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.