where do you go?" question later, but first I'm focusing on how I know there IS something after you die. Sorry if it makes no sense. I'm horrible at explaining things that make sense to me, and often enough the things DO make sense to me make sense to no one else... I am absolutely, 100% certain that there is life after death. We can picture things within our mind. Without using our eyes we "see" memories. We can create pictures, feel past emotions, and re-create past senses (touch, sight, sound, etc.), all within in our mind, as though it's our own personal movie, as we experience it.  Even without actually controlling it, these things run through our heads.  What do you think happens to that when w

So, for the past six months or so, my sleep schedule has gone from one extreme to another, in little phases here and there. For awhile I couldn't sleep unless I were, drunk then I just couldn't stay awake unless I were drunk, and it's flipflopped a few times. Obvious solution? Drink, since alcohol seems to control my sleeping patterns. So I did that for awhile. However, drinking caused problems. Not so much mine as other peoples'. First it was family, telling me that I drink too much, followed by friends. Well, some of my friends. Plenty of them are alcoholics, too. But, after awhile I decided that maybe being perma-drunk wasn't such a good idea..as if. No, work actually got in the way. Wasn't allowed to drink for about a month and a half for GRF (Global Reaction Force). We were basically on call to show up to work, fully mission capable within two hours of a phone call at any given time. So that meant no drinking. For the most part I stuck to that, except for

They say you never forget your first firefight, and that's extremely true. Mine was more than memorable. It was in early March, 2012 in RC-South, Afghanistan. Beautiful day, considering what a shithole we were in. It was pretty early in the morning, and we were going out on a  foot patrol to the South of our FOB (Forward operating base) to talk to one of the villagers, who was suspected of being a key player in the local Taliban group, who lived in what was referred to as Boss House. This also happened to be my very first mission. Well, movement down there was slow, about 800m through an open field, but we had to follow some engineers with a minesweeper because of the extremely high IED (improvised explosive device) threat. Basically walking ducks in a row through an open area like that was pretty stupid, but we had vehicles just off from our formation as overwatch and support. Well, when got to the house the old man was already sitting outside the front door waiting to speak w