Friday, February 25, 2005

Hope


I got to speak to my buddy who is in Iraq. He's 50 miles north of Bahgdad. He is a medic. He cannot go to the bathroom during the day in fear of mortors. During a mortor attack, two people got hit. He saved one but couldn't save the other.

The following is the epitomy of hope. In all the shit he's in....between all the mortors and all the doctoring and saving people....in the middle of the storm he's living in, the other day he managed to get online, and play Eve Online with the rest of us. He was able to be with all the people he knew and talked to, thousands of miles away. Hunkered in his bunker-or-wherever, he got online and chatted with us. Talked to us about how things were going and sent us pictures.

Eve is just a video game, tis true. However, it's something my buddy loves to do. And in the middle of guns and wars and hate, he was able to do the thing he loved to do, with the people he loved to do it with; a simple video game. He flew his spaceship in and out of in-game combat. Nobody else he flew with knew he was in Iraq, while they were in the comfort of their homes -- in their wives and girlfriends arms -- with a coffee or milk in their hands. While they had pajamas on, he had his fatigues, ready to run out and patch people up who would otherwise bleed to death. A microcosom of light in an other wise brutal existance. That is hope in its purest.

Time to go cut my hair for the party tonight. I'm going for the Tyler Durden look, from the later half of the movie.

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