BORN TO KILL

     Hey Michael,

     How’s it going back in the land of the big PX? Personally I am starting to miss it, I guess the same way people miss tapeworms once they’ve been flushed thru their intestines out their ass. Sorry if you’re eating, that’ll teach you to read my letters while you’re eating though.

     I’ve got sand in my pants, can you believe that? I stood up before and they emptied out like a big waterfall or something. (Check me out with my similes, now that’s what I call talent.) I’ve been carrying half the desert in my boots lately even tho I put duck tape over all the lace holes. Gunny fucking OBLITERATED!!!! me when he saw obv. THIS AIN’T A FUCKIN MICHAELS AND YOU AIN’T IN A GAD DAM CRAFT FAIR, NOW POLEES YOUR ATTIRE MARINE!!!!!!! Would put more !s but you get it. Less is more, right? He’s going mad with power IMO. I’m just trying to live my life right? And he’s always there like THAT HAIR ON YA CHIN AIN’T REGULATION MARINE!!!! But whatever you know it all already. 

     Wifi out here blows CHUNKS. I haven’t been able to speak to my fam in weeks and the last time I got a letter was 2 weeks ago so I have no idea when you’ll get this. Hope it’s soon. Everyone misses having you here, even Mother. Would bet 3 weeks of hash browns on it.

     Anyway. I’m rotating back in like a month. We’r█████████████ope there’s less sand. < For the poge reading this letter before you get it, take a shot if he sharpied that out.

     Pass on my best wishes to Pavel & remember to pour one out for me at every meal & send prayers godways that I don’t get blown to shit before I get home.

     Jim

tagged by @asbestcs my hero

ares (villains remix) – bloc party

daydream in blue – i monster

genghis khan – miike snow

revolusion – elliphant

rezorecta – black tiger sex machine

le perv – carpenter brut

battle royale feat panther – apashe

hello zepp – charlie clouser (it slaps ok)

humans are such easy prey – perturbator

$100 bills – jaroslav beck

     Even in school (the first year of a community college, that is, not that story he tells about eight years at Berkeley. As if he isn’t twenty-three) no one wanted to hear his ramblings about the atomic bombs. When you’re not in class, who wants to discuss neutrons in their spare time? Adam does. And now here he is, blathering on about it to a Marine of all things. Poor guy’s probably been lectured to enough for one lifetime. So Adam concedes to his demand, feeling very precious when his neck is touched, however unintentionally, by a real-life military man’s lips.

      But that silence lasts for only a few seconds. There can be no dead air on a radio show. And nor can there be in Adam’s life, because he goes right back to talking. “Hey–you think you got some Jody back home fucking your girl?” What a pleasant topic! Good job, Adam! He fits his fingers into Joker’s wheat colored hair and begins thumbing at a scab on his scalp. Locks his arm around his shoulder so he won’t move his mouth from the spot it’s nestled into.

     That makes him laugh, which surprises him. Lately he’s been thinking of Vanessa as his rifle and not his girlfriend, and she probably isn’t his girlfriend anymore anyway. Not that he’s self-deprecating enough to think the worst, but the last letter he got from her was a few months old and the envelope was tellingly absent of the letters she’d usually write on the flap: TSTSA. Too Sweet To Sleep Alone. It stings his teeth now to think about it.

     “Nah.” Fingers in his hair, that’s nice. He’s got nicks and scrapes everywhere and they dribble blood at a moment’s notice, a scratch on his elbow that bleeds like a head wound whenever he bends his arm and plenty on his hands, rough fingertips and calluses on his palms that must scratch when he reaches over and fits the web between his index finger and thumb under the edge of Adam’s jaw, turning his head away a little more. Under the rolled-up lip of his fatigues he can feel that shrapnel nick on his elbow splitting and his teeth bare in a wince. “She — ”

random text meme / accepting12: an accidental text

     > imagine if we fucked at trader joes

     ( six hours later — )

     He talks so fucking much.

     It’s getting to be that Joker just sits there and listens to him like you’d listen to whale noises. He’s saying something about something and Joker couldn’t give less of a shit about any of it if you paid him, but that’s not the point. He’s not even really pretending to listen like women do, all mhms and oh reallys, just sitting there with his shoulder wedged neatly against Adam’s and touching his own face – the bridge of his nose, the curl of his earlobe, the baggy skin under his eyes – since he’s not sure it’s really his. He couldn’t explain why if he was asked, but Adam won’t ask. He’s talking about – he buzzes in on a word with all the concentration it takes to thread a needle – isotopes. Joker doesn’t know what isotopes are. He doesn’t give a shit. Skin’s skin.

    If there’s sarcasm in this statement, Adam doesn’t seem to catch on. Privileged college boy. Maybe. He has promise of being a war machine, the nuclear little man, but he hasn’t benefited to the government in anyway. Not yet.

    Adam stares at him blankly behind those thick glasses and grins and grins and grins. A little chuckle rocks his shoulders and he sits back in his seat, pulls up his notebook with his incomprehensible little scribblings of mushroom clouds and Vietnam boys sharing pretty glasses of tea beneath the shade that cloud provides. Scrawled across the top is: NUCLEAR IN VIETNAM, WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN? He grabs a pen and adds circular, wire-rimmed glasses to one of the soldiers.

      “A paid vacation!” he decides, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He nestles his chin on a curled fist and says, “I’ve been callin’ you a soldier in my head, and for that, I apologize, fella. You’re a Marine. That means you weren’t drafted here. That means you’re a little warboy, born and bred! I can respect that kind of raw courage. I love the nihilistic and suicidal.”

     He’s leaning into it. He wouldn’t deny it’s odd to be on this side of the table, so to speak, but it’s not like he’s done many interviews since he first got here, none of real substance. The most he’s asked is how far away the VCs were when they got shot to shit – the further the better, because it makes for a better headline. So this is nice. He’s always liked being the centre of attention.

     He knows some marines that got drafted, but they’re few and far between. They’re looking for a few good men, not yanking them out of nowhere. Phoney tough, crazy brave. “Aw, shucks. I’d like to say I don’t rate that shit,” the difference, who cares either way if he’s a marine or a soldier or a civilian with a big grin and a notepad and a radio show, “but the longer I’m in-country the more I’m starting to think it’s all poges and cannon fodder in the army. See, I don’t think soldiers can be grunts. They don’t have the mettle.”