elizaskinner.net - the jambox

This country is in the midst of an unjust war. Most of the world pretty much hates us (but bedrudgingly adores our media output.) Our soldiers are coming home dead or mangled every day. Yet most of us live our lives like we just don’t care. Myself included.

So far today I woke up, read some comic books, ate brunch and a Whachamacallit bar, and played with the cats. I was pretty stoked to have found a Whachamacallit bar - I thought they had stopped making them. I bought it thinking, “Even though I’ve never eaten one of these, I’m pretty sure this is my favorite candy bar.” I was wrong. It was disappointing, but still chocolate. I started to daydream about the candy bar that I would create if I had the means - a lot of wafer, a lot of really salty peanut butter, and dark chocolate. TELL ME that wouldn’t be great! You can’t! It would! I’d call it “Jim Tasty”.

“[My hand] was gone, it just disintegrated. It was just a mist of blood….When we get injured, all it says is `one soldier wounded,’ Not that a soldier has lost an arm or a leg, or how hard that is.”
- Specialist Robert Acosta, pictured.

I forgot to tell Will that he wanted to remember to buy a Cars album today. I guess just a “Best of the Cars”, because he didn’t specify a particular one, just that he wanted some Cars music. Luckily, he remembered on his own and found what he wanted on Amazon. But I felt really guilty about not having reminded him - I said I would and it would have been nice of me. I am a liar, a SHAM. If I tell you I will remind you of something, just shake your head at me scornfully and walk away, because I am lying.

“[People] think the war is over, and it’s not. It’s getting worse and worse with everybody coming here wounded. They say ‘wounded’ like they have a cast, or a splinter. There are people who lost both legs, in wheelchairs, here. That’s not wounded: that’s fucked up. ”
-Tristan Wyatt, pictured.
Total American Military wounded in action Iraq as of September 7, ‘06 - 19910 [source]
I got an email plug for someone’s new show today, and I thought “Shit. I hope they don’t get famous before me.” It’s not that I don’t want other people to be sucessful, I just worry that everyone I know will get sucessful before me, and I won’t be cool enough to go to their parties or get their jokes, and eventually they’ll feel too awkward around me to even hang out and I’ll die fat and alone. So I started working on a new sketch. It’s about ugly babies.

Unnamed Marine with Nurse Stephanie Alvarez
Bomb blasts send a powerful shock wave through brain tissue, bursting blood vessels and smacking the brain against the inside of the skull. Soldiers are then left with a condition known as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) much like Shaken baby syndrome. TBI symptoms include an inability to find words, and inability to perform simple tasks, agitation, poor judgement and sexual inappropriateness.
61 percent of soldiers examined at Walter Reed between August and December suffered (TBI) in combat. Slightly more than half those cases had permanent brain damage. [source]

Lost shouldn’t have a 6 year story arc. That’s retarded. There is no way I’d date someone who said I had to wait 6 years to get past 3rd base, and there’s no way I’m going to care long enough to hold out 6 years to find out if The Others are clones. WHICH they totally are. (They CLONED Walt, so Shannon really DID see him in the jungle.) Why couldn’t they just make it a kick-ass miniseries? Is is that hard to think of a good idea, they had to make this one last 6 years? UGH!

Sergeant Ryan Kelly and his wife
“I don’t remember a blast,” Sergeant Kelly said of the roadside bomb. “It was a gorgeous morning, that time when it’s still cool. Then everything went black for a second, like when your TV goes out, and then the film comes back.
“I couldn’t hear anything but a loud tone,” he said. “The Humvee filled with dust and this smell, this smell that I can’t describe. And the blood. The windshield was shattered, and we went from 70 to 40.
“I was knocked backward and I tried to use my foot to get back up and it felt like there was nothing under my foot, like there was a hole in the floor of the Humvee, and I pulled back my foot and I couldn’t see it, the way it was hanging.
“I looked at Zayas, the driver, and there was blood all over his face and I said, my leg is gone,” Sergeant Kelly said. “My leg is out on the road back there. I switched my weapon to fire and emptied it. I was scared out of my mind and furious at the same time.”
Sergeant Kelly said he joked with the soldiers who evacuated him, though he knew he would probably lose his leg, which dangled by a strip of skin.
Finally, at the military hospital, he wept, he said. First, when the nurse pulled back the covers to show him his bandaged wound. And then, when his wife arrived. [source]

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.