and it is on 8.

and now i'm feeling the pressure to write good. i mean well.

fuck.

we had to write about what role we think the armed forces plays in our "conflicts" with "opposing" nations yesterday in one of my coffee-smelling classrooms.

i cant remember the exact wording of the in-class extemporaneous writing assignment, but the length was to be a single paragraph and it was to reflect the writer's opinion.

take a listen:

"the armed forces are merely pawns on the chessboard where the government is the king and the president is the queen. all of the pieces are only there to give them the satisfaction of being there and in reality are only there for show. valueless. the hand which moves them belongs to the business interests and lobbyists. we are but spectators in the arena watching the match for the grandmastership."

who has to read theirs in class? yeah, me.

i smugly do it, and all but sit back with arms defiantly folded cross the chest.

...and the professor informs us that she is in a "military family" and her brothers and sister and father are or were all in the various branches of the armed forces. ugh. she lost her fiancee in the early 70's in the vietnam war.

this is the story of my life. it may seem amusing or even funny sometimes, but i had to sit through the rest of class being the kid who is glad the professor lost her one true love to war. i might as well have been the one to shoot him, or the one who pulled his number in the draft, or at the very laast be the one who gave the order to blindly run through an unswept minefield...

the funny thing to me is the fact that big business ran and consequently made a fortune off of that war and the insignificance to the powers-that-be of her boyfriend dying only serves to prove the point that the armed forces meant nothing then and mean nothing now and since when did this journal become a social commentary?

holy jumped-up jesus.

and today i have to attend that class. in 45 minutes no less. i want to get in there early so no one notices me walking in after they are all seated. i bet i'll have one of those "seat-buffers" around me that only the most undesirable of nuisances require. that will be swell.

for the record: i was born 3 years after vietnam ended. there is no way i gave any orders before 1977.