Love and War
Well my brother went and did it. He got all married up. From the sounds of the peanut gallery his sole job now is the continual production of grandchildren. Just hand ’em over Dave, two at a time if you can muster it. They’ve already got names picked out for ’em and some heavy books on Southern discipline that you’ll be given as your guide.

We had perfect weather for the wedding this weekend and besides my many boutonnières which refused to stay alive for more than five minutes, and forgetting that one of my best man duties was to sign the marriage certificate as a witness, things went off pretty smooth. The nicest detail of the wedding came from Rich, a friend of my brother Ben, who volunteered his ’94 Fleetwood as the formal wedding carriage. The car was Big Pimpin’ and looked like it had come straight off the set of The Sopranos. The car was cool but wouldn’t have had nearly the stylin’ effect if Rich hadn’t shown up dressed the part of king chauffeur. For my money, I think if you’re going to throw a big event you should either find volunteers or pay people to do nothing but stand around in dark shades and look official. It’s even better if you can get them to guard shit. Protect things that in an ordinary setting would not require guarding — punch bowls, bathrooms, the wedding cake, the bar, certain high profile individuals. The more the merrier. If they can all look like Mr. Smith that’s even better.

I spent the better part of Sunday recovering from wedding duties and reading Evan Wright’s piece about the Iraq war called The Killer Elite. I can’t tell whether it’s just battling departments at Rolling Stone or some brilliant piece of Hollywood magic like the film Three Kings, but putting that silly kid from American Idol on the cover of RS and then having such a wickedly brutal and blunt story like Wright’s about the realities of war strikes me as pretty damn smart. I had this constant vision while reading Wright’s piece of a thirteen-year old girl, who, after convincing her mother to buy her the RS issue so she could run home to her bedroom and read all about the Idol kid, emerges two hours later balling her eyes out because she has read the article that came right after the American Idol one.

After the Wright piece I read Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, which is an even more real and brutal marine memoir of the first Iraq war. Why I chose to relax by reading a book about war and marine life instead of a book about sorcerers and little kids with dark rimmed glasses like the rest of the country I do not know. Suffice it to say when I went to bed last night I had a head full of the sounds, sights, and smells of a war that continues on today. I went to sleep with that head and woke up with that head at exactly 2am when I was bombed out of bed with what I thought was incoming mortar fire. The first hit sounded like someone was bowling in the apartment, I could hear the ball rolling down the hardwoods in the hallway approaching the bedroom, then there was a brilliant flash of light followed by an explosion like a hundred rockets had just slammed into the apartment.

Then the rain came down hard.

Damn, I have never heard thunder creep up and deliver such a precision strike in my lifetime. That was too surreal. I am definitely laying off the military reading for awhile.