Well I made my poetry reading debut tonight at the FMLA Open Mic night at the Jupiter House coffee shop. I was nervous as hell, but feel that I did a decent job. The poem that I read wasn't as strong as I would have liked, but it's a start. What I'd like to do is start working on prose again. I'll probably start doing that sometime soon. But in the meantime, I'm going to keep writing and writing and writing whatever comes into my head. :-)

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Seems like the fighting in Iraq has intensified over the past few days. Can't say that it's altogether all that surprising. What is new about all this fighting is that there appears to be a new name to a face that we're going to have to learn. Muqtada al-Sadr is a Muslim cleric who seems to have reached a high level of importance in the conflict. Whether or not the United States can "take him out" is almost irrelevant at this point, because sometimes those who fight for people do so more fiercely when that person is "martyred."

I read that 12 Marines died on Tuesday. It's almost too much to even think about sometimes. Being a former Marine, sometimes it hits really close to home when I read about Marines dying in combat. For all I know, I could have seen one of those people in any number of the places where I was stationed. Maybe I sat next to one of them in bootcamp or waiting for an airplane somewhere. As Brian Wilson would say, God only knows.

What's even scarier is to think that I could have been right there fighting in Iraq. I feel mighty fortunate that all this went down after I got out of the Marine Corps.

Sometimes the more I think about it, the more I wonder what I was doing there in the first place. It's just all too confusing sometimes. I'm proud I served, but looking back, it was about as far away from "me" as I have ever been. I sometimes felt that I went to a "place" where I had to put my feelings and values aside. And that's always a recipe for disaster in my eyes. Sometimes when I look back on it, I ask myself how a sensitive young person such as myself could ever have been swept up in the hyper-masculine culture of being a Marine.

But like I said, I'm not in Iraq and never served in Iraq. I was VERY fortunate to have served in a time of relative peace. Since I was so fortunate, most of the time I look back on my time as nothing more than a 4 year vacation where I got to see the world, while losing a little bit of my mind. haha ;-)

matt out