she was nice, but she was watchin' me like a hawk

the following is from an email to a friend on sunday.  i know i shouldn't be heading off in a new direction, considering all the hanging threads and unfinished business all over this blog at the moment--but what can i say, it was a helluva weekend, and i thought i'd tell you about a little of it.


read your post--hope you're having a great time with your family.

me? well, since you ask, last night i had fun in a bar for the first time in years. met up with adam and laura, and her cousin, the legendary porno joe (which is how he's known all over this dusty little town, i would find out--by the end of the weekend, i'd be calling him the marine whisperer), and he dragged us out to one of his recruiting grounds, this military dive bar on the main drag at the outskirts of town.

i was dreading it, tell you the truth, but it turned out great--everybody knew him there, so we had, like 80 instant friends, most of 'em smokin' hot. there were lots of women there too, of course, most of 'em dressed like, as laura put it, women who hang out at military dive bars, but they were really fun too. and all night long, young guy after young guy would come up to joe--this cheerful, bald, middle-aged, nondescript lookin' dude--drape their arm around him, and shoot the shit. he told me later, "mike, i swear, the more guys who find out who i am and what i do, the more they wanna be my friend." it was kinda surreal.

i spent most of my time out on the back patio where the music wasn't so loud, and--me, who never talks to strangers in bars--did interview after interview with these kids. there was the navy corpsman, nico, who i found mildly cute (until i spent half an hour with him, by which time i was half in love) who i got to open up about his field experience and training, and, eventually, all the lives he'd saved.

and there was bret, this tall, raw-boned marine IED specialist from kentucky, who, as he put it, "blows up shit in afghanistan". fourth-generation military, enlisted when he was 17, and at 25--after enduring three direct hits on armored vehicles in which he was riding, has wrecked knees, a wrecked back, partial deafness and god knows what else. i asked him what it was like in the aftermath of such an event--do you black out, do you just lay there, stunned, or what?--and he just said, matter-of-factly, "nah, you jump up, wipe the blood outta your ears, take care of the wounded and keep moving."

he's going back in ten days for his fourth deployment--which he anticipates will be the worst, seeing as how, since the current administration has thoughtfully announced our pull-out in 2014, the enemy will wanna make it look like they ran us out on a rail (i asked him what he thought would happen after that, and he said, casually, "oh, it'll all go to shit." yeah.).

his wife drifted over a couple times during our conversation--we talked about how she's struggling to budget in the face of recent news that washington is trying to cut their housing subsidy by half--and at some point i said to her, "this guy's really something, huh?", she just rolled her eyes, smacked him on the side of the head, and we laughed. it was really cute.

lemme tellya, after years in weho being surrounded by man-boys (myself included), it was really eye-opening hanging out with these boy-men last night. and now, if the time ever comes when i give up my boy-chasing ways, make my final selection and move to the checkout, it's gonna be very hard to settle for anything less.