As-Salaam Alaikum.
Had the day off yesterday. I have the day off tomorrow. It's a Christmas Miracle. On our days off we go to Doha, to which you may be thinking "aren't you in Doha?" Nope. I'm in America right now. On a small sliver of land on a Qatari military installation. We have an American mall, complete with BX, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Arby's, and a spa (a real spa, not sitting alert). We have the American postal service. We have Wi-Fi with American Football. Everybody speaks English, making my attempts to learn Arabic irrelevant. So yes, I'm in Doha, but not really. When we get days off, we get to go to the real Doha. We get to travel.
I have now been to 27 countries. When I tell people that a lot of them are surprised, "Only 27? I thought you've been everywhere..." Everywhere gets a lot bigger when you actually try to go everywhere. (Plus how many countries have you been to? Four? And Puerto Rico doesn't count, you've been to three.) My 27 is also not counting the dozens of countries I've flown over but never landed; people get too mad when I count flying over the Grand Canyon as having been to the Grand Canyon (people literally drive there, and then pay money to get in a helicopter and fly over it, if that's the best part of the attraction then I'm counting it). I'm rambling.
So 27 countries. I counted Qatar when we finally left the installation. I was driving, I always seem to be at the helm when interesting shit happens. But then again most people who can fly a 300,000lb airplane can also drive a stick shift in a country with slightly different traffic laws than our own, so who drives is usually decided by who either does or doesn't want to do it; I usually do because I think it's exciting and brings about that feeling of wonder and something new that no one's had at the wheel of a car since they were 16 and driving for the first time. And I think it's precisely that feeling which guides the urge in us to travel: something new.
We went to some Arabic restaurant for lunch in Doha. It was actually Yemeni, but that's like comparing Mexican food to Texan food: if you don't have the proximity to tell the difference then it's the same fucking thing. This restaurant was packed and the guy at the door told us we could sit anywhere we could find a seat, this included the floor. There wasn't a single table left available, so we had to decide between finding a different restaurant, or taking off our shoes and sitting on the floor.
This is why I think I've found my niche among travelers and pilots and people who are of the world, but don't even really seem to care because we do it all the time. We spend so much time crawling the globe that we become just as comfortable completely immersed abroad as we do with the comforts of home. When faced with the decision to sit on the floor to eat lunch, there was no "are we allowed to?"..."let's wait for a table"...or..."I'm not doing that." It was a simple agreement among the three of us: "Fuck it. I'm hungry"...and..."don't forget, it's rude to show the bottoms of your feet."
I asked Traver if he'd ever had a meal like this, while I used my hands and lack of silverware to tear off another piece of pita bread to dip into my mutton stew. "Nope, there's always been an open table." I think that pretty well summarizes my point. No matter how long you spend traveling, there is always something new, unintended or otherwise, and it is impossible to do it all. You may be able to try anything or go anywhere, but you can't experience everything, and you can't go Everywhere.
Everywhere is a concept tantamount to infinity. It's a kindle to the imagination, but in reality it's impossible. Everywhere is a coastline paradox: while finite in area, it's endless in measurement. As you zoom out, Everywhere gets very small, very confined, doable; but the closer you look, the bigger a task Everywhere becomes. Every continent is seven. Every country is 194. Every city is... well, you see the problem?
What about every language? Every road? Every nightclub? Every tiny family-run cafe? Including the one at the end of an alley in a neighborhood off the main road in a suburb of a city in Cambodia? Have you been there? That's a part of Everywhere.
I used to say "I want to go Everywhere twice." It was intentionally absurdist. Actually I still say it. Looking at my mental whiteboard of travels, I'm not doing half-bad upon first glance. I've been to Los Angeles twice, New York City twice, Miami twice (nine times actually). I've been to Cambodia twice, the Seoul Incheon Airport twice, Sevilla twice... the list goes on. But I've never been to the Staple's Center. I've never been to JFK. I've never been to Star Island. I've never been to Mondulkiri, I've never seen the Rosetta Stone and the Pyramids in the same day twice. I've never been to a mental institution. Again... the list goes on. The more you zoom in, the more you realize how astonishingly little you've managed to chip away at Everywhere.
That's why we travel. The world is an endless pot of new things, entirely new experiences. We can grow accustomed to and bored by the act of finding and exploring new places, but that's just physically being acclimated to movement. Still, you can never avoid the surreal feeling of a first encounter while on a quest for Everywhere. Everywhere is so boundless, so grand and everlasting by nature, it will never run dry.
You can go pretty much anywhere, outside of your hometown, and call it travel. It may not be far or particularly interesting, but it makes no difference in the eye of Everywhere. As you get further and further from home and the exotic smells and sounds flare and attack your sense of solace, Everywhere begins to grow. When it becomes addiction, and the countries and continents are getting checked off and you know how to say "cheers" in eight languages, Everywhere is still out there.
While you salsa dance in Spain with your wife or have a picnic on a sand dune, while you teach English to a class of orphans in South East Asia or hike through the jungle, while you're at the top of a Burj watching the sunset over an island shaped like a palm tree or while you fly over it five years later, it's growing. While you're climbing the Akropolis or trying to surf in Waikiki or eating with your hands on the floor of a Yemeni restaurant, you aren't getting any closer. Everywhere will grow and grow as you gain perception of simply how much there is.
Eventually every traveler will realize that Everywhere is not to be conquered; there's no end to it. And that is very good news! We can keep going, forever, traveling and finding things for the first time. And while Everywhere will seem like it gets bigger and bigger the more we see, it is as it always was: infinite.
Daunting infinity doesn't stop the urge to journey, it only promises the adventure will never cease. For some it's one of the best promises in life, elevated to a religious level making neighbors with the concepts of love or humanity. It's one of the few wonders in life that's sustainable. It's why I'm so grateful to have the job and life I've found myself in, because the world will always be out there. It's why my answer is always the same when people ask me, "where do you want to go the most?"
Everywhere.
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Monday, December 23, 2019
Not Today
Good evening. Another couple'a days doing pilot shit.
I can't believe the massive majority of this base that is here solely to support the flying operations. It seems from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to bed, we're surrounded by other people who are also deployed, who are working 12 hour days, who are away from their families, and who are doing everything but flying.
At 4:00 hours to take off we get a phone call from the step desk, telling us our callsign, flight duration, and whether or not we're going fishing. At 3:15 hours to takeoff, a van driven by an airman shows up at the front door to our dorm. At 3:10 we arrive at Aircrew Flight Equipment and an airman issues us our helmets, survival radios, and any other fishing gear we need. At 3:00 we arrive at the squadron and start paperwork. At 2:30 we go into the vault and get our intel brief, by an airman. At 2:15 a sergeant gives us more classified fishing gear, and explains how to use it if it's something we're not used to. At 2:05 I say CYA to Curlee (he's the one who called us an hour ago) and we do our secret handshake. At 2:00 another airman driving a van shows up out front and we load up. At 1:55 we stop at the flight kitchen and pick up our meals. At 1:40 we clear security onto the flightline, and an airman with a gun checks our badges.
1:30 we arrive at the jet; Traver starts getting the brief from the crew chiefs, who are airmen, and I head upstairs to start doing what I do. At 0:30 we start engines. Once we're started up and on time, we're within twenty minutes to takeoff; the crew chiefs give us one last look over, unplug their headsets from the nosegear, and one walks about 75 yards in front of the jet and stands at parade rest. I grab a quick taxi clearance, confirm the door light is out, ring the crew bell, and call the checklist complete.
"Ready to go?"
"Ready."
I flash the taxi light. The crew chief moves from parade rest to attention, and then starts marshaling forward. Traver juices the power to about 50% (we're heavy), I stick my head out the window to make sure we won't flip any trucks, we move forward and turn out of park. When the plane hits 45 degrees through the turn, the crew chief snaps back to attention, and salutes. I stop everything I'm doing and focus on nothing but the crew chief; I salute back, and hold it for a second. Then it's on to the next checklist. "Hydraulic pressure brakes and steering."
At about that time the crew chief drops his salute and starts walking off, fading from view. And that signifies one complete cycle of hundreds of people working 12 hour shifts on the ground to get one plane in the air.
When I was a freshman in college our detachment commander was telling us about flying one day. He gave the exact same elaborate speech that I just gave, step by step, and ended it with the salute. This really fired me up as a teenager. I know this because I wrote about it on January 28th, 2012.
The speech was about respect and how when you're a pilot you get saluted by an enlisted airman who is partially responsible for the success of your plane getting off the ground. The process goes like this... He walks up to the edge of the line after you get your engines started. Once pretaxi checklist is complete, your marashaller will stand at attention and salute you. From the cockpit, you salute back. The marshaller drops his salute, moves to parade rest, and gives you an enthusiastic thumbs up. This essentially means, "Sir, have a great flight."
To be wearing wings and receive a salute by my marshaller I really don't think I could have a bad flight.
I can't believe the massive majority of this base that is here solely to support the flying operations. It seems from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to bed, we're surrounded by other people who are also deployed, who are working 12 hour days, who are away from their families, and who are doing everything but flying.
At 4:00 hours to take off we get a phone call from the step desk, telling us our callsign, flight duration, and whether or not we're going fishing. At 3:15 hours to takeoff, a van driven by an airman shows up at the front door to our dorm. At 3:10 we arrive at Aircrew Flight Equipment and an airman issues us our helmets, survival radios, and any other fishing gear we need. At 3:00 we arrive at the squadron and start paperwork. At 2:30 we go into the vault and get our intel brief, by an airman. At 2:15 a sergeant gives us more classified fishing gear, and explains how to use it if it's something we're not used to. At 2:05 I say CYA to Curlee (he's the one who called us an hour ago) and we do our secret handshake. At 2:00 another airman driving a van shows up out front and we load up. At 1:55 we stop at the flight kitchen and pick up our meals. At 1:40 we clear security onto the flightline, and an airman with a gun checks our badges.
1:30 we arrive at the jet; Traver starts getting the brief from the crew chiefs, who are airmen, and I head upstairs to start doing what I do. At 0:30 we start engines. Once we're started up and on time, we're within twenty minutes to takeoff; the crew chiefs give us one last look over, unplug their headsets from the nosegear, and one walks about 75 yards in front of the jet and stands at parade rest. I grab a quick taxi clearance, confirm the door light is out, ring the crew bell, and call the checklist complete.
"Ready to go?"
"Ready."
I flash the taxi light. The crew chief moves from parade rest to attention, and then starts marshaling forward. Traver juices the power to about 50% (we're heavy), I stick my head out the window to make sure we won't flip any trucks, we move forward and turn out of park. When the plane hits 45 degrees through the turn, the crew chief snaps back to attention, and salutes. I stop everything I'm doing and focus on nothing but the crew chief; I salute back, and hold it for a second. Then it's on to the next checklist. "Hydraulic pressure brakes and steering."
At about that time the crew chief drops his salute and starts walking off, fading from view. And that signifies one complete cycle of hundreds of people working 12 hour shifts on the ground to get one plane in the air.
When I was a freshman in college our detachment commander was telling us about flying one day. He gave the exact same elaborate speech that I just gave, step by step, and ended it with the salute. This really fired me up as a teenager. I know this because I wrote about it on January 28th, 2012.
The speech was about respect and how when you're a pilot you get saluted by an enlisted airman who is partially responsible for the success of your plane getting off the ground. The process goes like this... He walks up to the edge of the line after you get your engines started. Once pretaxi checklist is complete, your marashaller will stand at attention and salute you. From the cockpit, you salute back. The marshaller drops his salute, moves to parade rest, and gives you an enthusiastic thumbs up. This essentially means, "Sir, have a great flight."
And now, it's every day.
I had an IFE (inflight emergency) yesterday. This was my third time declaring an emergency, and first time squawking 7700 (we usually don't but Kuwait told us to). We were doing a pretty standard mission, and had just rendezvoused with an E-3.
A full bird Colonel was on the flight; they never get to fly anymore (that's not our fault, we all make choices) so once every couple of months they get lucky and can clear their schedules and get added to a line. It's really a huge pain in the ass for whatever crew get's unlucky enough to get stuck with him. The common analogy is flying with a 7-year-old in the right seat; they just wanna touch everything and feel like they're a part of it, but they don't have any legitimate flying experience in the past ten years and have no fucking idea what they're doing. I can't believe with all of the safety reforms and "no-rank-in-the-cockpit" briefings we get, this is still considered a "managed" risk and somehow worthwhile (they had their chance to go airline! They chose the Pentagon and a parking spot in front of the commissary!) Just get a guy who never flies but has more confidence than anyone on the entire base, and put him in the seat of an extremely difficult aircraft for a combat mission; all because he wants to.
Anyway, sorry for the rant (but really they wouldn't put a 55 year old ex-special-forces-guy back onto a Seal Team mission just for old times' sake). The Col who flew with us was actually pretty cool, probably best case scenario. He flew C-130's back in the day and recognized that he has no business at the controls, but he still wanted to go flying so he sat jump. Some crews get nervous and start fucking things up when an O-6 is watching them, kind of like being star-struck. Traver and I are not one of those crews. We were on our fucking A-game. Traver and I play varsity, and we like keeping it that way.
Later on, I was flying the rendezvous with the E-3 about 5 miles back and closing. Traver had ownership of the fuel panel and was moving product around in the tanks.
"Hey close the K/T switch, I think we have a stuck valve in 2," he said. I closed it, and started looking at the fuel panel to back him up. He continued messing with it. "Shit I think we just lost 3,000 pounds."
"Python, Whistler. Hey it looks like you guys are venting fuel, that's not intentional is it?" The receivers asked.
If they say it's coming from the left wing, we're done with this mission and our day just got a lot harder. "Whistler Python, no it's not. We were moving fuel but now we're trying to work it," I said. "Can you tell where it's coming from?"
"Oh yeah. It's definitely number 2."
Fuck. So went from suspected fuel leak to a confirmed fuel leak. And it's in the wing, which means it's a structural issue of the wing (we typically try to fly with no cracks in the wing), and it's right above a jet engine burning at 600 degrees Celsius. So this is what we in the industry call a problem.
The checklist for a main tank fuel leak is not something you want to read if you're aiming for peace of mind. "Slow to 255KIAS or lower, this prevents the wing from falling off"..."Limit bank angle and wing loading, this prevents the wing from falling off"..."Land as soon as possible. Remember? Because of the wing?"
We declared emergency and whipped up a clearance back to base. I did a very gradual 180, niiiiiiiice and eeeeeaaaassssyyyy. I think it's the closest I'll ever get to experiencing what defusing a bomb feels like. ("You either do it exactly right, or suddenly it's not your problem anymore.")
We had to land with the flaps at half mast, and at 300,000lbs things like runway length and braking factors come into play. So we dumped fuel. But you never say "dump fuel" over the radio, because the activists who listen to LiveATC.net will start making a bunch of noise when they realize how common it is, and then the media will run with it and grossly misrepresent an entire industry and it's just easier in the long run if you say "adjust gross weight". Everyone knows what it means. It is the epitome of aviation euphemism.
Then we shut down an engine, because of the whole flammable jet fuel pooling and vaporizing God-knows-where you don't want it. All of those systems and EP sims come in handy when you're no-shit trying to fly as smoothly as Godly possible with two throttles at 90%, one at idle, and one cutoff.
But the wing stayed on, and we landed to a parade of fire trucks and fanfare. The Colonel, the group commander, my squadron commander, and the D.O. all shook Traver's hand along with mine, with a sincere "Great job, we had 100% confidence in you guys."
There's a Game of Thrones quote that's really good and poetic. But depending on the circumstances it's more tongue-in-cheek than anything. It's usually thrown around jokingly in the modern age of "warfighting" in the Air Force.
"There is only one god, and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: not today."
Some days it's funny. Some days it's not.
Friday, December 20, 2019
Dear American Soldier,
Good evening.
I've been sitting Alpha Alert for the past two days. That's when you get a "day off" but you still have to go in at 7am and do a preflight or two and then you can't do anything but sit in your room because you may have to take off within an hour. Some people absolutely hate it. I like to pretend it's a spa day. But the spa is in like a hurricane flood zone and you may have to be evacuated at any moment; that's why the spa is so cheap and not very popular.
When we went in to the squadron to grab the classified stuff to go do our daily preflight today we found that we had a new care package sent to us. Strangers, schools, retirement communities, churches, all the typical people who like to feel like they're helping, send us care packages. I love getting them and going through them... But... Some of them are pretty abysmal. It makes you think, "What the fuck do they think we're doing out here!?"
Examples:
- A couple of mini hotel shampoo bottles from La Quinta. ("They couldn't have sent a couple of mini whisky bottles from Delta?" - Traver)
- Two golf balls, dirty, clearly used. As if we're in the middle of the desert with nothing but a shovel and two sticks, and all that's preventing us from golfing are the balls. ("Why would they send this? We can just get those at the golf course off-base." - me)
- A copy of the Military Times, dated December 6th. The same magazine with free copies littered all over base.
- Granola bars. Hundreds of thousands of granola bars. All crushed and stale, because they were flown here over two weeks on 3 different C-17's and then went through Qatari customs.
"One of these days, we're gonna get a big bottle of scotch and a box of cigars," Traver said.
"Has that ever happened in your 12 years of deploying?"
"...no... so it's bound to happen soon."
The sentiment is sweet. We'd definitely rather get them than not. And if anything, it gives us a laugh at the perception of our conditions by strangers back home. And every now and then, you find a score. Homemade chocolate peanut buttercups that didn't get crushed. A snow-globe with your plane inside. There are so many little random things that people send that are clearly very thoughtful, Christmas lights are the perfect example. Or a deck of cards, where each card is a picture of a famous lighthouse in America. These are usually kept in the squadron, or shared among the community in our dorm living rooms. Postcards from random people's towns across the US is one I appreciate as well. Even if it's some Bumfuk place in Virginia with a picture of the only church in town, it's still nice because whoever sent it must be very proud of it and wanted us to see it.
However for me, the letters are the best find. As in - real letters. That may not be surprising, given my personality and what I appreciate most, but I'm not the only one who digs through boxes looking for that one letter that somebody put time into rather than just signing their name and church on a Christmas card.
We get a lot of drawings and handwritten notes from kids. You can never go wrong sending one of those. The more hilarious and misguided the better. A crayon drawing of a stick figure holding a knife, and another stick figure wearing a turban bleeding out next to him grasping his stomach, with the words in adorable all-capital child letters "DEAR SOLDIER. I HOPE YOU SHOOT LOTS OF TERRORISTS. I LOVE YOU - RACHEL", that stuff gets tacked to the bulletin board. "Fuck yeah Rachel. All in a days work." She'll probably grow up and run on the Republican ticket in 2044.
Other's clearly know we're pilots. I don't know how the logistics work of which care packages and letters get sent to which squadrons, but it would appear a small handful of them are specifically written to us... kinda. They're usually drawings of planes either dropping bombs or on fire, not sure which one is supposed to be us. Children are very violent.
Even still, the best find is a thoughtful letter from an adult. They're rare, but occasionally there's a typed out, one or two page letter from someone tucked into the tightly packed stacks of envelopes. Most of us who scavenge for them through the boxes of tootsie-rolls and baby wipes are extremely likely to write back, and maybe send a picture in response; a trade of sorts, of the little things valuable to both parties, strangers on the opposite side of the globe.
Today I finally found one. Pam, from Truth or Consequences New Mexico (the town that's named after an NBC show and not the other way around). She's a first grade teacher at the Manzano Christian School (good news, her class is praying for us), and she wrote a page long letter all about the kids' holiday festivities, and that they got a bunch of snow which is a rare occurrence in TorC (that's how people from Truth or Consequences say Truth or Consequences). Anyway, it became my goal today to write her back and send a picture of me and the crew in the cockpit.
But instead of making it easy and leaving a return address or email, she just left the name of the school and the words "1 Timothy 4:12". So I spent a while trying to find her on Facebook and on the school's website and finally just sent them an info request explaining I'm deployed and got a letter and we have Wi-Fi so it'd really make my life easier if I could just email her back instead of going the whole piece of paper on a C-17 route.
I've learned if you're going to send something to the troops, there's a pretty good chance it's not going to Delta Force in a foxhole somewhere, and there is already an abundance of tootsie rolls and baby wipes. One well-thought-out trinket, or one decently substantial letter, is equal to thousands and thousands of granola bars.
That being said, anything's better than nothing. Maybe if my flight cancels tomorrow I'll go out with my shovel, a stick, and my two newly found golf balls and play a few holes.
I've been sitting Alpha Alert for the past two days. That's when you get a "day off" but you still have to go in at 7am and do a preflight or two and then you can't do anything but sit in your room because you may have to take off within an hour. Some people absolutely hate it. I like to pretend it's a spa day. But the spa is in like a hurricane flood zone and you may have to be evacuated at any moment; that's why the spa is so cheap and not very popular.
When we went in to the squadron to grab the classified stuff to go do our daily preflight today we found that we had a new care package sent to us. Strangers, schools, retirement communities, churches, all the typical people who like to feel like they're helping, send us care packages. I love getting them and going through them... But... Some of them are pretty abysmal. It makes you think, "What the fuck do they think we're doing out here!?"
Examples:
- A couple of mini hotel shampoo bottles from La Quinta. ("They couldn't have sent a couple of mini whisky bottles from Delta?" - Traver)
- Two golf balls, dirty, clearly used. As if we're in the middle of the desert with nothing but a shovel and two sticks, and all that's preventing us from golfing are the balls. ("Why would they send this? We can just get those at the golf course off-base." - me)
- A copy of the Military Times, dated December 6th. The same magazine with free copies littered all over base.
- Granola bars. Hundreds of thousands of granola bars. All crushed and stale, because they were flown here over two weeks on 3 different C-17's and then went through Qatari customs.
"One of these days, we're gonna get a big bottle of scotch and a box of cigars," Traver said.
"Has that ever happened in your 12 years of deploying?"
"...no... so it's bound to happen soon."
The sentiment is sweet. We'd definitely rather get them than not. And if anything, it gives us a laugh at the perception of our conditions by strangers back home. And every now and then, you find a score. Homemade chocolate peanut buttercups that didn't get crushed. A snow-globe with your plane inside. There are so many little random things that people send that are clearly very thoughtful, Christmas lights are the perfect example. Or a deck of cards, where each card is a picture of a famous lighthouse in America. These are usually kept in the squadron, or shared among the community in our dorm living rooms. Postcards from random people's towns across the US is one I appreciate as well. Even if it's some Bumfuk place in Virginia with a picture of the only church in town, it's still nice because whoever sent it must be very proud of it and wanted us to see it.
However for me, the letters are the best find. As in - real letters. That may not be surprising, given my personality and what I appreciate most, but I'm not the only one who digs through boxes looking for that one letter that somebody put time into rather than just signing their name and church on a Christmas card.
We get a lot of drawings and handwritten notes from kids. You can never go wrong sending one of those. The more hilarious and misguided the better. A crayon drawing of a stick figure holding a knife, and another stick figure wearing a turban bleeding out next to him grasping his stomach, with the words in adorable all-capital child letters "DEAR SOLDIER. I HOPE YOU SHOOT LOTS OF TERRORISTS. I LOVE YOU - RACHEL", that stuff gets tacked to the bulletin board. "Fuck yeah Rachel. All in a days work." She'll probably grow up and run on the Republican ticket in 2044.
Other's clearly know we're pilots. I don't know how the logistics work of which care packages and letters get sent to which squadrons, but it would appear a small handful of them are specifically written to us... kinda. They're usually drawings of planes either dropping bombs or on fire, not sure which one is supposed to be us. Children are very violent.
Even still, the best find is a thoughtful letter from an adult. They're rare, but occasionally there's a typed out, one or two page letter from someone tucked into the tightly packed stacks of envelopes. Most of us who scavenge for them through the boxes of tootsie-rolls and baby wipes are extremely likely to write back, and maybe send a picture in response; a trade of sorts, of the little things valuable to both parties, strangers on the opposite side of the globe.
Today I finally found one. Pam, from Truth or Consequences New Mexico (the town that's named after an NBC show and not the other way around). She's a first grade teacher at the Manzano Christian School (good news, her class is praying for us), and she wrote a page long letter all about the kids' holiday festivities, and that they got a bunch of snow which is a rare occurrence in TorC (that's how people from Truth or Consequences say Truth or Consequences). Anyway, it became my goal today to write her back and send a picture of me and the crew in the cockpit.
But instead of making it easy and leaving a return address or email, she just left the name of the school and the words "1 Timothy 4:12". So I spent a while trying to find her on Facebook and on the school's website and finally just sent them an info request explaining I'm deployed and got a letter and we have Wi-Fi so it'd really make my life easier if I could just email her back instead of going the whole piece of paper on a C-17 route.
I've learned if you're going to send something to the troops, there's a pretty good chance it's not going to Delta Force in a foxhole somewhere, and there is already an abundance of tootsie rolls and baby wipes. One well-thought-out trinket, or one decently substantial letter, is equal to thousands and thousands of granola bars.
That being said, anything's better than nothing. Maybe if my flight cancels tomorrow I'll go out with my shovel, a stick, and my two newly found golf balls and play a few holes.
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
O M D B
As-Salaam.
I've spent about a third of my last 36 hours in the air. Building those airline hours. Today was a long and shitty one, albeit fun at times and just plain chill and relaxing for all of it. We were supposed to fly at about 1300, 9am alert, so naturally we all went to bed between midnight and one last night. But someone called in sick (believe it or not even Air Force pilots can play that card) and we were alerted by surprise at 5:30am, taking off in less than three hours. It didn't seem that bad until we discovered it was over an 8 hour flight. So we'd be bringing all three meals for the day on the plane with us, and we found out about it at the last minute.
It was an entertaining and secret-ish mission however, with the French. They were quite entertaining. Sipping their pinot and smoking their gauloises during AR while flying with their knees. I'm sure there's a clever baguette joke out there but I'm honestly just too tired to work for it. They were only twenty minutes late. We thought that was pretty good since that meant they had to have taken off within an hour or so of their scheduled takeoff time. We had 8 hours to come up with jokes on the French but I can't remember any of them, something about berets. Just use your imagination.
Yesterday was a great flight. We got tasked to do training over Muscat with the Omani Air Force. I realized almost immediately that this would put us directly over Dubai twice. I was working the radios all day so I had a little more control of the sight-seeing,
"Muscat control, what is the lowest you'll let us fly? FL200? Yeah we request that."
"Muscat control, request direct Tango Uniform Delta India Sierra. For uhhhhhhh... weather."
"What's at TUDIS?" Traver asked.
"The Palm Island."
So we got our cool pictures of the Palm and the Burj Khalifa from the cockpit, and now I've flown over Dubai. I had my music plugged into my Bose A20's, and had all the songs playing that Karen and I listened to driving through the skyscrapers on the 18-lane Sheikh Zayed freeway on our honeymoon.
It entirely felt like it wasn't even a day at work, deployed. I woke up at 4am excited. I was going to fly over Dubai, I was going to see a God's eye view of Muscat, the Al-Hajar Mountains of Oman, and I was going to refuel the entirety of the Omani Air Force (it's only six planes). It's days like this that really serve as a reminder to why it's worth it being a pilot. I could not have paid enough money to experience that. If Karen and I went on a trip to Dubai again, and there was some excursion package out of Skydive-Dubai or whatever where you paid money to fly a plane over the Burjes and the Palms, and then cruised over the dunes to Muscat, we'd do it!
But that doesn't exist, unless you're an Air Force pilot. Then it's just a Tuesday.
I've spent about a third of my last 36 hours in the air. Building those airline hours. Today was a long and shitty one, albeit fun at times and just plain chill and relaxing for all of it. We were supposed to fly at about 1300, 9am alert, so naturally we all went to bed between midnight and one last night. But someone called in sick (believe it or not even Air Force pilots can play that card) and we were alerted by surprise at 5:30am, taking off in less than three hours. It didn't seem that bad until we discovered it was over an 8 hour flight. So we'd be bringing all three meals for the day on the plane with us, and we found out about it at the last minute.
It was an entertaining and secret-ish mission however, with the French. They were quite entertaining. Sipping their pinot and smoking their gauloises during AR while flying with their knees. I'm sure there's a clever baguette joke out there but I'm honestly just too tired to work for it. They were only twenty minutes late. We thought that was pretty good since that meant they had to have taken off within an hour or so of their scheduled takeoff time. We had 8 hours to come up with jokes on the French but I can't remember any of them, something about berets. Just use your imagination.
Yesterday was a great flight. We got tasked to do training over Muscat with the Omani Air Force. I realized almost immediately that this would put us directly over Dubai twice. I was working the radios all day so I had a little more control of the sight-seeing,
"Muscat control, what is the lowest you'll let us fly? FL200? Yeah we request that."
"Muscat control, request direct Tango Uniform Delta India Sierra. For uhhhhhhh... weather."
"What's at TUDIS?" Traver asked.
"The Palm Island."
So we got our cool pictures of the Palm and the Burj Khalifa from the cockpit, and now I've flown over Dubai. I had my music plugged into my Bose A20's, and had all the songs playing that Karen and I listened to driving through the skyscrapers on the 18-lane Sheikh Zayed freeway on our honeymoon.
It entirely felt like it wasn't even a day at work, deployed. I woke up at 4am excited. I was going to fly over Dubai, I was going to see a God's eye view of Muscat, the Al-Hajar Mountains of Oman, and I was going to refuel the entirety of the Omani Air Force (it's only six planes). It's days like this that really serve as a reminder to why it's worth it being a pilot. I could not have paid enough money to experience that. If Karen and I went on a trip to Dubai again, and there was some excursion package out of Skydive-Dubai or whatever where you paid money to fly a plane over the Burjes and the Palms, and then cruised over the dunes to Muscat, we'd do it!
But that doesn't exist, unless you're an Air Force pilot. Then it's just a Tuesday.
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Bat-Shit Weather
As-Salaam Alaiykum.
Just got on the ground an hour ago. A solid 8.2 hours of exciting wartime flying. Actually it was about 2.3 hours of exciting wartime flying and 5.9 hours of flying in circles wondering how close to the contrail zone we are, and if we found it and it happened to be in our block altitude exactly how we'd set the FMS up to make a giant penis in the sky. Don't judge. Every pilot has at least thought about it.
But the 2.3 hours on the front and tail ends were some of my favorite flying: bat-shit weather! It was starting to rain (in the desert, again, I thought I'd only see that once but no) as we were starting engines and a downpour started. We were supposed to do some more black-ops tactical shit all night but then found out that it canceled and we were rescheduled to escort F-16's into-country and keep them topped off so they could play hall monitor in some airspace in the middle of nowhere. We took off at around 6pm, right at GCC rush hour and HOOOLLY SHIT was Qatari Departure not prepared for it. There were storms absolutely blanketing the Gulf with about sixty A380's from Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai all trying to just get the fuck out of there.
And then our poor F-16's who took off with us and were were clearly not used to this type of thing. Fighter pilots are all macho until they get the least bit uncomfortable and then they turn into baby ducks and cling to the tanker like a mama bird. I was flying the deparutre, dealing with crazy vectors and turbulence and hail and St Elmo's Fire. Since I was pilot flying I didn't have to worry about dealing with ATC on the radios but I was responsible for COMM1 and directing the formation of F-16's. Traver, my AC, was too busy dealing with a controller out of her skill level to have time to help me, so I was on my own leading the formation and to clear in the F-16s and steer them onto us through the weather. So that was fun, I love departures like that; every single person in the air over a metropolis is too busy to think about anything other than flying and getting out safely. Too busy for pictures, no glareshield GoPro vidoes; just you, your memory of it, your crew and a formation fighting through it.
Then coming back in it was more and more of it. I was still flying when we FENCE'd out and at this point Traver trusted me to exclusively own and operate COMM1 to run the formation. The F-16's were very concerned about weather over the Gulf. We normally don't even think about that sort of thing because, to us, either we'll get in and dodge the weather or we'll hold for 20 minutes or we'll divert. But F-16's are single cockpit and single engine and have like an hour of fuel. They get concerned quicker. So I agreed to get the weather for them. But we couldn't use datalink (like we'd usually use to get weather) because of the security protocols. I asked our controller for some weather info but Baghdad Center doesn't have WiFi so they couldn't help. I told the fighters that we're struggling with resources for getting weather. They asked us to please keep trying (MAMA BIRD cough cough). So now we're looking up classified frequencies of US Navy ships in the Gulf and trying to contact them. One finally worked and it sounded like an 18 year old girl on the other end. She said "Weather? In Doha? Uhh yeah I can get that for you!"
We spent the next five minutes debating whether she was contacting the weather squadron on base, or just googling "Doha weather" on her iPhone. She finally came back and said it was scattered at 15,000ft, light winds (it was not). We eventually got on frequency with a company 135 about 150nm ahead of us on the arrival. It actually happened to be a MacDill crew, Ryan and Rizvi, both of whom I'm good friends with, so I was able to get some weather updates through them.
"Yeah dude it's like fucking Independence Day out here."
"Oh." I said, and then called the fighters back. "Nickel flight, Python."
"Yeah we heard that. Do you guys mind if we stick with you and arrive as a formation through the weather?"
Not at all. So we dragged them almost all the way through the crap. It was worse than when we took off. Once we broke through and had a clear path to the base we worked their IFR approach clearance for them, I cleared them off ("Nickel Python you guys are cleared off Doha 123.63 squawk 8231 good luck getting in CYA!") and we let them rocket ahead to shoot the approach first so they could make terra firma.
Upon further debate once we were all on the ground, we mostly agree that the chick on the Navy vessel just went outside with binoculars.
For this next segment I need to explain some background. When I was packing my uniforms for the deployment, I put my three separate covers (uniform hats) aside to bring each variety: a normal OCP patrol cap, an OCP baseball cap, and a boonie...
"Why are you bringing a fishing hat?" Karen asked.
"It's not a fishing hat. It's a boonie. It's tactical. It's supposed to make it look like you aren't a person wearing a hat."
"But... it's a fishing hat."
"No... Vietnam veterans may HAPPEN to wear them when they go fishing, but that's because it's so tactical. You can jump in the bushes to hide from commies and the boonie will make you blend right in!"
Anyway. Today my flight was supposed to be some black-ops cosmic-top-secret shit (and it was gonna be TOTALLY BADASS until it got canceled and we switched to drag the F-16's). So since I was gonna be fighting the war all blacked out, I knew I needed to pack my equipment to match. I needed to dress tactical. So I dug the boonie hat out of the very bottom of my suitcase and was ready to go to war. I sent Karen and picture and then left for the crew van.
As soon as Traver saw me, "Why the fuck are you wearing that."
"We're doing black-ops! To be honest I'm surprised you're not wearing it. It's tactical."
"It's a fishing hat."
Then when we lost our cool mission Traver said it was because I wore the hat.
Just got on the ground an hour ago. A solid 8.2 hours of exciting wartime flying. Actually it was about 2.3 hours of exciting wartime flying and 5.9 hours of flying in circles wondering how close to the contrail zone we are, and if we found it and it happened to be in our block altitude exactly how we'd set the FMS up to make a giant penis in the sky. Don't judge. Every pilot has at least thought about it.
But the 2.3 hours on the front and tail ends were some of my favorite flying: bat-shit weather! It was starting to rain (in the desert, again, I thought I'd only see that once but no) as we were starting engines and a downpour started. We were supposed to do some more black-ops tactical shit all night but then found out that it canceled and we were rescheduled to escort F-16's into-country and keep them topped off so they could play hall monitor in some airspace in the middle of nowhere. We took off at around 6pm, right at GCC rush hour and HOOOLLY SHIT was Qatari Departure not prepared for it. There were storms absolutely blanketing the Gulf with about sixty A380's from Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai all trying to just get the fuck out of there.
And then our poor F-16's who took off with us and were were clearly not used to this type of thing. Fighter pilots are all macho until they get the least bit uncomfortable and then they turn into baby ducks and cling to the tanker like a mama bird. I was flying the deparutre, dealing with crazy vectors and turbulence and hail and St Elmo's Fire. Since I was pilot flying I didn't have to worry about dealing with ATC on the radios but I was responsible for COMM1 and directing the formation of F-16's. Traver, my AC, was too busy dealing with a controller out of her skill level to have time to help me, so I was on my own leading the formation and to clear in the F-16s and steer them onto us through the weather. So that was fun, I love departures like that; every single person in the air over a metropolis is too busy to think about anything other than flying and getting out safely. Too busy for pictures, no glareshield GoPro vidoes; just you, your memory of it, your crew and a formation fighting through it.
Then coming back in it was more and more of it. I was still flying when we FENCE'd out and at this point Traver trusted me to exclusively own and operate COMM1 to run the formation. The F-16's were very concerned about weather over the Gulf. We normally don't even think about that sort of thing because, to us, either we'll get in and dodge the weather or we'll hold for 20 minutes or we'll divert. But F-16's are single cockpit and single engine and have like an hour of fuel. They get concerned quicker. So I agreed to get the weather for them. But we couldn't use datalink (like we'd usually use to get weather) because of the security protocols. I asked our controller for some weather info but Baghdad Center doesn't have WiFi so they couldn't help. I told the fighters that we're struggling with resources for getting weather. They asked us to please keep trying (MAMA BIRD cough cough). So now we're looking up classified frequencies of US Navy ships in the Gulf and trying to contact them. One finally worked and it sounded like an 18 year old girl on the other end. She said "Weather? In Doha? Uhh yeah I can get that for you!"
We spent the next five minutes debating whether she was contacting the weather squadron on base, or just googling "Doha weather" on her iPhone. She finally came back and said it was scattered at 15,000ft, light winds (it was not). We eventually got on frequency with a company 135 about 150nm ahead of us on the arrival. It actually happened to be a MacDill crew, Ryan and Rizvi, both of whom I'm good friends with, so I was able to get some weather updates through them.
"Yeah dude it's like fucking Independence Day out here."
"Oh." I said, and then called the fighters back. "Nickel flight, Python."
"Yeah we heard that. Do you guys mind if we stick with you and arrive as a formation through the weather?"
Not at all. So we dragged them almost all the way through the crap. It was worse than when we took off. Once we broke through and had a clear path to the base we worked their IFR approach clearance for them, I cleared them off ("Nickel Python you guys are cleared off Doha 123.63 squawk 8231 good luck getting in CYA!") and we let them rocket ahead to shoot the approach first so they could make terra firma.
Upon further debate once we were all on the ground, we mostly agree that the chick on the Navy vessel just went outside with binoculars.
For this next segment I need to explain some background. When I was packing my uniforms for the deployment, I put my three separate covers (uniform hats) aside to bring each variety: a normal OCP patrol cap, an OCP baseball cap, and a boonie...
"Why are you bringing a fishing hat?" Karen asked.
"It's not a fishing hat. It's a boonie. It's tactical. It's supposed to make it look like you aren't a person wearing a hat."
"But... it's a fishing hat."
"No... Vietnam veterans may HAPPEN to wear them when they go fishing, but that's because it's so tactical. You can jump in the bushes to hide from commies and the boonie will make you blend right in!"
Anyway. Today my flight was supposed to be some black-ops cosmic-top-secret shit (and it was gonna be TOTALLY BADASS until it got canceled and we switched to drag the F-16's). So since I was gonna be fighting the war all blacked out, I knew I needed to pack my equipment to match. I needed to dress tactical. So I dug the boonie hat out of the very bottom of my suitcase and was ready to go to war. I sent Karen and picture and then left for the crew van.
As soon as Traver saw me, "Why the fuck are you wearing that."
"We're doing black-ops! To be honest I'm surprised you're not wearing it. It's tactical."
"It's a fishing hat."
Then when we lost our cool mission Traver said it was because I wore the hat.
Friday, December 13, 2019
As-Salaam Alaiykum
Good evening.
I landed about an hour ago. It was cloudy over the Gulf and most of the peninsula, so the views weren't as good today. But we did fly right over Kuwait at FL230 during the day which yielded a nice view of more Arabian skyscrapers, but I couldn't find the Towers which was a disappointment. I'll know where to look next time.
I enjoy flying over Basra, Iraq. You can see the Shatt Al-Arab, which is the river that forms from the merging of the Tigris and Eurphrates. You can follow both rivers northwest; and at night you can distinguish the rivers by the steady stream of lights along both with the stark contrast of dark desert between. Basra is currently getting fucked over by Turkey (who isn't right now?) because they've been stealing a major portion of the water from both rivers upstream of the Syrian border. Now the filtration infrastructure that was built in Iraq during the restoration period are no longer sufficient to keep up with the trash-to-fresh-water ratio, and by the time it gets to Basra it's all dry and toxic. And Basra's a pretty big city, with like two MILLION people. So that'd be like if New Orleans could no longer use the Mississippi delta for their water source. This is all in the news, just not in America (it's an election year that isn't 2004, no one gives a shit about Basra...)
I brushed up on my Arabic last night. I've been saying shuk'ran to the dining staff when they get me my meals, but they never seem to really respond to it. I couldn't tell if I remembered it wrong and have been mispronouncing it, or if the "local" workers are not actually Qatari, and actually from Bangladesh or Myanmar or somewhere that doesn't speak Arabic. I looked it up. I've been saying it perfectly. Then I remembered - it's Qatar, of course the minimum wage workers aren't GCC citizens.
For local languages, I like to learn "thank you" and "cheers" at a bare minimum. I already knew "shuk'ran", and they don't drink in the Muslim world, so "cheers" is N/A. But since I've been flying, I've picked up the habit of learning "thanks have a good day" or something similar for all countries I fly over, so I can say my sign off on the radio in the local dialect. This is very important to me. Well, Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait and Dubai and Saudi, like a proper GCC territory, import all of their controllers from the UK or Australia, so I've just been saying "cheers have a g'nite mayte" and that's pretty much covered me locally. But once I get a little further out, as expected, it gets a little more ethnic.
For Baghdad Control, sometimes Kuwait, I've been saying "as-salaam"; which is literally saying "PEACE!" and changing freqs, but more religious. "As-Salaam alaiykum" is the religious and standard greeting in Muslim countries, Arabic for "peace be unto you"; and the response is "Wa-alaiykum salam" for "and unto you peace". So it's basically a Catholic Mass every time you run into someone. In radio brevity, "as-salaam" is what they say, so it's what I say.
I imagine some people may think it's odd that anyone in the US military would take the time to wish an Iraqi Muslim "peace be unto you" over the radio. Something about flirting with the enemy seems to be from where the uncomfortability stems. But Iraq and Islam aren't the bad guys, ISIS and Al-Qaeda are, and it's a lot safer and quicker to get through Iraq's airspace with their assistance, so there's really no logical reason saying "as-salaam" over the radio while on a USAF callsign would be weird or frowned upon. Quite the contrary, it's in our best interest in reality.
When we went into the intel vault for our daily intelligence brief today they asked us, "oh you guys were on Python XX flying to XXXXX the other night weren't you?" We said yes. "You guys had flags on the flight, we need you to sign the certificates. There are a lot of them." They handed us a clipboard filled with a stack of diploma-esque military certificates, with the crew's name typed out below a blank signature line on each. My name was in the middle of the three, "1st Lieutenant William D Loyd - Copilot".
I asked what I'm supposed to do with it. "Just harness your inner Lebron James, and sign them all." So I did. There were a lot of them so it took me a few minutes to get through them all. Each one had a different family's name: "In honor of... The Smith Family... this hereby certifies that this flag was flown into combat in Operation Inherent Resolve, witnessed and acknowledged by the following crew...etc".
I asked about it. It's considered an honor to receive a flag flown on a US Air Force aircraft on an actual combat mission. So for Gold Star families, or families affected by the war, or local businesses that show significant support for deployed troops (the list goes on but you get the point), we fly with a bunch of American flags somewhere on the jet (usually in the boom pod or somewhere that it can be seen by people during the mission) and then send it to those families with the certificate signed by the crew. So my name's on the mantel of a dozen or so families somewhere.
Well, that sums up about everything I can talk about. Until next time, as-salaam alaiykum...
I landed about an hour ago. It was cloudy over the Gulf and most of the peninsula, so the views weren't as good today. But we did fly right over Kuwait at FL230 during the day which yielded a nice view of more Arabian skyscrapers, but I couldn't find the Towers which was a disappointment. I'll know where to look next time.
I enjoy flying over Basra, Iraq. You can see the Shatt Al-Arab, which is the river that forms from the merging of the Tigris and Eurphrates. You can follow both rivers northwest; and at night you can distinguish the rivers by the steady stream of lights along both with the stark contrast of dark desert between. Basra is currently getting fucked over by Turkey (who isn't right now?) because they've been stealing a major portion of the water from both rivers upstream of the Syrian border. Now the filtration infrastructure that was built in Iraq during the restoration period are no longer sufficient to keep up with the trash-to-fresh-water ratio, and by the time it gets to Basra it's all dry and toxic. And Basra's a pretty big city, with like two MILLION people. So that'd be like if New Orleans could no longer use the Mississippi delta for their water source. This is all in the news, just not in America (it's an election year that isn't 2004, no one gives a shit about Basra...)
I brushed up on my Arabic last night. I've been saying shuk'ran to the dining staff when they get me my meals, but they never seem to really respond to it. I couldn't tell if I remembered it wrong and have been mispronouncing it, or if the "local" workers are not actually Qatari, and actually from Bangladesh or Myanmar or somewhere that doesn't speak Arabic. I looked it up. I've been saying it perfectly. Then I remembered - it's Qatar, of course the minimum wage workers aren't GCC citizens.
For local languages, I like to learn "thank you" and "cheers" at a bare minimum. I already knew "shuk'ran", and they don't drink in the Muslim world, so "cheers" is N/A. But since I've been flying, I've picked up the habit of learning "thanks have a good day" or something similar for all countries I fly over, so I can say my sign off on the radio in the local dialect. This is very important to me. Well, Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait and Dubai and Saudi, like a proper GCC territory, import all of their controllers from the UK or Australia, so I've just been saying "cheers have a g'nite mayte" and that's pretty much covered me locally. But once I get a little further out, as expected, it gets a little more ethnic.
For Baghdad Control, sometimes Kuwait, I've been saying "as-salaam"; which is literally saying "PEACE!" and changing freqs, but more religious. "As-Salaam alaiykum" is the religious and standard greeting in Muslim countries, Arabic for "peace be unto you"; and the response is "Wa-alaiykum salam" for "and unto you peace". So it's basically a Catholic Mass every time you run into someone. In radio brevity, "as-salaam" is what they say, so it's what I say.
I imagine some people may think it's odd that anyone in the US military would take the time to wish an Iraqi Muslim "peace be unto you" over the radio. Something about flirting with the enemy seems to be from where the uncomfortability stems. But Iraq and Islam aren't the bad guys, ISIS and Al-Qaeda are, and it's a lot safer and quicker to get through Iraq's airspace with their assistance, so there's really no logical reason saying "as-salaam" over the radio while on a USAF callsign would be weird or frowned upon. Quite the contrary, it's in our best interest in reality.
When we went into the intel vault for our daily intelligence brief today they asked us, "oh you guys were on Python XX flying to XXXXX the other night weren't you?" We said yes. "You guys had flags on the flight, we need you to sign the certificates. There are a lot of them." They handed us a clipboard filled with a stack of diploma-esque military certificates, with the crew's name typed out below a blank signature line on each. My name was in the middle of the three, "1st Lieutenant William D Loyd - Copilot".
I asked what I'm supposed to do with it. "Just harness your inner Lebron James, and sign them all." So I did. There were a lot of them so it took me a few minutes to get through them all. Each one had a different family's name: "In honor of... The Smith Family... this hereby certifies that this flag was flown into combat in Operation Inherent Resolve, witnessed and acknowledged by the following crew...etc".
I asked about it. It's considered an honor to receive a flag flown on a US Air Force aircraft on an actual combat mission. So for Gold Star families, or families affected by the war, or local businesses that show significant support for deployed troops (the list goes on but you get the point), we fly with a bunch of American flags somewhere on the jet (usually in the boom pod or somewhere that it can be seen by people during the mission) and then send it to those families with the certificate signed by the crew. So my name's on the mantel of a dozen or so families somewhere.
Well, that sums up about everything I can talk about. Until next time, as-salaam alaiykum...
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Remembering the Colors (3)
Good evening. I'm still in Qatar.
I haven't been writing consistently for a while, despite churning out a few good pieces here and there. But I've decided I need to get back into it, regularly, especially while traveling. Even if they're short, the least eventful days of my life are more eventful than every single day of high school when I would crank out novels in the back of Hobbs' class. Plus it's healthy. It's good for the mind. So, even if it feels like nothing's going on in my life, and I have nothing to put down to paper, I'm still gonna try to do it.
I was reading my travel journals just now. Like my no-shit-pen-on-paper-in-a-leather-bound-notebook travel journals. They're short, because writing by hand has been obsolete since circa 1440 and cramping is a thing. Yet despite such brevity, excitement is captured. Pure excitement. A level of excitement and joy that can't be faked, that you can see it beaming from the ink. You can see it in the palm trees and skyscraper pictures I quickly drew in the opening pages. In it's blatancy I notice myself with a peculiar anxiety: I don't want to lose it.
In my writings throughout both high school and college, there is a theme incessantly inscribed. Even when I don't say it outright, it's very apparent: this thing... this, act of travel and experience and immersion and nonstop movement, is what I want to do for the rest of my life. My memory of growing up was diphase - at home, and not.
The memories of the latter had a brighter tint to it. And it you can quickly sniff out the fact that I firmly believed that living a life of movement would result in an entire life in that such tint: in color. When I wrote abroad, it was in color. And at home between epic trips it's not like I perceived life in black in white, but perhaps it was missing the red pixels, other days missing the blue, some days simply came out as orange. The conclusion was then drawn, continue to live in motion, and I'll always live vibrantly. Life in color.
Hence the anxiety that stirs about when I find myself in, say, Germany five years later, and the color is still faded. Memories still come out with a shade, and every quick remedy to slop the colors back on the pages failed. Travel was my fix to life! The only tool in my toolbox that I fostered growing up to combat this! That would be quite a shock to anyone. But upon further analysis, it's really not that big of a game-changer. The recipe to the elixir of life in color was simply a bit misinterpreted. I thought, nay believed, that movement and exciting travel would always keep the colors of my life bright. That is perhaps a critical oversimplification of the issue at hand.
In the epic adventures of years and years ago, the ones in full color, I was doing much more than just traveling. I was writing, sharing, learning, embracing and challenging myself. You could pick a thousand little intricacies of life and point to one thing, like... sleep, and say "well waking up at 5:00 in the morning is the secret to life" because every good day you've had involved waking up early. But that ignores every other aspect that may have lead to the result.
That's not to say that all of the colors aren't ever-present, all of the time. It just doesn't feel like they are; and we are nothing but our perception of ourselves, ego, constantly updating and being overwritten - colors erased. If a painting looks blue, it's blue. Our minds are not evolved to debate illusions. They're designed to evaluate things quickly, print out the picture, and put it on a shelf to fade even more. That would explain why we have memories that come out dull, they might be missing some of the colors.
So here I am. Writing in my little college dorm room in an attempt to make my life remembered in a little more color. But that is just one ingredient in the elixir, and I believe that your ability to remember the colorful things that happen throughout is no small part. If you can't recall the colors, than of course you won't perceive life as colorful.
And that brings me to the primary purpose of writing on a regular basis: Remembering the colors.
I flew yesterday. I saw the colors of Doha lit up at night with its' neon light shows and their super-stadiums (WHICH IS BUILT BY SLAVES - cough cough - I didn't say that) all lit up. Working the radios were easier than I expected. The local English is pretty acceptable, even in the sketchy countries. And on approach through Dubai or Bahrain or Doha it's all British controllers who took their expat tax bennies and fled the shitty European weather. Then after landing we went to the Fox for some beers to celebrate our first combat mission. The Fox is the vernacular for the Fox Sports Bar, which is a Fox sponsored sports bar in the middle of the army-ish side of the base. Leave it to Fox Media to capitalize off of American troops with the allure of German beer and British sports.
There are two residential complexes at the Deid. There's the CC and the BPC. The CC stands for "Coalition Complex" which is an Army-bullshit name for 30-to-a-room boarding if I've ever heard one. I'm living in the BPC, which is a large complex of new dorms, complete with private showers and bathrooms and kitchens and single rooms. No one knows what BPC stands for, but it's generally accepted knowledge that it stands for "Better People Complex".
Today I was supposed to have a show time of around 1600, and fly, but it was cancelled when I woke up at 11:00. I'm worried about getting seasonal affective disorder, despite being in an incredibly sunny location. The crew dorms are all blacked out with no windows so that you can fully adjust to whatever schedule you end up flying on. So if you don't go outside, you don't see the sun. On days where you're just waiting around for your flight to get un-canceled, it's easy to just chill out inside and watch Netflix. You could conceivably go days without seeing the sun if you don't pay attention, or if you fly late nights for a while.
To combat this I woke around the base for like 5 hours while listening to audiobooks, until the sun set. And that was my day.
I haven't been writing consistently for a while, despite churning out a few good pieces here and there. But I've decided I need to get back into it, regularly, especially while traveling. Even if they're short, the least eventful days of my life are more eventful than every single day of high school when I would crank out novels in the back of Hobbs' class. Plus it's healthy. It's good for the mind. So, even if it feels like nothing's going on in my life, and I have nothing to put down to paper, I'm still gonna try to do it.
I was reading my travel journals just now. Like my no-shit-pen-on-paper-in-a-leather-bound-notebook travel journals. They're short, because writing by hand has been obsolete since circa 1440 and cramping is a thing. Yet despite such brevity, excitement is captured. Pure excitement. A level of excitement and joy that can't be faked, that you can see it beaming from the ink. You can see it in the palm trees and skyscraper pictures I quickly drew in the opening pages. In it's blatancy I notice myself with a peculiar anxiety: I don't want to lose it.
In my writings throughout both high school and college, there is a theme incessantly inscribed. Even when I don't say it outright, it's very apparent: this thing... this, act of travel and experience and immersion and nonstop movement, is what I want to do for the rest of my life. My memory of growing up was diphase - at home, and not.
The memories of the latter had a brighter tint to it. And it you can quickly sniff out the fact that I firmly believed that living a life of movement would result in an entire life in that such tint: in color. When I wrote abroad, it was in color. And at home between epic trips it's not like I perceived life in black in white, but perhaps it was missing the red pixels, other days missing the blue, some days simply came out as orange. The conclusion was then drawn, continue to live in motion, and I'll always live vibrantly. Life in color.
Hence the anxiety that stirs about when I find myself in, say, Germany five years later, and the color is still faded. Memories still come out with a shade, and every quick remedy to slop the colors back on the pages failed. Travel was my fix to life! The only tool in my toolbox that I fostered growing up to combat this! That would be quite a shock to anyone. But upon further analysis, it's really not that big of a game-changer. The recipe to the elixir of life in color was simply a bit misinterpreted. I thought, nay believed, that movement and exciting travel would always keep the colors of my life bright. That is perhaps a critical oversimplification of the issue at hand.
In the epic adventures of years and years ago, the ones in full color, I was doing much more than just traveling. I was writing, sharing, learning, embracing and challenging myself. You could pick a thousand little intricacies of life and point to one thing, like... sleep, and say "well waking up at 5:00 in the morning is the secret to life" because every good day you've had involved waking up early. But that ignores every other aspect that may have lead to the result.
That's not to say that all of the colors aren't ever-present, all of the time. It just doesn't feel like they are; and we are nothing but our perception of ourselves, ego, constantly updating and being overwritten - colors erased. If a painting looks blue, it's blue. Our minds are not evolved to debate illusions. They're designed to evaluate things quickly, print out the picture, and put it on a shelf to fade even more. That would explain why we have memories that come out dull, they might be missing some of the colors.
So here I am. Writing in my little college dorm room in an attempt to make my life remembered in a little more color. But that is just one ingredient in the elixir, and I believe that your ability to remember the colorful things that happen throughout is no small part. If you can't recall the colors, than of course you won't perceive life as colorful.
And that brings me to the primary purpose of writing on a regular basis: Remembering the colors.
I flew yesterday. I saw the colors of Doha lit up at night with its' neon light shows and their super-stadiums (WHICH IS BUILT BY SLAVES - cough cough - I didn't say that) all lit up. Working the radios were easier than I expected. The local English is pretty acceptable, even in the sketchy countries. And on approach through Dubai or Bahrain or Doha it's all British controllers who took their expat tax bennies and fled the shitty European weather. Then after landing we went to the Fox for some beers to celebrate our first combat mission. The Fox is the vernacular for the Fox Sports Bar, which is a Fox sponsored sports bar in the middle of the army-ish side of the base. Leave it to Fox Media to capitalize off of American troops with the allure of German beer and British sports.
There are two residential complexes at the Deid. There's the CC and the BPC. The CC stands for "Coalition Complex" which is an Army-bullshit name for 30-to-a-room boarding if I've ever heard one. I'm living in the BPC, which is a large complex of new dorms, complete with private showers and bathrooms and kitchens and single rooms. No one knows what BPC stands for, but it's generally accepted knowledge that it stands for "Better People Complex".
Today I was supposed to have a show time of around 1600, and fly, but it was cancelled when I woke up at 11:00. I'm worried about getting seasonal affective disorder, despite being in an incredibly sunny location. The crew dorms are all blacked out with no windows so that you can fully adjust to whatever schedule you end up flying on. So if you don't go outside, you don't see the sun. On days where you're just waiting around for your flight to get un-canceled, it's easy to just chill out inside and watch Netflix. You could conceivably go days without seeing the sun if you don't pay attention, or if you fly late nights for a while.
To combat this I woke around the base for like 5 hours while listening to audiobooks, until the sun set. And that was my day.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Athens Nightlife
So we went out last night. I was falling asleep at about 8:00 after working out, until Gio texted me, "Dude, it's ATHENS, we HAVE to." And of course I was like, "Yeah, I know, I'm coming." They sent me a car since they were already down in Centro.
The first bar was really cool, called Noel if you want to look it up. It had very eccentric yet classy decor, expensive ancient vases and shit everywhere. And the cherry on top was that they played oldies dance hall music, like American 50's and 60's pop. We figured it was to feel American and old-timey, but we liked it.
Anyway, next bar, rooftop, great view, also playing 50's music. "Huh, what a coincidence, maybe they ripped the idea off of the other place." We met some Greeks who were very nice and we did the whole talk about our country then learn about their country (Greek politics are fucked btw). They recommended non-touristy, REAL nightlife places, like a list of five or six places.
We went to the first, nothing, it was dead. Went to the second place, closed. Started walking towards the third and as we round the corner we see a massive crowd of young people, all Greek, overflowing into the street around this club. "Okay, that's the one." I was the only blonde person on the block.
We go in and it's a live band playing Greek soft rock, it was okay, but the locals didn't seem to pay attention. Then they say something over the microphone and introduced the headliner. A Greek rock band came out on stage and everyone cheered.
And then, to our total utter surprise, they started playing... Great Balls of Fire by Jerry Lewis, including the whole piano solo. And the Greeks went ballistic, dancing like it was 1957. The lead singer on stage was all over the place like Elvis. Then they played Jailhouse Rock, a few others I don't remember, and within 5 songs we were all doing The Twist. We had to question whether or not we somehow went back in time.
Eventually we asked a local, "Oh yes, this music everyone's favorite" and then it made sense, the youth in Greek just really like partying to American 50's music. Culture is so weird and unpredictable. Thought you might find that interesting. Maybe it'll make it into my "Clubbing Around the World" book.
Thursday, July 11, 2019
The War
A war is being waged right now. Without a theater, without arms; but with two sides each of which have an enduring cause and lasting effect on the war's sole participant. I haven't yet discovered the exact extent or locality of it. I know that I'm a part of it, or rather that it's a part of me, and I know that I am not alone in that fact. But whether or not this is something embodied in every human being who has ever lived is unknown to me. Maybe the war is a front of the modern age. Maybe it's a plague, afflicting only the prone or the unlucky and trading blows among the alcoholics, the overly thought-provoked, the otherwise weak and historically known as the melancholy. Maybe it's a plague in the sense of aging, and affecting everyone to varying accounts; maybe it's a plague in the sense of cancer, and there are those who exist who will experience a life completely devoid of it altogether.
Many religions and philosophies of the world prescribe balance as a key proponent of existence. The Yin and The Yang. Heaven and Hell. The Feather of Ma'at, an ostrich feather, being weighed on a scale against one's heart for each soul passing between Ancient Egypt and the Duat. These principles go remarkably far back in the stories that man told himself, and it was written down as soon as he evolved the ability to do so. Human's are laughably predictable, and the patterns that go back to the core of humanity are inanely simple. We really appreciate when things are in threes, and organize our religious personifications into a "trinity" even when they represent the same thing. We see faces in all sorts of ordinary objects, and can often be caught worshiping these objects as if the face actually embodies something other than our keen ability to spot them. And we absolutely love when there are two opposing forces colliding in equity, creating in our minds a true perfection in the immediate center.
Any personal trainer will tell you that you need rest, as well as exercise, to build strength and muscle. For an air conditioner to create cold air, it needs a compressor to warm the air up. And perhaps the best manifestation of harmony composed in two parts is the human brain. We have a left hemisphere for logic and analysis, and a right hemisphere for creativity and holistic intuition. Without the left we'd be unbound to reality, but without the right we'd be unable to describe it. The substantial amount of evidence a human can gather at a basic level to support the notion that balance equals grace, provides a reason for it's ubiquity over thousands of years and billions of people.
However if you explain the concept of balance with darker insinuation, you could very well be lead to the concept of war. "A set of opposing forces" versus "a set of opposing forces, with significant disagreement". It's this thought that leads me down the rabbit whole of questioning the aspects of life, particularly happiness. If balance is to be trusted as natural law, it would mean an equilibrium between white and black. It would mean an equal amount of days that are bright, and days that are dark. There is wholesome optimism where it appears that time and you and everyone exists so that that brightness can be appreciated. There is also a shadow, a dreadful perception that the passing of time is just a tally to remind you of your existence, and it's lack of everything except it. Both of these states are objectively real, and they're struggling among themselves and similar states to thrive. They represent a set of opposing forces, with significant disagreement: a war.
If sin and virtue or Yin and Yang are to appropriately be applied to life, they could hate and claw at each other in war just as easily, if not more easily, than they could coexist in harmony. Like the angel on one shoulder and the Devil on the other, they could be pulling you with all of their might in one direction, they could deceive you and cheat their way into your attention. And the same can be said of happiness and despondency.
Optimism and pessimism. Peace and anxiety. Hope and despair. They absolutely hate each other, always trying to rid you of their opposition and find ways to convince you that they are right and the other is wrong. They play tricks, and disguise themselves as other sentiments, and cloud your head with conflicting thoughts, only to reveal a Trojan horse at it's core with more of the same. And they save the most deceitful delusion until one of the two has a firm grip on your mind, when it will relentlessly tell you that it has won the war for good, and the other will never return.
But that deceit, as it turns out, is what exposes the two and their perpetual battle to an exploitable flaw in the system upon which they wreak havoc. Once it's revealed that each side isn't rooted within the limits of truth, you can choose who to believe. Choice becomes an invaluable asset in war, particularly among allies and the like-minded, as a soldiery bound by common cause is dominant to one bound by conscription. You, despite being trapped in your own mind where this war is held, are dignified enough to pick a side if you're intelligent enough to realize that this is all the case. You could choose to fight alongside happiness, to pick the losing team that seems to be constantly devastated; or you could choose to do nothing, to flow through the path of least resistance which always seems to lead to despondency.
Regardless, the war is never won, only the battle of the day. Maybe you find yourself in a good and bright day, or maybe despite your best efforts you find yourself in a dark and miserable day. It may seem that happiness has acquired a secret weapon of sorts, and the war is close to an end, but it's equally possible that despondency has answered with it's own, and the arms race continues. When you wake up and find that one or the other has made a strike, all you can do is go about time and existence in concession until the next day when the other will strike back. Either way, the key is to keep fighting, so that slowly and methodically and in a way that's unnoticeable in the short term, your side wins more often than it loses.
A plague is caused by coccobacillus bacteria. Bacteria, a morbid creature that seems to have no place in the world but has placed itself in such a way that you can never fully rid of it. Instead, our immune systems have evolved to sniff the bad ones out and remove them one by one. Our bodies fully acknowledge the fact that we will never live a day without bacteria trying to force it's way in and apply it's crude ideology; and so, our bodies continue, day after day, to fight them off. It's not a fight to a definite end, it's a fight that results in just enough of the plague being pushed back each morning so that we can experience a normal day without even noticing the struggle happening deep down.
This is the war of happiness. It's a daily contagion creeping forward like the tide, which left unchecked will swallow you whole like the flood of a town with no levies. It's a curse that cares nothing of it's own purpose other than to breach your mind and infect. Unfortunately, like bacteria we will never live a moment without it somewhere present inside of us breeding and pushing and taking over if you let it. Therefore, it's entirely a blessing, a miracle even, that we have optimism, the Yang, the ostrich feather, serving like our immune system in an attempt to reinstate the balance we're told we're born with. And as we're conscious beings and graced with intelligence, we can do countless acts in our part to help tip the scales. That is the war of happiness.
And the war rages on.
Many religions and philosophies of the world prescribe balance as a key proponent of existence. The Yin and The Yang. Heaven and Hell. The Feather of Ma'at, an ostrich feather, being weighed on a scale against one's heart for each soul passing between Ancient Egypt and the Duat. These principles go remarkably far back in the stories that man told himself, and it was written down as soon as he evolved the ability to do so. Human's are laughably predictable, and the patterns that go back to the core of humanity are inanely simple. We really appreciate when things are in threes, and organize our religious personifications into a "trinity" even when they represent the same thing. We see faces in all sorts of ordinary objects, and can often be caught worshiping these objects as if the face actually embodies something other than our keen ability to spot them. And we absolutely love when there are two opposing forces colliding in equity, creating in our minds a true perfection in the immediate center.
Any personal trainer will tell you that you need rest, as well as exercise, to build strength and muscle. For an air conditioner to create cold air, it needs a compressor to warm the air up. And perhaps the best manifestation of harmony composed in two parts is the human brain. We have a left hemisphere for logic and analysis, and a right hemisphere for creativity and holistic intuition. Without the left we'd be unbound to reality, but without the right we'd be unable to describe it. The substantial amount of evidence a human can gather at a basic level to support the notion that balance equals grace, provides a reason for it's ubiquity over thousands of years and billions of people.
However if you explain the concept of balance with darker insinuation, you could very well be lead to the concept of war. "A set of opposing forces" versus "a set of opposing forces, with significant disagreement". It's this thought that leads me down the rabbit whole of questioning the aspects of life, particularly happiness. If balance is to be trusted as natural law, it would mean an equilibrium between white and black. It would mean an equal amount of days that are bright, and days that are dark. There is wholesome optimism where it appears that time and you and everyone exists so that that brightness can be appreciated. There is also a shadow, a dreadful perception that the passing of time is just a tally to remind you of your existence, and it's lack of everything except it. Both of these states are objectively real, and they're struggling among themselves and similar states to thrive. They represent a set of opposing forces, with significant disagreement: a war.
If sin and virtue or Yin and Yang are to appropriately be applied to life, they could hate and claw at each other in war just as easily, if not more easily, than they could coexist in harmony. Like the angel on one shoulder and the Devil on the other, they could be pulling you with all of their might in one direction, they could deceive you and cheat their way into your attention. And the same can be said of happiness and despondency.
Optimism and pessimism. Peace and anxiety. Hope and despair. They absolutely hate each other, always trying to rid you of their opposition and find ways to convince you that they are right and the other is wrong. They play tricks, and disguise themselves as other sentiments, and cloud your head with conflicting thoughts, only to reveal a Trojan horse at it's core with more of the same. And they save the most deceitful delusion until one of the two has a firm grip on your mind, when it will relentlessly tell you that it has won the war for good, and the other will never return.
But that deceit, as it turns out, is what exposes the two and their perpetual battle to an exploitable flaw in the system upon which they wreak havoc. Once it's revealed that each side isn't rooted within the limits of truth, you can choose who to believe. Choice becomes an invaluable asset in war, particularly among allies and the like-minded, as a soldiery bound by common cause is dominant to one bound by conscription. You, despite being trapped in your own mind where this war is held, are dignified enough to pick a side if you're intelligent enough to realize that this is all the case. You could choose to fight alongside happiness, to pick the losing team that seems to be constantly devastated; or you could choose to do nothing, to flow through the path of least resistance which always seems to lead to despondency.
Regardless, the war is never won, only the battle of the day. Maybe you find yourself in a good and bright day, or maybe despite your best efforts you find yourself in a dark and miserable day. It may seem that happiness has acquired a secret weapon of sorts, and the war is close to an end, but it's equally possible that despondency has answered with it's own, and the arms race continues. When you wake up and find that one or the other has made a strike, all you can do is go about time and existence in concession until the next day when the other will strike back. Either way, the key is to keep fighting, so that slowly and methodically and in a way that's unnoticeable in the short term, your side wins more often than it loses.
A plague is caused by coccobacillus bacteria. Bacteria, a morbid creature that seems to have no place in the world but has placed itself in such a way that you can never fully rid of it. Instead, our immune systems have evolved to sniff the bad ones out and remove them one by one. Our bodies fully acknowledge the fact that we will never live a day without bacteria trying to force it's way in and apply it's crude ideology; and so, our bodies continue, day after day, to fight them off. It's not a fight to a definite end, it's a fight that results in just enough of the plague being pushed back each morning so that we can experience a normal day without even noticing the struggle happening deep down.
This is the war of happiness. It's a daily contagion creeping forward like the tide, which left unchecked will swallow you whole like the flood of a town with no levies. It's a curse that cares nothing of it's own purpose other than to breach your mind and infect. Unfortunately, like bacteria we will never live a moment without it somewhere present inside of us breeding and pushing and taking over if you let it. Therefore, it's entirely a blessing, a miracle even, that we have optimism, the Yang, the ostrich feather, serving like our immune system in an attempt to reinstate the balance we're told we're born with. And as we're conscious beings and graced with intelligence, we can do countless acts in our part to help tip the scales. That is the war of happiness.
And the war rages on.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Avicii
Good afternoon,
For some reason, I have never been affected by celebrity deaths. I have never understood it either. I've never known a celebrity well enough for it to matter, it never seems more sad than a stranger dying in a car accident. There's never been a famous person to die, who I've been the least bit attached to for it to have an impact on me.
Then, about a year ago, before driving down small-town Oklahoma roads to a KC-135 systems class, it became news that Tim Bergling had killed himself in Oman. Unlike every other celebrity death I've experienced in my life, I felt... really sad. It caught me off-guard, it wasn't a dear friend or familiar member who'd passed, but it felt like someone I'd grown up with was no longer with me.
To explain it I must go back to the first moment I'd heard his music. I was in a nightclub in Los Angeles at 18 years old (an appropriate time and place to be introduced to house music). Levels came on and the club shattered into pieces; it was the most simple and repetitive yet complex string of notes to have been played in a Hollywood nightclub yet (I mean, I think it was, that was the first time I'd been in a nightclub).
Avicii followed me through the early years of college, helping me study to songs like Silhouettes, Superlove, and I Could Be The One. Fast forward to sophomore year, in the middle of rough ROTC times and rougher engineering classes Karen and I were to take Spring Break in the one and only MIAMI. The day before we left, while struggling through midterms and packing our bags, Avicii dropped a brand new single. X You, just in time for Ultra, and with a music video highlighting Miami nightlife, we couldn't help but feel, despite how irrational, that Avicii made the song for us because he somehow knew that we needed it. We needed a break, we needed Miami (more than usual), and we needed a new Avicii song to listen to on the flight. And Avicii delivered.
College life continued and Avicii followed us with Wake Me Up among others as he gained popularity. Boyfriend life turned into engaged life and eventually married life and we started traveling more and more. Songs like Hey Brother I never understood until hearing it in a nightclub in Rio de Janeiro and seeing all the cariocas singing along in redneck accents. It seemed like the traveling made the music better, as if we only felt the full effect of the melody if we heard it the same way he wrote it: on the road, finding new places.
One of the most memorable of all times was on our honeymoon in Dubai, when a few days into our trip Avicii came out with Waiting For Love. Again, because the song was released within days of our wedding, and crept itself onto a YouTube playlist just as we arrived in Dubai, we couldn't help but feel that in some way or another the song was written for us. Of course we know that's not true, but the feeling presides none the less. There are times when a song matches a memory so indescribably well, it's ingrained in your mind for life; and hearing this song while driving through the the buildings on Sheikh Zayed is the prime example.
Then came darker times. Cambodia, my mom's first illness, moving away, things bubbled over quickly in those months and I had an Avicii album to emote with. The lyrics and melodies of Ten More Days or Sunset Jesus, once again, felt like they were written for me personally in order to be discovered at the exact moment I needed it. For A Better Day, a song about the escape from child trafficking of all things, landing in my lap just in time for me to listen to on my lunch break between teaching Cambodian children stuck in poverty, feels like it's fulfilling a purpose.
So to let it sink in on an Oklahoma highway that Avicii was no longer here, creating music and living life, meant there would be no more chance encounters with his music when it seemed I needed it most. It would mean I'd hit the limit on relating to his music. And perhaps the saddest aspect, it meant the lyrics weren't for show. It meant he really was a tortured soul, and when it felt like through his music he had the same problems we all do with life, it's because he really did. And now there will be no more of it because of the fact.
But hopefully, I can reminisce in the fact that for the rest of my life whenever I hear Levels there will be a projection in my mind of Hollywood nightclubs. Whenever I hear X You I picture the approached over the Everglades into 8L at KMIA. Hey Brother takes me right back Rio, and Karen and I both still see skyscrapers on both sides of an 18 lane freeway when we hear Waiting For Love. I will always remember sitting in a hammock on Koh Rong coping with his latest album.
And just like that, a complete 180 of my previous assertions on celebrity deaths. They do leave an impact, an empty feeling, because despite being a one-way road a person can share quite a bit of their life with an artist. And the most stinging part of their death is the fact that the bond no longer exists, despite never existing in the first place.
For some reason, I have never been affected by celebrity deaths. I have never understood it either. I've never known a celebrity well enough for it to matter, it never seems more sad than a stranger dying in a car accident. There's never been a famous person to die, who I've been the least bit attached to for it to have an impact on me.
Then, about a year ago, before driving down small-town Oklahoma roads to a KC-135 systems class, it became news that Tim Bergling had killed himself in Oman. Unlike every other celebrity death I've experienced in my life, I felt... really sad. It caught me off-guard, it wasn't a dear friend or familiar member who'd passed, but it felt like someone I'd grown up with was no longer with me.
To explain it I must go back to the first moment I'd heard his music. I was in a nightclub in Los Angeles at 18 years old (an appropriate time and place to be introduced to house music). Levels came on and the club shattered into pieces; it was the most simple and repetitive yet complex string of notes to have been played in a Hollywood nightclub yet (I mean, I think it was, that was the first time I'd been in a nightclub).
Avicii followed me through the early years of college, helping me study to songs like Silhouettes, Superlove, and I Could Be The One. Fast forward to sophomore year, in the middle of rough ROTC times and rougher engineering classes Karen and I were to take Spring Break in the one and only MIAMI. The day before we left, while struggling through midterms and packing our bags, Avicii dropped a brand new single. X You, just in time for Ultra, and with a music video highlighting Miami nightlife, we couldn't help but feel, despite how irrational, that Avicii made the song for us because he somehow knew that we needed it. We needed a break, we needed Miami (more than usual), and we needed a new Avicii song to listen to on the flight. And Avicii delivered.
College life continued and Avicii followed us with Wake Me Up among others as he gained popularity. Boyfriend life turned into engaged life and eventually married life and we started traveling more and more. Songs like Hey Brother I never understood until hearing it in a nightclub in Rio de Janeiro and seeing all the cariocas singing along in redneck accents. It seemed like the traveling made the music better, as if we only felt the full effect of the melody if we heard it the same way he wrote it: on the road, finding new places.
One of the most memorable of all times was on our honeymoon in Dubai, when a few days into our trip Avicii came out with Waiting For Love. Again, because the song was released within days of our wedding, and crept itself onto a YouTube playlist just as we arrived in Dubai, we couldn't help but feel that in some way or another the song was written for us. Of course we know that's not true, but the feeling presides none the less. There are times when a song matches a memory so indescribably well, it's ingrained in your mind for life; and hearing this song while driving through the the buildings on Sheikh Zayed is the prime example.
Then came darker times. Cambodia, my mom's first illness, moving away, things bubbled over quickly in those months and I had an Avicii album to emote with. The lyrics and melodies of Ten More Days or Sunset Jesus, once again, felt like they were written for me personally in order to be discovered at the exact moment I needed it. For A Better Day, a song about the escape from child trafficking of all things, landing in my lap just in time for me to listen to on my lunch break between teaching Cambodian children stuck in poverty, feels like it's fulfilling a purpose.
So to let it sink in on an Oklahoma highway that Avicii was no longer here, creating music and living life, meant there would be no more chance encounters with his music when it seemed I needed it most. It would mean I'd hit the limit on relating to his music. And perhaps the saddest aspect, it meant the lyrics weren't for show. It meant he really was a tortured soul, and when it felt like through his music he had the same problems we all do with life, it's because he really did. And now there will be no more of it because of the fact.
But hopefully, I can reminisce in the fact that for the rest of my life whenever I hear Levels there will be a projection in my mind of Hollywood nightclubs. Whenever I hear X You I picture the approached over the Everglades into 8L at KMIA. Hey Brother takes me right back Rio, and Karen and I both still see skyscrapers on both sides of an 18 lane freeway when we hear Waiting For Love. I will always remember sitting in a hammock on Koh Rong coping with his latest album.
And just like that, a complete 180 of my previous assertions on celebrity deaths. They do leave an impact, an empty feeling, because despite being a one-way road a person can share quite a bit of their life with an artist. And the most stinging part of their death is the fact that the bond no longer exists, despite never existing in the first place.
Sunday, June 16, 2019
A Loan to Life*
Good evening. I'm in Hawaii.
It's finally being paid off; the debt that life has taken out on me, that is. I loaned to life four years of striving for a high school GPA, five years of crumbling through engineering classes in college, and two years of long, long days in pilot training. By my count, without factoring in any interest, life owes me 11 years of enjoyment and fulfillment. A deal's a deal, and all this time I've been wondering at which point I'd start to be paid back.
I've been on and off of the road now for a few months. Life's birthday present to me the day I turned 26 was my first trip as a pilot. Maine, New York, Boston, can't complain. Trip #2 was a ridiculous training week in Louisiana pretending we were gonna fly everyday until every single B-52 in the inventory broke each morning. Then things got interesting after being home for a few days; I was offered a trip to England and happily volunteered. A day later that trip canceled but I was added to a crew going to Hawaii. That trip DIDN'T get canceled, and our jet broke the second we landed (boost pump failure—wasn't me, I didn't touch the fucking thing). So now you're caught up. I'm sitting in my hotel room overlooking downtown Honolulu from the 30th floor enjoying myself.
Despite the fact I'm quite isolated from everyone I care about for the time being, I do enjoy being six hours separated from the rest of my world. I've felt it in Cambodia, I've felt it in Europe and Dubai—a feeling of peace and calm at about 5 or 6pm when every single person you know turns to sleep other than the four people who are on your crew. For the first time in a long while you become unable to share your every thought with your friends and family; it's just you, in your own head and keeping thoughts to yourself for a time, walking down a beach in Hawaii. The sun sets and the buildings glow orange and the skies pink, and while you can take a picture and send it across the world, it won't be received anytime soon as the sun set hours ago where everyone you know happens to be.
There's a feeling of welcomed isolation in flight as well, specifically over the oceans. Los Angeles Center signs you off via radio and Oakland Oceanic Control signs in you in via text message, then it's twenty minutes of radio chatter steadily draining into silence as one by one almost every other plane drifts beyond the curve of the Earth, and far beyond contact with you. The few callsigns you still hear more than once are the few planes flying to exact same place as you, and even they are hundreds of miles ahead or behind.
I was serving as the relief crew-member, and had my 3-hour nap break during the last third of the flight. The only bunk left was a top-bunk right near the heating vent and was far too warm for me to be comfortable, so I took the mattress down and made a nest in the boom pod. I put on a podcast and went to sleep with my head a foot away from the boom pod side windows. I could open my eyes and see straight down from 36,000ft to the ocean, just to serve as a reminder that I'm in a jar of aluminum with 27 other people surrounded by thousands of miles of saltwater, and that's it...alone.
When my nap break was over I walked back into a much busier cockpit than I left it. Oakland Oceanic turned into Honolulu Center, radio silence turned into a fast paced radio jive of instruction, and planes from all over the world, who just hours ago were each isolated by hundreds of miles, were now converging on a single island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We found our place in line between A330's from Tokyo and Dash-8's from Lanai, and touched down to join the crowd of a metropolis in the middle of nowhere.
Everywhere you go on this island you find yourself inundated by people who paid a lot of money to be here, who dipped into their savings for the dream Hawaiian vacation. We walk among them, snorkeling and swimming and taking pictures of the turtles, but we didn't pay a thing to be here—the contrary, in fact. And while I'm away from my wife and simply doing my job as a pilot, there's plenty of opportunistic fortune to be had by seizing a tropical island holiday when one is dumped into your lap.
Tiki-bars and mai tais, hours on the beach being warmed by the sun and cooled by the waves, I'd be a fool to even attempt to find a reason why I shouldn't make an effort to enjoy it. The caveat is only being able to enjoy it alone, but the trade is fair. And if this is what being a pilot means, then I was right to assume a decade ago that a pilot's life is for me.
There's a thought that's been frequently sparking in me since I turned 26. It may occur to me while stepping off the jet into someplace new, while walking through Central Park or a riverboat casino on the Red River. I think of it while floating in my pool with Karen and whenever I see the sunset from 30,000ft.
And it popped into my head just now as I looked out my balcony over Waikiki: "I guess life just made a payment."
It's finally being paid off; the debt that life has taken out on me, that is. I loaned to life four years of striving for a high school GPA, five years of crumbling through engineering classes in college, and two years of long, long days in pilot training. By my count, without factoring in any interest, life owes me 11 years of enjoyment and fulfillment. A deal's a deal, and all this time I've been wondering at which point I'd start to be paid back.
Despite the fact I'm quite isolated from everyone I care about for the time being, I do enjoy being six hours separated from the rest of my world. I've felt it in Cambodia, I've felt it in Europe and Dubai—a feeling of peace and calm at about 5 or 6pm when every single person you know turns to sleep other than the four people who are on your crew. For the first time in a long while you become unable to share your every thought with your friends and family; it's just you, in your own head and keeping thoughts to yourself for a time, walking down a beach in Hawaii. The sun sets and the buildings glow orange and the skies pink, and while you can take a picture and send it across the world, it won't be received anytime soon as the sun set hours ago where everyone you know happens to be.
There's a feeling of welcomed isolation in flight as well, specifically over the oceans. Los Angeles Center signs you off via radio and Oakland Oceanic Control signs in you in via text message, then it's twenty minutes of radio chatter steadily draining into silence as one by one almost every other plane drifts beyond the curve of the Earth, and far beyond contact with you. The few callsigns you still hear more than once are the few planes flying to exact same place as you, and even they are hundreds of miles ahead or behind.
I was serving as the relief crew-member, and had my 3-hour nap break during the last third of the flight. The only bunk left was a top-bunk right near the heating vent and was far too warm for me to be comfortable, so I took the mattress down and made a nest in the boom pod. I put on a podcast and went to sleep with my head a foot away from the boom pod side windows. I could open my eyes and see straight down from 36,000ft to the ocean, just to serve as a reminder that I'm in a jar of aluminum with 27 other people surrounded by thousands of miles of saltwater, and that's it...alone.
When my nap break was over I walked back into a much busier cockpit than I left it. Oakland Oceanic turned into Honolulu Center, radio silence turned into a fast paced radio jive of instruction, and planes from all over the world, who just hours ago were each isolated by hundreds of miles, were now converging on a single island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We found our place in line between A330's from Tokyo and Dash-8's from Lanai, and touched down to join the crowd of a metropolis in the middle of nowhere.
Everywhere you go on this island you find yourself inundated by people who paid a lot of money to be here, who dipped into their savings for the dream Hawaiian vacation. We walk among them, snorkeling and swimming and taking pictures of the turtles, but we didn't pay a thing to be here—the contrary, in fact. And while I'm away from my wife and simply doing my job as a pilot, there's plenty of opportunistic fortune to be had by seizing a tropical island holiday when one is dumped into your lap.
Tiki-bars and mai tais, hours on the beach being warmed by the sun and cooled by the waves, I'd be a fool to even attempt to find a reason why I shouldn't make an effort to enjoy it. The caveat is only being able to enjoy it alone, but the trade is fair. And if this is what being a pilot means, then I was right to assume a decade ago that a pilot's life is for me.
There's a thought that's been frequently sparking in me since I turned 26. It may occur to me while stepping off the jet into someplace new, while walking through Central Park or a riverboat casino on the Red River. I think of it while floating in my pool with Karen and whenever I see the sunset from 30,000ft.
And it popped into my head just now as I looked out my balcony over Waikiki: "I guess life just made a payment."
Thursday, May 2, 2019
...and was back home in Florida ______ later.
Good evening,
I'm sitting upstairs in Palacio Loyd, and decided it was high-time to write. I was SUPPOSED to be in pre-departure crew rest today, before flying off to the majestic untamed reaches of Alaska, but some asshole in scheduling decided it's more important for me to be certified in all the nuclear-end-of-the-world shit and be able to fly a plane through a mushroom cloud. I understand how priorities work, and I admit it would be kind of cool knowing the Top Secret inner workings of how the nuclear holocaust is supposed to play out, but I was gonna go hiking in Alaska! Now that has to wait an unknown number of weeks!
Despite the disappointments in scheduling, I'm excited to say I have been flying. I have another 50-somethin' hours down on paper. Yesterday I was to refuel test flights over the Gulf, but the receivers cancelled and we already had 100k of fuel loaded which ruled out patterns at MacDill (or Miami like I initially suggested). We had to fly at least an hour away to burn down to landing weight so I was like "fuck it, let's go to Charleston". So we did. I went over the bridge, I saw the aircraft carrier, and looked at the church steeples poking through the historic parts of the city; all things that I have done dozens of times visiting aunts and cousins, only this time I peaced-out early and was back home in Florida an hour later.
A few days prior to that, on the 26th of April, I had a nice 8.1hr good-deal-Friday mission flying presidential support, which was AMAZING and I can't wait to write about it! Only... Oh, this is awkward... Well, it's just... I can't talk about it. Yeah, I know I joke a lot about how things are classified but I'm not kidding this time. I could've been refueling a flying strip club for the president and I'd still be honor-bound (read: NDA-bound) to keep my lips sealed and you and the rest of the serfdom would have no idea. I will say, I wasn't refueling a flying strip club for Donald Trump (BUT OMG COULD YOU IMAGINE?) Anyway, I still took off from the Sunshine State and went to some undisclosed location and did stuff and was back home in Florida 8 hours later.
A week prior to that I had my first trip! My Dollar Mission! It also happened to coincide with my first time flying in SEVEN months, so many antics were to be had on all fronts. I hesitate to admit that the pranks were lazy at best (a glitter bomb? really? am I twelve? Now my wife has to clean that up.) But while the pranks were lacking the shore excursions were NOT. You see, while on the road the copilot is designated as the "Cruise Director". The AC is always tired of running the show, and officers never trust the enlisted with the entire funness of a trip which rules out the Booms, so the Cruise Director duties go to Co by default.
And cruise-direct I did. We hit real New England breweries in Portsmouth, the Salem Witch Museum, and when I finally got comfortable with my position I delightfully informed the crew at 35,000ft over the North Atlantic on Day 3 that we would be going to New York City next. So we did, and now I've been to New York City. The next day I went to Boston. C'est la vie d'un voyageur. One day I left Tampa, traveled to some new places, and was back home in Florida a week later.
The quick-paced travel can really fuck with the senses of time and space. We're trained from an early age to think the world is so massive that even your relatives a few states over are a distance away from you that's equally high in time and money. Of course the revolution of air travel changed things from the way it used to be, but even still if you want to be in Maine in two hours you need a pretty good reason to justify spending a grand on tickets. For the most part it's putting up the airfare once or twice a year and the rest of the time putting in days-worth of driving. For the average person, Charleston is 10 hours or $600 away from you. New York is 16 hours or $800 away from you. If you live in Texas or Alaska, good luck.
And then there's people like me, people who get paid to fly. Charleston is only an hour away; it's an afternoon escapade in which you can eat your lunch while watching the Ravenel Bridge, which you used to run across as a high schooler, fall beneath wing. It takes twice as long to drive to New York from Maine than it does to fly to Maine from Florida. But to pilots, a day in Manhattan is only one good deal in scheduling, one flight, and one ambitious Cruise Director away. Seeing downtown Boston is as hard as deciding if you'd rather stay in the hotel and watch movies on an off-day, or see downtown Boston.
When I moved to Texas for Pilot Training, I remember seeing the massive windmill farms about halfway between San Antonio and Laughlin. I remember seeing them a few weeks later when we went to SAN for New Years, and the hour and half of driving that separated me from them. Then I had my first flight in the T-6, and it took about 7 minutes to get to the MOA where Captain Jones ripped us into a cloverleaf, I remember looking up (down) through the canopy, and seeing the same windmill farm.
I'll leave you with the tale of TUDEP. Everyday when we flew out of New England, we'd go halfway across the Atlantic and catch a flight of F-15s coming home. Each flight was long, in fact we could've landed in Europe in less time than it took to go halfway and come back to New England due to winds. Each day we started the oceanic portion of our journey heading east and picking up our path of Lat-Longs that told Gander when and where we'd be as we did our work outside of radar coverage, and then we'd come back. About half of the days that point started or ended at TUDEP.
The first time we did this, as I was in the cockpit alone loading the flight plan while the AC was doing the walk-around and the boom was preflighting the APU, I realized something as I punched in "T-U-D-E-P" into the FMS. I had been there before! Not only that, but I was extremely familiar with the place.
TUDEP is a GPS waypoint about 100 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. Because of the way the winds flow and the great-circle geography of Europe and America, this waypoint is one of the several starting or ending points of the aerial highway across the Atlantic. Due to it's importance in transatlantic travel and my passion for everything-flying in high school and college, for a while I've known quite a lot about this waypoint. I know more about this point in space than I do some countries. It's at about 51°10' North and 53°14' West. It's commonly used as both the starting point for the easterly tracks, and the ending point for the westerly tracks. Hundreds of planes fly over this spot on Earth everyday using it as a standard routing. And I've been there more than once, even before becoming a pilot, most recently on a plane to Switzerland while in college.
And from the cockpit of a KC-135, I visited TUDEP again. I looked out the window at the endless range of sea, clouds, and icebergs; the same view I saw many years ago. A few hours later after turning around I saw it again. I've been to TUDEP, a landless and random yet traceable point in space over Earth's surface, more times than I have been to New York City. And on the last day of the trip, I passed over 51°10'N 53°14'W again, for probably the ninth or tenth time in my life, and was back home in Florida a few hours later.
Until next time...
I'm sitting upstairs in Palacio Loyd, and decided it was high-time to write. I was SUPPOSED to be in pre-departure crew rest today, before flying off to the majestic untamed reaches of Alaska, but some asshole in scheduling decided it's more important for me to be certified in all the nuclear-end-of-the-world shit and be able to fly a plane through a mushroom cloud. I understand how priorities work, and I admit it would be kind of cool knowing the Top Secret inner workings of how the nuclear holocaust is supposed to play out, but I was gonna go hiking in Alaska! Now that has to wait an unknown number of weeks!
Despite the disappointments in scheduling, I'm excited to say I have been flying. I have another 50-somethin' hours down on paper. Yesterday I was to refuel test flights over the Gulf, but the receivers cancelled and we already had 100k of fuel loaded which ruled out patterns at MacDill (or Miami like I initially suggested). We had to fly at least an hour away to burn down to landing weight so I was like "fuck it, let's go to Charleston". So we did. I went over the bridge, I saw the aircraft carrier, and looked at the church steeples poking through the historic parts of the city; all things that I have done dozens of times visiting aunts and cousins, only this time I peaced-out early and was back home in Florida an hour later.
A few days prior to that, on the 26th of April, I had a nice 8.1hr good-deal-Friday mission flying presidential support, which was AMAZING and I can't wait to write about it! Only... Oh, this is awkward... Well, it's just... I can't talk about it. Yeah, I know I joke a lot about how things are classified but I'm not kidding this time. I could've been refueling a flying strip club for the president and I'd still be honor-bound (read: NDA-bound) to keep my lips sealed and you and the rest of the serfdom would have no idea. I will say, I wasn't refueling a flying strip club for Donald Trump (BUT OMG COULD YOU IMAGINE?) Anyway, I still took off from the Sunshine State and went to some undisclosed location and did stuff and was back home in Florida 8 hours later.
A week prior to that I had my first trip! My Dollar Mission! It also happened to coincide with my first time flying in SEVEN months, so many antics were to be had on all fronts. I hesitate to admit that the pranks were lazy at best (a glitter bomb? really? am I twelve? Now my wife has to clean that up.) But while the pranks were lacking the shore excursions were NOT. You see, while on the road the copilot is designated as the "Cruise Director". The AC is always tired of running the show, and officers never trust the enlisted with the entire funness of a trip which rules out the Booms, so the Cruise Director duties go to Co by default.
And cruise-direct I did. We hit real New England breweries in Portsmouth, the Salem Witch Museum, and when I finally got comfortable with my position I delightfully informed the crew at 35,000ft over the North Atlantic on Day 3 that we would be going to New York City next. So we did, and now I've been to New York City. The next day I went to Boston. C'est la vie d'un voyageur. One day I left Tampa, traveled to some new places, and was back home in Florida a week later.
The quick-paced travel can really fuck with the senses of time and space. We're trained from an early age to think the world is so massive that even your relatives a few states over are a distance away from you that's equally high in time and money. Of course the revolution of air travel changed things from the way it used to be, but even still if you want to be in Maine in two hours you need a pretty good reason to justify spending a grand on tickets. For the most part it's putting up the airfare once or twice a year and the rest of the time putting in days-worth of driving. For the average person, Charleston is 10 hours or $600 away from you. New York is 16 hours or $800 away from you. If you live in Texas or Alaska, good luck.
And then there's people like me, people who get paid to fly. Charleston is only an hour away; it's an afternoon escapade in which you can eat your lunch while watching the Ravenel Bridge, which you used to run across as a high schooler, fall beneath wing. It takes twice as long to drive to New York from Maine than it does to fly to Maine from Florida. But to pilots, a day in Manhattan is only one good deal in scheduling, one flight, and one ambitious Cruise Director away. Seeing downtown Boston is as hard as deciding if you'd rather stay in the hotel and watch movies on an off-day, or see downtown Boston.
When I moved to Texas for Pilot Training, I remember seeing the massive windmill farms about halfway between San Antonio and Laughlin. I remember seeing them a few weeks later when we went to SAN for New Years, and the hour and half of driving that separated me from them. Then I had my first flight in the T-6, and it took about 7 minutes to get to the MOA where Captain Jones ripped us into a cloverleaf, I remember looking up (down) through the canopy, and seeing the same windmill farm.
I'll leave you with the tale of TUDEP. Everyday when we flew out of New England, we'd go halfway across the Atlantic and catch a flight of F-15s coming home. Each flight was long, in fact we could've landed in Europe in less time than it took to go halfway and come back to New England due to winds. Each day we started the oceanic portion of our journey heading east and picking up our path of Lat-Longs that told Gander when and where we'd be as we did our work outside of radar coverage, and then we'd come back. About half of the days that point started or ended at TUDEP.
The first time we did this, as I was in the cockpit alone loading the flight plan while the AC was doing the walk-around and the boom was preflighting the APU, I realized something as I punched in "T-U-D-E-P" into the FMS. I had been there before! Not only that, but I was extremely familiar with the place.
TUDEP is a GPS waypoint about 100 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. Because of the way the winds flow and the great-circle geography of Europe and America, this waypoint is one of the several starting or ending points of the aerial highway across the Atlantic. Due to it's importance in transatlantic travel and my passion for everything-flying in high school and college, for a while I've known quite a lot about this waypoint. I know more about this point in space than I do some countries. It's at about 51°10' North and 53°14' West. It's commonly used as both the starting point for the easterly tracks, and the ending point for the westerly tracks. Hundreds of planes fly over this spot on Earth everyday using it as a standard routing. And I've been there more than once, even before becoming a pilot, most recently on a plane to Switzerland while in college.
And from the cockpit of a KC-135, I visited TUDEP again. I looked out the window at the endless range of sea, clouds, and icebergs; the same view I saw many years ago. A few hours later after turning around I saw it again. I've been to TUDEP, a landless and random yet traceable point in space over Earth's surface, more times than I have been to New York City. And on the last day of the trip, I passed over 51°10'N 53°14'W again, for probably the ninth or tenth time in my life, and was back home in Florida a few hours later.
Until next time...
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Dear me,
Decker,
Control is a desirable thing. Whether it's using a conversation as it's a helm at the bridge to control what's being said, whether it's manipulating your way into the more favorable assignments at work, or simply deciding what to eat in the middle of the night, control is something I very much enjoy having. Because of this, I don't understand how I spent the past short part of my life letting something control me.
Knowledge is another desirable thing. And in the quest to know everything until you actually do know everything, but can't always remember it all in the same point in time, I've come to realize there are things that are not desirable to know. Like how it feels to be arrested, or if I'm smart enough to actually get away with absolutely everything. I just don't care to know.
I've been crying for days. I've been drinking for weeks. But for some reason, some odd circumstance arose as I laid awake at 5:00 in the morning: it's time. It's time to write a letter to myself. It's time to change.
I haven't done this in a while. I honestly think the last time I wrote a letter to myself was in high school was when Marissa stopped texting me back, and months later I found out it was because she was grounded. Isn't that strange? I got so broken and down and out of the fight that I sat and write a letter to yourself, something to look back to, something to cling to as you fight for life in the bitter world we call our own. And then, in six months, you go back to it. You read the letter you wrote, and realize how stupid this shit is. She was GROUNDED, of course she didn't text you back. There was just information in the world that you didn't happen to know at the time that would've walked you off the ledge had you known.
I've been listening to a lot of music lately. I know that military training has the tendency to do that, but this time it feels different. It's a lot of Phill Collin's music by the title of "that's all" and "I don't care anymore." I scream the lyrics from my car; I want people to hear it. "Oh it's just a shame, and that's all."
But in a day, maybe it was the sleeping pills, maybe it was my will to survive, I can't tell; but one night the music went from "Oh it's such a shame" and "I don't care anymore", to "it's time to move on" and "lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones, and I will try to fix you." I broke down crying, maybe at the transition, maybe at the new lyrics. But maybe now it's time to forget how to play on piano "that's all", and learn "fix you."
Maybe now it's time to eat. Maybe it's time to sleep. Maybe it's time to fix my entire world that I inadvertently destroyed. It won't take a day, it won't take a week. But it's time. Time to fix me.
I can do it. I've done it before. I've done RIDICULOUS shit before. I've landed planes in thunderstorms and 50kt winds. I've graduated an engineering school where we were tested on how electrons move through semiconductors. I've done pilot training - OVER A YEAR OF IT. I've been fucking tortured. Let that soak in. I, W Decker Loyd, have been tortured. So why let this feel worse?
So I will definitely fly again. The Air Force will understand the hiccups along the way. I've been trained in acute communication, I know what to say if they don't quite understand. But motherfucker, I will fly again.
The sun is coming up. Slim blue light is starting to gloss over my pool and pond. Soon the sandhill cranes and blue herons will wake up and make their presence known. Soon Cessna's, British Airways triple sevens, and KC-135's alike will be flying overhead. My house isn't going anywhere. My wife isn't going anywhere. My wings aren't going anywhere.
You aren't losing anything. Just the time it takes to heal. And then, when it's all done, when you read this very letter in how ever long it is, and chuckle over A) how poorly written it was and B) how unnecessary it was; you'll pack up your flight bag, flight suit up, and fly across the world.
And life will be good again, as it always has been.
Control is a desirable thing. Whether it's using a conversation as it's a helm at the bridge to control what's being said, whether it's manipulating your way into the more favorable assignments at work, or simply deciding what to eat in the middle of the night, control is something I very much enjoy having. Because of this, I don't understand how I spent the past short part of my life letting something control me.
Knowledge is another desirable thing. And in the quest to know everything until you actually do know everything, but can't always remember it all in the same point in time, I've come to realize there are things that are not desirable to know. Like how it feels to be arrested, or if I'm smart enough to actually get away with absolutely everything. I just don't care to know.
I've been crying for days. I've been drinking for weeks. But for some reason, some odd circumstance arose as I laid awake at 5:00 in the morning: it's time. It's time to write a letter to myself. It's time to change.
I haven't done this in a while. I honestly think the last time I wrote a letter to myself was in high school was when Marissa stopped texting me back, and months later I found out it was because she was grounded. Isn't that strange? I got so broken and down and out of the fight that I sat and write a letter to yourself, something to look back to, something to cling to as you fight for life in the bitter world we call our own. And then, in six months, you go back to it. You read the letter you wrote, and realize how stupid this shit is. She was GROUNDED, of course she didn't text you back. There was just information in the world that you didn't happen to know at the time that would've walked you off the ledge had you known.
I've been listening to a lot of music lately. I know that military training has the tendency to do that, but this time it feels different. It's a lot of Phill Collin's music by the title of "that's all" and "I don't care anymore." I scream the lyrics from my car; I want people to hear it. "Oh it's just a shame, and that's all."
But in a day, maybe it was the sleeping pills, maybe it was my will to survive, I can't tell; but one night the music went from "Oh it's such a shame" and "I don't care anymore", to "it's time to move on" and "lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones, and I will try to fix you." I broke down crying, maybe at the transition, maybe at the new lyrics. But maybe now it's time to forget how to play on piano "that's all", and learn "fix you."
Maybe now it's time to eat. Maybe it's time to sleep. Maybe it's time to fix my entire world that I inadvertently destroyed. It won't take a day, it won't take a week. But it's time. Time to fix me.
I can do it. I've done it before. I've done RIDICULOUS shit before. I've landed planes in thunderstorms and 50kt winds. I've graduated an engineering school where we were tested on how electrons move through semiconductors. I've done pilot training - OVER A YEAR OF IT. I've been fucking tortured. Let that soak in. I, W Decker Loyd, have been tortured. So why let this feel worse?
So I will definitely fly again. The Air Force will understand the hiccups along the way. I've been trained in acute communication, I know what to say if they don't quite understand. But motherfucker, I will fly again.
The sun is coming up. Slim blue light is starting to gloss over my pool and pond. Soon the sandhill cranes and blue herons will wake up and make their presence known. Soon Cessna's, British Airways triple sevens, and KC-135's alike will be flying overhead. My house isn't going anywhere. My wife isn't going anywhere. My wings aren't going anywhere.
You aren't losing anything. Just the time it takes to heal. And then, when it's all done, when you read this very letter in how ever long it is, and chuckle over A) how poorly written it was and B) how unnecessary it was; you'll pack up your flight bag, flight suit up, and fly across the world.
And life will be good again, as it always has been.
Monday, February 4, 2019
My Fucking Awesome Life
Her side:
"I’m currently writing this because I don’t want to say something I can’t take back and regret later. Decker had barely been home from SERE for 12 hours when his dad told him that his mom’s cancer was back. Right now I’m so upset I don’t know if I should cry or scream - currently doing both.
He was so down and depressed before SERE and came home actually happy. He told me SERE was the perfect reset for him. He finally felt normal again. I’m heartbroken and fuming mad that he couldn’t even enjoy that for A DAY!
I want to ask his dad what the fuck is wrong with him or, if I’m toning it down, ask why he couldn’t let him have just one day at home. They don’t even have any details yet, so why the fuck would they spring this on him right when he gets back.
Today was supposed to be a relaxed movie day. We were so excited to watch Red Sparrow and other movies and Decker would tell me what was and wasn’t realistic, but now he’s driving around alone and I’m here trying to talk myself off the ledge. Seriously, we couldn’t even have one fucking day, what the actual fuck is wrong with his parents. Not even one day. That is so fucking ridiculous.
Who in their right mind thinks, “he’s been tortured and had the worst few weeks of his life, let’s tell him some news that will destroy him”? Seriously. This news destroyed him last time and they know it. He couldn’t have ONE FUCKING DAY. I’m pissed. NOT. EVEN. ONE. FUCKING. DAY. “Oh hey, Karen and Decker have their reunion day to relax together and enjoy him being home. Hmmm, yea, fuck that, let’s crush him.”
Don’t get me wrong, I know they’re not being malicious by any means, but this just seems like a horrible judgement call.
The last time his mom had cancer was the worst time for our marriage. Decker has said before that his biggest regret in life was how he treated me while his mom was sick. That pain was still lingering with him before he left for SERE as he told me one night when he was upset. I wish I was stronger back then and I wish I could’ve helped him more. I’m worried this time that I won’t be strong enough again."
My side:
I'm currently sitting shirtless in the sun, on the pool deck of my Florida home that I worked so hard to attain. I'm listening to the same music that got me through SERE. I'm tanning. I got pale in Washington and we can't have that.
But I'm manically depressed.
There are six Florida condors circling my pool. I love them, like all birds. They are free but endangered; fake nests are erected along I-95 to keep them alive. They are beautiful. So why the fuck am I crying and shaking in a pool lounge looking at them.
It's been on my bucketlist since middle school: trouble in paradise. To be absolutely miserable in a place people go to escape misery. I think it's been checked off one too many times.
So what do I do? I've texted my boss, gotten myself off the schedule, so I'm good right? I'll just sit by the pool and tan until everything is better. Temporary solutions to permanent problems.
Apollo's son, or daughter, is in the pond next to me. I didn't know he had a family. I'm happy for him. I hope no one gets cancer.
My palm trees are still alive. The majesty palm is struggling but I might just replace it. Or should I nurse it to health? These are the questions that now embody my spirit. Unfortunately.
Am I replaceable? Or have I reached the budget point where I'm worth more damaged and flying than not? We shall find out.
My parents didn't ask for cancer. They didn't beg for it to fuck with me. Yet here we are. They told me one day too early for Karen. Was that one day too early for me? I don't think so. There is no day in which that is the right time to disclose that information.
I could've been at SERE, it could've been a week from now. And I would be destroyed. That is the nature of it. Destruction. It takes a lot to destroy a human being. It's easier to kill than destroy, Killing is quick, take out an artery, a blow to the head, suffocation. To destroy is much more involved. You have to figure out what that being latches onto, and slowly and efficiently destroy that. And then a human is alive, and destroyed.
But does that describe me? I'm in Florida while the rest of the country freezes to death. I could be at the beach in five minutes. Who could be so fucked up to which this isn't enough?
Me. I am fucked up. I am destroyed. Universe help me.
I could've been at SERE, it could've been a week from now. And I would be destroyed. That is the nature of it. Destruction. It takes a lot to destroy a human being. It's easier to kill than destroy, Killing is quick, take out an artery, a blow to the head, suffocation. To destroy is much more involved. You have to figure out what that being latches onto, and slowly and efficiently destroy that. And then a human is alive, and destroyed.
But does that describe me? I'm in Florida while the rest of the country freezes to death. I could be at the beach in five minutes. Who could be so fucked up to which this isn't enough?
Me. I am fucked up. I am destroyed. Universe help me.
Friday, February 1, 2019
Dear Mom
Good evening,
I went to the beach today. I drove my blacked out sports car down 41, weaving through tourists with my favorite music playing. I walked barefoot on the sand, down to my spot next to the breakers, and I sat. I saw a plane overhead that wasn't commercial traffic, it was clearly a 135 in MacDill's pattern. "Watching one of our own, tearing up the pattern over Tampa Bay, Florida, as I watch from the sand. Nothing gets better," I thought.
I had visualized this moment for four weeks, I even wrote about it: "the end". I slept through many cold nights and endured plenty worse with the thought that on February 1st, 2019, I would be on a beach watching my friends fly above me. It's a beautiful feeling, one that I'd hoped would cling to me as I endured my time in Washington.
But for an entire month, that feeling was robbed of me. The feeling of "the end" has no shortcuts. The psychologists told us, "when you're in pain and misery, just visualize that beach, or that ski slope, or that spouse you cling to, the mind will allow you to escape." I found that to be a lie. When I was going into shock from the ice water, I had not a single neuron left in my brain to think about Karen, the beach, or warmth. Thought's very rapidly turn to survival. What is it? What can I do right now, to get me out of this fucking coffin, and eventually home. That's what the brain resorts to: the ultimate end. Survival, so you can enjoy everything you love, in health, one day in the future.
Dad told me about your situation. The bleakness of potentially doing chemo again covers us all in the family, running a marathon and being told to run another. I'll tell you what dad told me after being tortured: I don't and can't understand what it feels like, the emotions, despair, anger, the questions. But I get it. I get emotions. I get despair. I get anger. I have questions that are never answered. There are a lot of things that we can't control, can't know. God does, but we aren't God. We are simply here at the poker table of life, with the cards we've been dealt.
Another thing the psychologists told us, which was not a lie, that I really latched onto, is that, and I can't emphasize this enough, "IT. WILL. END." The thing I figured out early on, perhaps the biggest secret in tough military training, is that that ending is by your own accord. That is the one piece of control you get in life. At SERE we had a safeword. "Flight Surgeon." If I ever said that word, at any point in training, everything would have stopped and a SERE psychologists would've snowmobiled into my location, and at that point, I could've S.I.E'd, self induced elimination. The military acronym for quit. I could've just quit, and it all would've been over. But had I done it, that day would've been the last day I wore my wings, a fate to me worse than death.
When I was in a coffin being showered with ice water, I knew I could force myself to stop shivering, and let my body go unconscious. I knew the Air Force regulations, once I conk out training is done, I get rushed to the hospital. I could end it, rather quickly. But had I done that, I will have lost consciousness without a blow to the head, which is a precursor to epilepsy, migraines, all sorts of potential complications. My medical clearance would've been in jeopardy. It may have been the last day I wore my wings. So I stayed awake, and endured.
I knew I had just a hair of control over my situation. I could quit, and be done with my career and life, or I could take one more miserable step. This conversation in my head was a broken record for eight days. But the only logical, emotional, rational choice, is to take another step - one step closer to the end. That is the only option. Yes, you have a choice, but only one makes sense. You can't quit on yourself, on your family, on your God, you take one more miserable step towards the end. And as long as that step is on course, the end will come.
Mom, you obviously don't have incredibly intense military training ahead of you where they bend your emotions to a breaking point. You're in a very different boat altogether. But the psychological tensions are the same. "I have a lot of shit ahead of me, and I don't even know how much. I don't know if I can handle it." It's a position of despair and fear. But you have an advantage, you know how this works. You know how kidney stints work (if it comes to it), you know when to eat the brownie and when it's futile. Just like I'm trained to make a real world experience as a POW more comfortable, you have the experience, which always trumps training, to make chemo livable, survivable, enough to get through this.
I remember how awful it was seeing you in chemo. And after watching 15 adults cry over me being iced, when I turned out fine emotionally (relatively), I'm convinced that not only is the dread worse than the deed, but going through it is not the hard part. Having your loved ones look over you is the hard part. And your husband and I are mentally and emotionally the strongest people you know, believe me. We've seen some shit. We will be by your side, unwavering like the American Flag through the snowfall. We will be fine. We just want you to be fine.
And considering the circumstances; considering you left your home in Utah because you wanted a better life which lead to us, considering the strength and bond of our family that will never leave you, considering you raised me to be a superhuman, getting through engineering, pilot training, SERE, and considering that you are the toughest of all of us because, shit, you've done this before; you will be fine. You will get to the sacred "end".
There is nothing worse than having your health or freedom taken from you. You and I have experienced both. It sucks. It really fucking sucks. But until you forget that God has planned an ending to this chapter, where Karen and I visit for Christmas and drink bourbon around the fire because we're freezing; until you forget that your husband is by you thick and thin with great health insurance, desperate to go to fucking North Dakota for some reason, and until you forget that the son you raised will continue to succeed in everything he loves and wanted in life and calls you each weekend...
You will reach the end.
And then you will be forced to go to North Dakota. And I can't help you there.
I went to the beach today. I drove my blacked out sports car down 41, weaving through tourists with my favorite music playing. I walked barefoot on the sand, down to my spot next to the breakers, and I sat. I saw a plane overhead that wasn't commercial traffic, it was clearly a 135 in MacDill's pattern. "Watching one of our own, tearing up the pattern over Tampa Bay, Florida, as I watch from the sand. Nothing gets better," I thought.
I had visualized this moment for four weeks, I even wrote about it: "the end". I slept through many cold nights and endured plenty worse with the thought that on February 1st, 2019, I would be on a beach watching my friends fly above me. It's a beautiful feeling, one that I'd hoped would cling to me as I endured my time in Washington.
But for an entire month, that feeling was robbed of me. The feeling of "the end" has no shortcuts. The psychologists told us, "when you're in pain and misery, just visualize that beach, or that ski slope, or that spouse you cling to, the mind will allow you to escape." I found that to be a lie. When I was going into shock from the ice water, I had not a single neuron left in my brain to think about Karen, the beach, or warmth. Thought's very rapidly turn to survival. What is it? What can I do right now, to get me out of this fucking coffin, and eventually home. That's what the brain resorts to: the ultimate end. Survival, so you can enjoy everything you love, in health, one day in the future.
Dad told me about your situation. The bleakness of potentially doing chemo again covers us all in the family, running a marathon and being told to run another. I'll tell you what dad told me after being tortured: I don't and can't understand what it feels like, the emotions, despair, anger, the questions. But I get it. I get emotions. I get despair. I get anger. I have questions that are never answered. There are a lot of things that we can't control, can't know. God does, but we aren't God. We are simply here at the poker table of life, with the cards we've been dealt.
Another thing the psychologists told us, which was not a lie, that I really latched onto, is that, and I can't emphasize this enough, "IT. WILL. END." The thing I figured out early on, perhaps the biggest secret in tough military training, is that that ending is by your own accord. That is the one piece of control you get in life. At SERE we had a safeword. "Flight Surgeon." If I ever said that word, at any point in training, everything would have stopped and a SERE psychologists would've snowmobiled into my location, and at that point, I could've S.I.E'd, self induced elimination. The military acronym for quit. I could've just quit, and it all would've been over. But had I done it, that day would've been the last day I wore my wings, a fate to me worse than death.
When I was in a coffin being showered with ice water, I knew I could force myself to stop shivering, and let my body go unconscious. I knew the Air Force regulations, once I conk out training is done, I get rushed to the hospital. I could end it, rather quickly. But had I done that, I will have lost consciousness without a blow to the head, which is a precursor to epilepsy, migraines, all sorts of potential complications. My medical clearance would've been in jeopardy. It may have been the last day I wore my wings. So I stayed awake, and endured.
I knew I had just a hair of control over my situation. I could quit, and be done with my career and life, or I could take one more miserable step. This conversation in my head was a broken record for eight days. But the only logical, emotional, rational choice, is to take another step - one step closer to the end. That is the only option. Yes, you have a choice, but only one makes sense. You can't quit on yourself, on your family, on your God, you take one more miserable step towards the end. And as long as that step is on course, the end will come.
Mom, you obviously don't have incredibly intense military training ahead of you where they bend your emotions to a breaking point. You're in a very different boat altogether. But the psychological tensions are the same. "I have a lot of shit ahead of me, and I don't even know how much. I don't know if I can handle it." It's a position of despair and fear. But you have an advantage, you know how this works. You know how kidney stints work (if it comes to it), you know when to eat the brownie and when it's futile. Just like I'm trained to make a real world experience as a POW more comfortable, you have the experience, which always trumps training, to make chemo livable, survivable, enough to get through this.
I remember how awful it was seeing you in chemo. And after watching 15 adults cry over me being iced, when I turned out fine emotionally (relatively), I'm convinced that not only is the dread worse than the deed, but going through it is not the hard part. Having your loved ones look over you is the hard part. And your husband and I are mentally and emotionally the strongest people you know, believe me. We've seen some shit. We will be by your side, unwavering like the American Flag through the snowfall. We will be fine. We just want you to be fine.
And considering the circumstances; considering you left your home in Utah because you wanted a better life which lead to us, considering the strength and bond of our family that will never leave you, considering you raised me to be a superhuman, getting through engineering, pilot training, SERE, and considering that you are the toughest of all of us because, shit, you've done this before; you will be fine. You will get to the sacred "end".
There is nothing worse than having your health or freedom taken from you. You and I have experienced both. It sucks. It really fucking sucks. But until you forget that God has planned an ending to this chapter, where Karen and I visit for Christmas and drink bourbon around the fire because we're freezing; until you forget that your husband is by you thick and thin with great health insurance, desperate to go to fucking North Dakota for some reason, and until you forget that the son you raised will continue to succeed in everything he loves and wanted in life and calls you each weekend...
You will reach the end.
And then you will be forced to go to North Dakota. And I can't help you there.
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