A Different Cloth

I think about death a lot.

It's not that I find the subject one I am eager to experience, mind you. If the rest of the world is headed to their mortal demise on a rocket ship, I am opting for the golf cart with a transfer to a ten-dollar scooter.

When I was a kid, I was convinced I would die before I was eighteen. Perhaps I got that notion from all of the impromptu "Come to Jesus" meetings I inadvertantly scheduled with my father. I deserved every one of them except for one.

He apologized for that one before he passed away himself. You have to make these things right before you are no longer available for comment.

On my eighteenth birthday, I told my gullible mother that I was going to the Army recruiter to look into the career options they offered.

There was a girl involved.

There usually is.

And I emerged from that office an enlisted young man, just as gullible as my mother was when I went in.

Two years of Army Reserve later, I found myself in the scenic landscape of Saudi Arabia on a Middle Eastern tour called Desert Storm. I really thought I was going to die then, and I didn't even ask for that. My uncle Samuel, who wears bad clothing cut from American flags, made that decision for me.

I had asked to go to Germany, enroll in college there, sample the beer in its historical form, and fornicate with young lasses as much as earthly possible.

Still, I survived.

Even after that one moonlit night when the lovely scent of Sarin was in the air, and I was told in the most loving but brisk way, "Take off your mask, Jonesy. You're the lowest ranking. We wanna see if you do the flippin' chicken."

I got to smell what Iraq was cooking.

It wasn't food.

But that moment is now closer to my birth than I am to it at this moment. And I had lasting fun from it.

So, I think a lot about what life may and may not be. I don't think there is a Hell because if there were, most politicians would be zombies. They would get served with a restraining order from both sides.

The Devil is probably a lawyer, anyway.

Or he sells pillows.

Either way.

I think about all of the turmoil the world is in. I think about all the words I write, as well as all of those other lasses with their tomes of love and six-foot-tall rich men with proper manners, devoid of what is apparently called "toxic masculinity."

I've had wet dreams, too.

Reality is more like my grandfather, five foot seven, with a limp, because the same government that silver-tongued me into the desert sent him to, well, Germany. Except they blew him up and carted him away until General Patton decided they had enough of that and rescued him.

All of these things we write will be forgotten in about one hundred years or so, and someone will have to explain men in dresses.

Not kilts, dresses.

I am sure that all of my own jottings, scrivenings, and blitherings will also be discarded to the dustbin of time. I'm prepared for that. In the meantime, my Uncle Sam and I don't get along so well. He says and does a lot of idiotic things these days, like that drunk uncle who always fell into the punchbowl at the family Christmas party after taking a leak on the curtains.

It takes work to get him on the phone when you need him. Nowadays, when he thinks of calling, I just send him off to voicemail.

Especially now that he's starting to wear a dress.

Not a kilt, a dress.