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 (nobody)...and 124 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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'tis my usual sort of tangential orgy. there is an article on metafilter, about things cut in ; recommended. from that i find , about viet cong tunnels. also recommended. i begin googling it. i find has made a movie involving these tunnels based on his experiences, and i had no idea oliver stone was in vietnam. i just know him for "natural born killers" and "scarface" so the idea of him covering a more serious topic is interesting to me. back on wikipedia, i find out that (1986) actually established stone as a more proper figure in movies. i promptly torrented the movie, and i also recommend. also of note: charlie sheen can play serious roles? i had no idea also of note: i've totally heard in so many other places before dismal movie, emotionally, but quite good |
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i think now, loocking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. the war is over for me now, but it will always be there, for the rest of my days. my grandfather was in the navy in WWII. there was a brief fracas that i had funny at the time, when he got mad at my father for buying japanese car. it was funny to me at the time -- my dad said, "he only contributed $20." like, you're buying a honda? $20 is all i have for you. within a year or five, though, he'd toned it down. whenever asked about the war, he would say: it was terrible, every time i've spoken about it it's made people unhappy, and please don't ask me about it again. my father came very close to being drafted in vietnam. i'm not sure of the details, but from what i've been told, it was just barely not. he was a very nice man and i feel like had he been drafted, i would never have come to exist. he'd probably have just gotten blown up. but, had he survived, he would have had to become a much harder, nastier person rather than the genuinely sweet man he was, it would have disrupted his academic career... and, yeah, i wouldn't be here. |
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silly as it is, what unsettles me most about this movie is the idea of my dad having been sent into that. it didn't happen; what's it matter? just such a horrid thought. |
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rambly fact ~ the the 92 civil LX he contributed $20 to in a a trollish fashion would bedome my first car about fifteen years later. he was generally an owum grandfather, with the occasional glitch -- my father called him bill, for various complex reasons -- and i remember a distinct moment out in front of the barn: you will call me grandpa! and i'm like: jesus shit, ok then the incident in which i was four or six and i'm just doing my thing coloring in coloring books with crayons. some irish lass who, in retrospect, was quite pretty, was nuking up wax to make jam preserves. grandma, who was dying of cancer at the time, calls her off or some task. eventually, she returns. she lifts the lid off the pot of molten wax; it explodes. the walls are on fire. she screams. i am, at four or six, in a bart simpson state of "cool man" my grandfather walks into the kitchen. observes the fire. ponders a moment. cool as a cucumber; fetches a fire extinguisher out of nowhere and extinguishes the kitchen. years later, i would connect this moment with my father's almost irrational fear that i would set the house on fire -- it was just sort of a thing in that household |
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Now this is interesting. |
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I like reading about your dad |
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> i feel like had he been drafted, i would never have come to exist the contingency of the self is messed up. If he'd walked a little more slowly one day out of a thousand, there'd also be no you. We've all won the infinite improbability lottery, and the prize is: fun. ^_^ |
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The irony being of course that we're all EpicMegatrax |
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Not me buddy I'm different I'm special, I post long rants on a dying electronic music messa- oh. |
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did you watch this epic? it was really good |
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I watched Black Hawk Down again the other day and pondered the alarming possibility that if my father had been born 50 years later, in Somalia, and not mowed down by the Delta Force, I'd currently be hawking shit in some fly-blown market in Mogadishu. There but for the grace of Allah, etc. |
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I watched star ship troopers once and had the exact same thought, |
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i watched star ship troopers once and had the exact same thought as well |
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the contingency of the self is messed up. If he'd walked a little more slowly one day out of a thousand, there'd also be no you. We've all won the infinite improbability lottery, and the prize is: fun. ^_^ my reaction was twofold. first, you have a valid point, but you're at the wrong level of scale. think: how many people don't exist because of vietnam? never mind me and my lonesome, how many of them might have been the next oliver stone? if gerald donald's father had died in vietnam before there was a gerald donald? it's just such an abysmal, abhorrent waste of potential. but, then again, according to platoon, "they were the bottom of the barrel." people from corners of mississippi, alabama. black people, who didn't quite have proper civil rights yet. the poor. perhaps, in a sub-conscious way, war is a culling mechanism... but, still, it is a crude machine, and i'm sure plenty of talent went down the drain in vietnam. and that bothers me. second, just the thought of someone i cared about very much having to go through that was even more upsetting. |
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I'm sorry, I shouldn't have grabbed your mental football and run off into the weeds. > i'm sure plenty of talent went down the drain in vietnam Yes absolutely. I'm reminded of this Stephen Jay Gould quote I saw recently - "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." > second, just the thought of someone i cared about very much having to go through that was even more upsetting. Yeah I get it. Wait till you have a kid and you read about bad things happening to kids and you want to go in your kid's room and hug him or her but it's 2 a.m. and why are you reading the bad news at 2 a.m. you idiot. you garbage brain crap person. |
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exactly why i'm not going to torrent that 10-part series of vietnam, despite the feeling that i probably should understand the whole arc of the thing |
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I like reading about your dad here's one more, that disney just dredged up we were at disneyLAND, the one out in california. splash mountain or whatever. as we get to the log boat, my dad's all "why don't you sit in front?" i do. as we're reaching the splash part, i promptly duck. dad, sitting behind me, gets soaked. he immediately admitted that i'd gotten him right good |
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