“A man chooses. A slave obeys.” ~Bioshock’s Andrew Ryan
Finally, an end to an era that lasted two years longer than
it really should have. My military
career as of two days ago has ended five years and eight months after it
began. Nearly six years ago I was a
young lazy noob living in my mom and dad’s basement playing video games and
getting fat while sucking at college and working a part time job at
Wal-Mart. At first my entry into the
military was mimicking a journey my former herpes infested fiancé had begun, but
after I dumped her ass and had my heart broken by her hurtful confessions, I
decided that instead of joining for her, I’d do it for myself. I didn’t like living in my parents’ house and
I wanted to do something new, just for me.
That, and my dad told me I had six months to get the fuck out. So I signed up with a new motive in mind, not
really knowing what I was doing other than getting out of my parents house and
actually doing something with my life.
You know, something other than the whole losing my scholarship because
getting drunk was more important than math, or the whole spending my life
owning noobs at Halo being more important than actually finding another job to
help pay for my own school, type of thing.
I give my sister a lot of shit for living at home with mom and dad, but
she has legitimately worked her ass off pursuing the career she wants and deep
down inside that is something I envy because her schooling is almost done. I have the rest of this year before I finally
get a bachelors degree at the amazing age of 26. Wow, slow down and live a little cowboy.
After I left the base, I decided to come home in the most rebellious fashion possible, which was driving the speed limit, to rebelliously change into my civilian attire. From there I didn’t really know what to do. I stood at the bottom of the stairs between the living room and kitchen and just looked back and forth between the two like some ass hat on acid who stumbled into the wrong house. Maybe I’ll clean the house. I mean, the dishes are piled sky freaking high, the living room looks like a four year old Tasmanian devil (Looney Toons version) wannabe ran through it, and the laundry desperately needs done. Screw that shit, I should go break something or pee on a cop car, anything to help signify my freedom from the military, although peeing on a cop car could get me in trouble. Unless I dressed up as a sour patch kid and gave the cops a bag of donuts afterwards. First I’m sour, and then I’m sweet. Enjoy the new paint job fatties. Those commercials are seriously stupid though. If one of those little fuckers tripped me down the stairs and then laid out a mattress for me to land on, the last thing I would say is, “oh, thanks.” Thanks for what? Thanks for tripping me down all of those concrete stairs which have caused massive internal bleeding in my head, a few broken bones, and a blow to my dignity? Why did you do it in the first place? So you could pretend to be the good guy at the end? That would be like McDonalds intentionally making people fat so they could open a brand new gym across the street.
“Hey? You don’t like
being fat from all that shitty food we serve?
Well we just opened a gym for you to lose all that weight!”
“Hey you did a great job losing all that weight, how about
treating yourself to a ShitMCSandwich as a reward?”
Seriously, though, Mr. Sourpatch kid, trip me down some
stairs and I will fucking kill you and all the little bitches they package you
with.
Holy cow, and this has nothing to do with what this post is
about at all, but speaking of McDonalds and commercials. Have you seen that one commercial where the
guy is like, “I love you” to his girlfriend and she’s thrown off by it so she
tells him, “and I think…you’re the egg Mcmuffin of boyfriends.” He of course lights up like she just proposed
to him and then the commercial proceeds to show you a heap of garbage about how
the egg mcmuffin is king shit way to describe something "awesome."
One, why is the guy being the chick in the relationship by saying I love
you first? Apparently I mistook his
short hair and Adams apple for him looking like a guy. Two, she totally gave a guys response, talk about role reversal.
“Like OMG I love you!”
“Yeah um, I think you’re very special too, baby.”“Like OMG I love you!”
That’s how that goes down in real life, but not here in this commercial. Instead, the she dude decides to tell him that he’s the reason she’ll have diarrhea within an hour rather than just saying, “I just don’t feel the same right now, it’s only been a week.” Oh, and the only part that got the right meaning out of the egg mcmuffin reference was the chick in the shitty apartment saying, “he said this was the egg mcmuffin of apartments, the egg mcmuffin!” Yeah, and he told the truth. That apartment has diarrhea walls. We’ll stop there.
Alright, let’s get back to my life altering decision on what
I should’ve done on my first day out of the joint. I decided not to clean because who the hell
wants to do that on their first day freedom?
I needed to do something awesome that I normally wouldn’t be able to do
while I was in the military. I came to
the conclusion that feasting on a Subway sandwich and having a “Breaking Bad”
marathon was the right thing to do. Take
that Air Force! I’m a fucking rebel
without a cause.
So by now, almost a page and a half into this post, you’re
probably wondering if there is a reason I put that quote at the top of
this. “A man chooses, a slave obeys.” I totally nabbed that from a video game
character, but a vey philosophical character.
Anyhoo, no, there’s no real reason I posted that up there other than to
signify that I’m a born again free man. I
felt like I was a slave a lot of the time I was serving and I’m sure most
people in civilian jobs feel the same way when they have Hitler as a supervisor. Do you want to know what the big difference
is between civilian and military though?
When I reach the breaking point, I can’t tell my bitch of a supervisor
to fuck off and go catch AIDS without going to jail. At least when I do that outside of the
military, the worst that can happen is I get fired, right? It’s pretty funny that the people serving to
protect the freedoms we get in this country actually lose quite a bit of those
freedoms when they sign up to serve.
Perhaps it’s because we have to be better than you. Oh, and to be better just means that we’re
practically grounded all the time and when we’re not grounded, we have to go
inside when the street lights come on. I
mean, think about it. Civilians get paid
more money, have less life threatening jobs, and get to talk shit about their
President. In the military, you get paid
jack shit, you get deployed and shot at while still making less money than the
garbage man, and if you talk shit about the President, you can go to jail. Which sucks because that was the same guy who
tried to STOP paying the military because his greedy ass and the greedy asses
that fill up congress couldn’t decide on a budget plan.
“Hey guys, I’m getting shot at over here in Iraq and I’m not
getting paid a fucking dime for it.” Sounds
like a slave to me.
If you haven’t caught on by now, the military will send you
to jail if you fart the wrong way. I’m
not kidding. I had to sit through that
whole UCMJ crap in basic training where they told me that having sex with my
wife in any position other than missionary was considered sodomy. The punch line for that is if you get caught
making babies any other way, you’d get thrown in jail where getting slapped in
the face by large black dicks is a daily discomfort. I don’t know what the real punishment is, but
that’s an actual military law (Article 125 of the UCMJ). Not that
you’ll have security police hooking up cameras in your bedroom in order to help
enforce this law. In fact, it’s just as
useless as that law in New York where the penalty for jumping off a
building is death. Still, they preach it
as law which means that if you’re reenacting the Jason Statham/Amy Smart scene
from Crank, you’ll be getting punished for a lot more than just public
indecency.
It’s not even the rules that made me feel like a slave, it was
the constant vigilance of my life. Service
before self was one of the core values and I honestly think it was bogus to
even try and make people enforce it. You want
me to put my lousy job that I fucking hate over my family? My most recent supervisor, a person I hate
more than Justin Bieber herself, had once told me that I couldn’t have one Friday off
so my wife could attend her class without worrying about taking care of
the kids (the course was six weeks long and I only asked for one day), and
that my wife should know that me sitting at a desk playing pocket pool (your tax
dollars at work) was more important than her trying to better her career. It’s that kind of mentality that made me
despise it. On top of that nonsense, the
military preached that its members were on the clock twenty four seven. Oh and they mean it too. I was woken up at three in the morning one
time to go into work to pee in a cup.
“Surprise maggot!
Come piss in this cup or get court marshaled, your choice dirt bag!”
The one thing I disliked most about the Air Force was its
stupid obsession with PT. Yes I
understand we all need to be fit for that one time that will never happen where
I have to drag my buddies off of the field of battle. At least when I was in basic training they
yelled at us about being combat ready even though most of us Air Force folk who head over to war just sit behind a desk in a tent in the middle of the camp that is
protected by the Army and Marines. Those
dudes need to be in ridiculously good shape because they actually utilize it. Those guys practice their PT and they're dead serious about it. The Air Force, on the other hand, is like the kid that farts in class because
he wants to be funny enough to fit in with everyone else. Except everyone else hates him because he
farts in class. I know that we’re
suppose to project a positive image and that image shouldn’t be of a thirty
five year old fat Master Sergeant who's popping out of his blues, but the
requirements on the test don’t need to be so strict. Not everyone is a runner, man, and besides,
how much running will I ever do for the military? NONE!
I was medical administration.
Holy crap, medical admin is the fat kid that gets picked last for dodge
ball. Only this kid gets pounded in the
face by his own team as well as the opposing team. I sat behind a desk for ninety-five percent
of my military career doing menial tasks that did not matter.
The workplace was nothing but a melancholy graveyard of
paperwork with petty leaders telling you to stay in shape and to go work out. By yourself of course. I mean they were all gung ho about being in
tip top shape, but they never gathered the crew to go work out and make it
happen. If they did make a PT schedule,
you’d be damned to see them show up even five percent of the time. They’d yell at you to go, but they didn’t
think it was important enough for them because they tote around larger penises and
that’s workout enough. So in a nutshell, at least from what I’ve learned, is that the Air Force
likes to talk about being in shape the same way that a non-published writer likes to talk about writing
that book he never started (yeah, yeah, point that finger in my direction).
So anyway, I’m a free man.
I don’t have to put up with that demon anymore and I can finally do what
I really want in life. Like writing that
book, ha-ha.
