 I can remember playing war when I was young. I would run around outside, turn my backyard into a battlefield, my driveway into a makeshift airstrip, and then my garage would always be the headquarters. I'd go on missions, complete campaigns, and at all costs carry out my orders. I could cast myself as whoever I wanted, but I'd always choose to be a sergeant or a lieutenant. I didn't want to be a general or an admiral. I didn't want to play war room. I wanted to re-enact the action. I wanted to be right in the heart of it, fighting alongside the dashing heroes I'd seen in movies who could calmly light a cigarette and flirt with all the foxy French resistance agents in the face of danger. I learned to read off the subtitles of cheesy World War II movies. I'd always watched them with my father and my grandfather, and my favorite one of all was this Frank Sinatra flick. It was called Von Ryn's Express. And in it, this group of allied prisoners hijacks their prison train and tries to drive it into Switzerland. Usually, my dad would read the subtitles to me, but this night, he'd fall asleep, leaving me to struggle through the words myself. I remember how awkward the muscles in my mouth felt trying to form every letter, feeling my lips wrap their way around the phonetics of each word as they appeared in yellow block letter at the bottom of the television. The words I said aloud were the orders of this Nazi officer commanding his men to open fire, gunning down Frank Sinatra's character, shooting him in the back as he tried to catch the train. This was the first time I realized heroes could die. And not only could they die, but didn't have to be in any climactic final battle scene between some antagonist who could just be a random bullet from a random soldier. Someone listed in the credits as Nazi number two. Before then, I always thought being brave kept you alive, but I learned that war is indiscriminate. Yeah, I saw a werewolf. My Uncle Danny says to me, sipping a Jenny Cree male on his front porch. And I'm not talking any change with the moon, pagan bullshit, no. See, I was stationed out in Turkey doing some intelligence work on the Russians and whatnot. And I was my knight to be out on the wire doing guard duty, and I see this fucking thing come lurching over the hill. It's got combs of hair, long fucking nails. It looks human, except its face was elongated, narrowed to a point like a snout. And I watch it pick up this goat from a flock, take a fucking chunk out of the animal and carry it back off down to the valley. And of course all I got is some army issue, bolt action and piece of shit. So I'm just lucky that that thing didn't see me before it saw the goat, you know? Danny would always tell me these stories when he babysit me. He was an army veteran who served in Vietnam and then worked intelligence on U.S. bases in Turkey and Japan to watch Russian troop movements. But Danny has always been more wizard than warrior to me. He's had gray hair and a long gray beard for as long as I can remember. And when he tells a story, he sits down, casts a spell and wraps you into his world with a kind of magic. But he won't tell you them over the phone. Now, see, he remembers what he could do, so now he can only imagine what they can do. He keeps himself locked in his house like it's a tower, refuses to go out, says, since the neighborhood's going down, as soon as I leave, someone's just gonna fucking break in and take everything besides. There's nothing left to see of this fucking country. It's all going to the Stalinists. He's still sour about San Francisco. Without coming home to his good old USA and having to drive straight to the nearest Vietnamese dry cleaner so that he can get the red paint out of his uniform before it's stained. Hell yeah, I believe in the draft. You'll say, you think I want black water to make some fucking business out of this? No, sure, war is fucked. Sure, Vietnam was fucked, but do you know why it's fucked? Because once upon a goddamn time, we had to fight it. We, us, the fucking people, Donny. Now we've trivialized the thing. There's half of it is fucking privatized and you watch, you just watch. If no one feels lost anymore, people don't understand for themselves how fucked this is. It's not gonna stop. It won't ever fucking stop. He used to let me watch all the movies my parents would. So one day after school, I went over to his place and we turned down Zulu Don. And in the end scene where the entire British regiment is getting slaughtered, this Zulu warrior comes rushing through the camp and kills the chef. I couldn't understand. He was just a cook. He didn't have anything to do with combat. So I turned and I asked my uncle, Danny, why'd they kill the chef? To which he just said, it's war, Donny. Everybody dies. And it was like my question was a full moon. And I watched Danny change right before my eyes. He cast his head back on his chair, stared up at the ceiling as if he wanted to howl, as if he wanted to shout at something, but he just stepped in. He couldn't complete silence until the credits ended. Then he turned to me as if nothing happened. He started telling me about the Swap people who lived in the Huzetonic, how they had mutated because of PCBs, but if I wasn't careful, they would come and get me. It was just nothing changed. As if he thought, I didn't see him, lose himself in thought, see him sit there and try to understand that to some people he'll always be remembered as more monster than man. Have you noticed that we have this tendency to make a timeline out of wars. We use them as landmark events in our history and shape the rest of our facts around them. Even in my American history class, there are sections labeled things like post-World War I literature, post-World War II journalism media, the economics of the Cold War. Now, I don't want to belittle any of these events, nor do I think we should, but I'm not sure if placing so much significance on them really does more harm than good. We institutionalize war and violence to the point of our everyday. Whenever there is a piece of infrastructure, a bridge, a park, a road read, a school, it's usually named or dedicated after some war or warrior. I believe in honor, not glorify. I think it's important to remember these men and women to honor their sacrifices, but not do it by romanticizing their experiences. After Danny graduated from boot camp, my grandfather wanted to take him out to eat, so he brought him to some pizzeria to celebrate. He was proud of his son. While they were there, these four biker tufts walked in, decked out in Nazi memorabilia with swastika bands wrapped around their arms. It was the sixties, and this is how they wanted to rebel. Seeing my uncle dressed up in his army casuals, they walked over to my grandfather, stuck out their chest with pride, shoved their medals into his face and said, What do you think of these, old man? So, which my grandfather put down the piece of pizza he'd yet to eat? He looked up at them and said, So the last time I saw four guys dressed up like that, I lined them up against the side of a barn and shot them. Then he turned back to in France, my grandfather and some men from his unit had snapped. After they were just sent back for R&R, there was shell shot. This was World War II. This was the just war, the one war that had real cause, a real reason to fight behind it, but at nineteen, my grandfather executed Nazi officers and soldiers who had surrendered. Unarmed German men. This wasn't news. This wasn't some scandal. It was never reported. His lieutenant just suggested him and the other men involved, meet the front. He gave him quartermaster staff positions. There were no official sanctions. My grandfather just had to live with his actions. The danger in making things like these standardize is that mixed war seem like something that literally shapes and builds our community. And war has always been a destructive force, which is why it should be a last resort, rather than a first option. But we're reactionary people. And if you don't believe me about that, you should try driving on the mass pipe, someone from Massachusetts. Yep, that's okay, just go ahead. It's not like I was driving this lane anyway. Oh yeah, George, George, don't use your signal. It's not like that's important or anything, it's not like we're all driving a fucking 70 miles an hour. God damn, man. Yeah, that's why you better get off that fucking exit. Fucking Worcester, fuck. Jesus Christ. It's like no one can drive in this goddamn... Access information. Whenever there's a tragedy that happens within minutes, the news, the internet, has all sorts of explanations, possible answers at our fingertips, and our curiosity, our desire for answers, makes us seek them out in the better house, and sensationalize as seriously as they might be. The sad truth is that tragedy brings us together like no other force. Empathy is the greatest gift we have, but we so often forget that. Caught up in this rat race, it's so easy to develop the mentality that, well, my schedule is way more important than yours. We let our compassion be the first thing to go, and we convince ourselves that it has to be that way. But whenever a tragedy happens, we think differently, only for a day or two. It opened letter to the editor of Rolling Stone Magazine from a little brother. My brother and I used to make shadow puppets. We'd hide flashlights into our pillows so that after our parents went to bed, we could pull them out, stay up late, and create an entire world just out of our hands. And like all things, even these had to come to an end. Eventually, my brother did some things that I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to forgive him for. I made myself a promise that I would never grow up to be anything like him, but it's funny. Now that I'm older, and I can look back, I realize that we have, and always have had, so much in common. I'm not suggesting Sanayaf is like this. I don't think his older brother made him do it. I don't know their relationship, and quite frankly, I don't want to. But I do know what it's like to be under someone else's shadow, to want so badly to be able to step out and cast your own by any means necessary, and you gave him that opportunity by shining down your limelight, but it is nothing new. How many times do we see Osama bin Laden's face pasted on the covers of newspapers and magazines after 9-11? How many action movies come out every year with Hollywood hunks and attractive actresses? There has been a celebrity of violence long before your issue. All you did was make it evil. You ensure that people will never forget about him, and never forgive him, either. You didn't make him some sex symbol. You didn't make him some rock star. You made an image that people are willing to lose their very livelihoods, their careers in order to discredit, but your cover also made me remember that the first person I called the night after the Boston Marathon bombings was my brother. I wanted him to know that I was alright. It's funny. I spent so much of my youth wishing you didn't even exist, and now I can't even begin to wonder where I'd be without him. I don't think people set out to be evil. I think they have to believe that whatever they're doing is right, and good and bad is all just a matter of sight. Because, you know, our grudges cleared off a lot of our shadows. In the right kind of light, we can make them look like the atrocity we want, but when we take the time to really look at them, we give ourselves the chance to understand. We see that they're just these things that we make out of our own two hands. When people ask me about my political affiliation or where I stand on controversial issues, I just want to tell them that I'm a part of the Leave Each Other Alone great sex party. See, we're primarily composed of rogue Democrats and sexually repressed Republicans, but I think it's a premise most people can get behind. No pun intended. You see, it's pretty simple. Just leave each other alone, mind your own business, and have fantastic sex. Whether that sex is within or without the confines of a marriage is up to you, your moral convictions and your religious affiliation, but I don't particularly care because that's your business. I'd like to imagine, I'd like to believe and hope, in fact, that there are men and women all over the world who think just like me, that whenever there's some sort of violent act, they just say to themselves, can you just stop? I'm trying to get laid over here and you, with all your killing and shit, you're just making it so difficult. But then again, you know, scientists, naturalists, philosophers, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and on the entire other list of this, I'd like to suggest that war was made out of some necessity for resources. I'm not totally sure that I agree with that. I think maybe there is some shrewd, politically minded, homo-safiation who just figured out that if, in fact, you wanted to get this entire band of nomads together, you need to give them someone else to fight and other to ban around foreign forces in order to defeat. And I think this, this was the beginning of war as community. After accidentally fighting myself homeless in Boston halfway through the semester, I realized that I would need to crash at some friends' places because getting an apartment halfway through the semester was just going to be way too expensive at this point in the game. So, most of my close friends happened to live in the Mission Hill Roxbury area of Boston. That's where I spent most of my last semester. Now, when I tell people this, I normally get the question, isn't it dangerous there? But what do you think they mean? Is it important? Sure, it's dangerous and you have to be careful. But you have to be careful anywhere you go. I mean, nowadays you can even get shot just for walking through suburbia. There is this stigma surrounding lower income neighborhoods that all the people who live there are just waiting for the right opportunity to snatch whatever it is you have. And that's just fucking wrong. People there are trying to get by. Chances are that people here are so wary of walking past at night that they're just coming home from another shitty work shift and they just want to be left the fuck alone. Whenever there is some act of violence in one of these communities, like what happened in New Orleans on Mother's Day at 1.45 in the afternoon during a second line when 19 people were shot out in the street, we just shrug and say, oh, well, I mean, that just happens there as if the situation somehow makes it acceptable. It's as if media measure is worth by life insurance. And as if someone's income is directly reflective of their life's value. And we buy into this policy by just smiling, accepting it and saying, well, this is Rock Ferry, Brooklyn. Just Bear Hill, Hopewood, Park Heights, Woodside, Bankhead, College Hill, Whitehaven, South Central, it's just Central City. You know, if in fact there is a God, then that asshole has an awful lot to answer for. Things like arthritis, Alzheimer's, yoga pants, and only other things in this life that only seem to torture us. If we were to try to objectively explain life to some alien from some other plant who had no conception of humanity or civilization, it would just sound almost sadistic. Um, yeah, well, when we were born, and then, uh, then we work in school, and, uh, well, then we work during work, and then, uh, that's about it. But this is why we can't just think objectively. It's important to remember all the people and all the things that come between these little victories. That's living. Without them, all we can do is survive. You know, you would have made a damn good scientist, but I guess there has to be one writer out there I have some use for. These were the last words Mr. Children said to me after I graduated high school. He is my ninth grade chemistry teacher, and, well, I'm not sure I learned too much science. There's one thing I specifically remember him saying, and that's that he loved teaching about chemistry because it meant he could talk about anything. I have always been fascinated by thermodynamics. The first time I really consciously thought about the fact that nothing cools off. It blew my mind. Everything is just trying to absorb energy to gain heat, and I wondered if that was the same with people. Because some days I couldn't seem to get energy from anywhere. Not in a bad way, but not in a good way either. I was just going through the motions, filling out the formula for normalcy that I knew so well. Smile, be social, raise hand, answer question. It was so easy. They say depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that's the nice, polite, medical way of saying it. As though it's some equation we can balance out with the right elements. Add lithium to one side, slow the process of sodium on the other, but sometimes you just want to add. You want to speed up your existence so fucking badly and get right there, right to the end. People don't like hearing it when you talk about suicide. They prefer to pretend that it just doesn't happen. That normal people will never think about it, let alone ever do it, but fuck that. If we're ever going to move forward, if we're ever going to really help people, it's important to open up a dialogue, to share, to let them know that it's nothing to be ashamed of, that it is nothing to hide, that everyone goes through things. It's something you're experiencing, and you should experience it, because this life is just one big fucking experiment. A chance for you to test out every possible hypothesis. I know it might not sound perfect, but hey, it's only my working theory. Nobody asks for existence. As far back as we can remember, there wasn't some divine being who handed us a contract and said, uh, yeah, just sign here on my lines for roughly, I don't know, 80 to 90 years of consciousness, full of existential crises, some drunk texts you're going to regret, and I guess I can throw a pavish kid in there, too. We just kind of got here, and we're told to make the most of it, and if anyone out there feels worthless, no proven conclusions, no sure solutions, all that I have to offer you is this one thought, and I hope it helps you, remember, you are the single most beautiful combination of chemicals and coincidence in this entire fucking universe. Every particle in you could have been a part of anything else, but instead it decided to make this. And it's a fact that no two bodies of mass can occupy the exact same space at the exact same time, so please understand that you are actually irreplaceable. This isn't nice emotional bullshit. I'm not some therapist. This is ninth grade science. This is the first time you actually got to flirt because someone needed help on their homework. This is using a Bunsen burner for all the things it's not supposed to be used for, but public schools think it's fine to give teenagers fire and who are you to tell them otherwise? This is understanding. This is realizing that you are actually good at something, even if it's as boring as chemistry. Sure. I could have been a scientist, but I've always been awful at math. And I remember reading somewhere that this whole entropy thing, it's not just about gaining energy. It also requires that you're ready to give all of that energy right back. My mom feeds ducks. This is important. Every day after work she goes down to the Cove with a bag of corn and throws it out to them. She even has a couple out of a bunch that she affectionately calls Daisy and Daffy. She's a vegetarian. She kind of runs in the family. Her favorite saint? It's Saint Francis of Assisi. The patron saint of animals and nature and all that kind of stuff. Now my parents live in North Carolina. If there's one thing North Carolinians love more than a NASCAR, it's hunting. By doing all of this feeding, my mom quite literally turns them into sitting ducks. So inevitably, when the hunters come, my mother will grab an air horn and go running down, blowing it so the ducks can scatter before these hunters have a chance to set up their blinds. And usually this seems to happen early in the morning, so I'll just be sitting in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal and watching my short, fiery Irish Catholic mother have it out with these hunters, trying all the while. Give them hell, mom. The ducks aren't actually important. In fact, none of this is. At least not by itself. I'm a poet. I make my occupation exploring stories, extrapolating meaning from actions and making cheap puns of my own expense. I can't end violence. I can only suggest possible reasons why it might happen. I can't stop people from trying to balance out the body count of human history. I can only ask that we start to forgive each other. I can't break any cycles. I can only point out that they exist. The truth is my words only have as much meaning as what you choose to do with them. Change has to start here with you right now. And so though these curtains or this camera might close there remains too much work left for there to be about.