I want to talk a little bit about failure. A lot of times I’ll find myself receiving criticism about my popularity or lack thereof (depending on where you catch me in my career as a clown). I find it incredibly strange that people base their value on how much others approve of them. Why would you need to be validated if you know everyone has been rejected before? Everyone has failed before. Most everyone has been dumped, or told to “fuck off” at some point or other. Everyone feels pain and everyone regularly finds themselves incapable of doing something. We’re all losers and winners. No escaping it.
What I’m saying here is, it is strange to criticize others for what you yourself have been through and continue to go through. “Wow! What are you? A guy who pees in a toilet? Ha! What a loser! Hey everyone, look, this guy has slightly yellow pee! What are you? Someone who only drank a decent amount of water, not a lot of water!? Ha ha! Loser!” Yeah, that’s how it feels when you go around crapping on people for “popularity” issues. You say someone sold out, yet you sell out in almost every way. Selling out means sacrificing your values for personal gain, no? You and I do that in small ways, constantly. When humans behave as if they are above other humans, in such an aggressive and derogatory way, it rarely says anything about the people they look down upon. The biggest and most bold message often reveals everything you need to know about he or she who condescends alone. I wanted to deliver this mini rant in a blog post… but then I realized there was a more efficient alternative… I figured I may as well just write a new chapter of my book, considering today is the day I was scheduled to do exactly that. As I write this book and in times before, I felt myself humor my own worries. As if my mind were taking part in a sub efficient erroneous internal analysis. I ask/asked myself “Are my chapters too long?” and “Am I writing enough?”. I’ll go on and ask “Do I come off as too rude or negative?” additionally “Why are other people seemingly so constructive and natural people-pleasers while I’m such a… me?” It's a real bummer. We can’t just flip a switch and be that ideal squeaky clean, conventional face on a mom’s magazine. We all know what is socially ideal, we all know what would make most everyone think we’re a great contribution to conservative generic society… but, we’re just too… us. Tiger Woods, great smile, great face of a magazine… but secretly just another guy, right? Well… maybe that’s how most all of us are. None of us are really that poster boy wet dream… maybe we’re all just a mess. Maybe it’s only liars who seem clean because they’re the masters of faking it and feeling fine with living fairy tale? Or maybe it’s way more complicated than that… maybe I truly am the product of a broken home, and this is just what you get. Mr. Damaged. Captain Baggage. To get to the point, I feel like I’m doing what billions have done before me. I’m fighting who I am, acting like I’m not good enough and essentially working against myself. But what if I’m supposed to? What if you’re supposed to fail, fear, doubt… then blame yourself, try to get better, fail again and so on? What if the real answer to everything is that we’re not supposed to change our routine? That everything you think you’re supposed to be, you’re actually not. Maybe right here, right now, you are exactly who you are supposed to be… and if you were meant to be that dream, you would be? “The grass is always greener on the other side” – It’s how so many rich, successful people, are still ranting, bitter and often immature little babies. Real wealth comes from within right? How can you truly appreciate the things in life if you don’t know how to properly absorb and digest them? Money and success do not inherently grant you perspective… Or what if all these thoughts are incredibly stupid, because we’re all just ants on a log, our lives don’t matter and it makes no real difference what changes we make, good or bad? It’s all a joke, we exist by chance, and this is just another needless tease to a full-blown existential crisis? Maybe I should stop… So where did we leave off? Basic training? I recall a boy was crying the first night of basic (I know, great transition, A+ buddy). But after giving that guy a backrub, I walked off to my new twin mattress to sleep. The crying guy “washed back” about a week later. Washing back, or washing out, is basically when you can’t cut it with your flight, and they reconsider your graduation date. I’m pretty sure he didn’t make it through basic. I mean… you’re crying the first night, what chance do you have? How out of touch with reality do you have to be to not know that in Basic Training, they scream at you? He popped up not long after he disappeared. He was in a formation on their way to the chow hall. This crying boy was grouped with Airmen on crutches, in casts and the others… those wearing orange reflective vests. Why were some Airmen wearing orange reflective vests in the reject squad? Because they tried to go AWOL (Absent Without Leave) by running off base, back to their civilian life. There were laws against that. You risk literal prison by running away from the military. So? Major motivation, seeing that group, to stay in line and keep gunning forward. Anyway, my training instructor was hot as hell. The female one... not the male… the male one looked like Mr. Clean… but more like if Mr. Clean was mixed with Christian Bale. Like they had a baby? Somehow? Kind of an awesome looking dude. But the female? She was about 5 feet 0 inches tall. She had freckles, red hair, and a loaded mouth on her… that means she was a firecracker. A hot head. A hot, hot head. Throughout training she would do awful things to us. That female trainer would constantly say we were an embarrassment (which I expected), she would say we didn’t deserve to wear the uniforms (which… you know, yes we do, we volunteered give our lives for our country so fuck you very much), she would throw temper tantrums, throwing her hat around while getting red faced… and, she would perform manipulation tactics on us that were… too far. Apparently our female training instructor was withholding mail from us. She would joke about how we didn’t deserve to hear from our family members. She loved to play head games because it seemed like that’s where she thrived. I learned later, that’s just something you cannot do. American troops should always have access to their own mail… or so that was the ideal that was expressed to me by people I trust. Meanwhile the male training instructor was standard issue awesome. He gave us exactly the experience we saw on TV and in the movies. Yelled at us all the time, but in a way that you knew was designed for training enhancement. He clearly expected the best from us, punished us for screwing up and rewarded us for succeeding. There was one moment in Basic where I missed a spot shaving. During the inspection in the morning, he looked at my face closely and said “Airman Daniel, you missed a spot shaving. Go fix that immediately!” and I replied, “Yes sergeant!” and broke formation to go fix my issue immediately. No big deal right? That’s how punishment should work right? Well, the other sergeant, the lovely female type, caught me softly laughing in formation at something that was said. I was confronted about whether or not I was laughing, and I told the truth, that I was. I was then instructed to take a position to the side of the formation, face the flight and point at everyone in the formation, so I did. The female T.I. then instructed everyone but me to get on their faces (meaning to get in push up position) and begin pushing. I was then instructed to say “Ha ha ha. You’re all pushing because of me.” I did not understand why I was instructed to do this. As I continued to say “Ha ha ha. You’re all pushing because of me” my fellow Airmen became more and more angry with me. Some were now making eye contact with me, and groaning with that frustration while they pushed. It was almost comedic how angry they got over this, how easily manipulated their emotions were by our tiny instructor. I could see them really buying into what the female T.I. was selling. Gradually, the whole sequence of events became increasingly unfunny to me. My fellow Airmen were starting to feel genuine hatred for me. They knew I didn’t want them to have to do pushups. The TI was the one telling me to say what I was saying… but that didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t understand why they would feel anger considering push ups are no big deal. I would push with them, but I wasn’t allowed to… so… grow up, right? Well, they didn’t see it how I did, so, laughing in formation under my breath was no longer an option for me. I was going to be crucified if I kept being amused by my surroundings. The female TI made her point. This was not a place to chuckle to yourself, this was a place absent of happiness or amusement. It reminded me of getting in trouble for smirking when my dad called the cops on me for not wanting to eat dinner. Being amused by dumb situations just wasn’t going to fly here. The most humiliating thing my female TI did to me happened when I was alone with her and another female TI. I didn’t want to go to any form of church on the first weekend of bootcamp. They have a variety of religious ceremonies at Lackland AFB, but none of them fit what I am. I was confronted by multiple TI’s who encouraged me to go. Clearly this was their chance to chill, and I was ruining it. I kept telling them I had no compatible belief system and didn’t want to go. As a result, I was left in the sleeping area of our building with the two female TI’s. One TI was from a different flight, the other was my own. My training instructor took it upon herself to call me over and force me to do a “dead insect” exercise in front of both of them. It basically involved me putting my arms and feet up in the air and holding that position as I laid on my back like a dead bug. They giggled to themselves as I was forced to maintain this position till finally my TI called it off. There was no purpose to it, I hadn’t done anything wrong, she just wanted to make me feel uncomfortable. Once again, she was demonstrating that she had complete power over my life and there was nothing I could do about it. But again, I knew damn well Basic Training wouldn’t be a breeze. I just didn’t expect the humiliation to be so personal, and isolated. The next week I went to church, I just picked a random one, and went there. I wasn’t going to risk being degraded by the female training instructors again. The first time I sat in church, I fell asleep sitting up. They were talking about nature, fairies and stones… knocked me right out. This was for some weird religion I picked, probably a pagan one. I didn’t go back because I felt the drum beat of my life didn’t match the drum beat of that faith. The same applied to the Catholic church I went to the following week. We had some lousy crackers and grape juice there. It was basically a real waste of time, but again, better than being degraded by those women. As far as friends went, I wasn’t making very many. My wingman (the guy who slept above me on my bunk) was a former drug dealer who was given a choice between prison or the same job I volunteered for (absolutely insulting). I had no interest in bonding with him. The guy sleeping right next to my bunk was also a crook. At one point when the female TI, who I was not a fan of, pissed off the guy next to my bunk, he mumbled that he would punch her in the face. At the time, I was really sensitive to men abusing women, even if I was not fond of said woman. Even today I would have probably reacted the same as I did then. Right after he threatened her under his breath, I stood up and walked over to the female TI who was chatting it up casually with a visiting TI in her office. I stood at attention and said, “Airman Daniel reports.” The sergeant looked pissed but instructed me to speak. I went on and stated the boys rank and name who had just said he was going to punch her. Her expression became quickly even more aggressive. She immediately left the office to go scream at the boy who said he would punch her. The boy who mumbled that he would punch the female TI promptly appeared as if he was going to wet himself. I felt no sympathy for him. I didn’t like our TI, but she was much smaller than him and him hitting her would be so incredibly unfair and disgusting I couldn’t condone myself letting such a threat to her go unaddressed. This method of resolution came from my acknowledgement that I didn’t outrank the this violent man. I had no authority to correct him, so running it up the chain was my only option. That… and I secretly loved that woman. Ok? You know how easily I fall for older women. Have you read the other chapters? Eh… whatever. In Basic I was taught close quarters combat. I was taught how to fire a grenade, throw a grenade, fire a handgun, clean a handgun, fire a rifle, clean a rifle, low crawl, salute and so forth. It was definitely a learning experience that I got real college credit for. I actually only got to throw one grenade. They threw the second one for me because I didn’t actually… throw it… well. I mean, that was the idea I got. I felt like I threw it far, but you’re supposed to be ducking after you throw, so I don’t really know what happened there. During shooting training I became a certified marksman, which just means, if you give me a rifle, I’ll probably do very well. I got a special ribbon for it which was very flattering. Regardless… I know this chapter is shorter than usual, but if you’re bummed out about it, that’s a wonderful thing, because it means you actually want to read more. If not… maybe read a different book? I hear great things about The Bible. People love that book so much they kill each other over it. Weird huh?