Noxious Truths: A stream of consciousness bit

Life is a sticky mess. While some people seem to glide through, I feel as if I'm swimming against a current. Is my psyche not aerodynamic enough for these things? Well, a good film can really change that feeling. Of course, drugs and booze work just as well, but movies are a great alternative. I'm really fascinated by dark movies. But I don't know what fascinates me about it. I've always been interested by these sort of taboo concepts of depressing things and things that nobody ever wants to talk about or think about. But why do we act this way? Life is REAL. Real things HAPPEN. I just feel like so many people carry this instinctual aversion to sadness and bad things. But what is wrong with it? Sadness helps you relate to people. Sadness helps you realize that you're HUMAN. And it's not even like I'm always sad. Just more than normal, I guess. Well, not even sad. I feel like I just embrace a sort of cruel self-honesty that so many people choose to avoid. Some go pretty far out of their way to avoid it. There was this thing on NPR the other day about this woman, Jess Goodell, who was a marine in Iraq around 2004. After being in the corps for a while, she felt a pressure to go serve in the war. Since jobs there were mostly taken, she volunteered to serve in a unit which is new in the American military; a unit called the Mortuary Affairs unit. This is a unit that goes to sites of fatalities, and must recover and process the remains of dead American soldiers and Iraqis in order to have them returned to their families. This fascinated me immensely. Not in a sick sort of way. It was because it wasn't an ordinary "realities of war" subject. This was really, truly, Fucked Up. I just felt that hearing about it was like a taste of actual hell. The darkest thing you could ever experience vicariously. I'm drawn to this sort of thing. Some of the descriptions she gave nearly made me gag, and if you know me then you know I don't get queasy over many things. The way she said everything was incredible. She said everything with this aching tone, as if she was hesitant about every word she said. Like she had to force herself to put it into actual words. I got the feeling that every syllable she uttered made her want to just curl up in a ball and try to forget the things she'd seen. I know this all sounds sort of sadistic, but it's not. It was simply the most human thing I have ever really heard. This woman, and everyone in this unit, was literally walking on the edge of the things you can humanely ask someone do. The worst part was that she had no idea what she was getting into. She wasn't one of these biologist morticians who are intrigued by the surgical aspect of death and bodies or anything. She was a regular girl who wanted to serve in Iraq. Anyways, I was really touched by it. She wrote a book about it and I really want to read it. What made me feel really bad, though, was that as I was listening to her bear the darkest parts of one of the most traumatic experiences one could go through, I just kept thinking that so many people would probably just change the channel and be disgusted that someone would let her say this crap on the radio. Or something, maybe not quite as harsh. It's like her entire horrific, yet aw-inspiring experience is sort of nullified by the fact that it's hard to swallow. Because people are afraid! People are afraid to be Human. They are afraid to face realities that some humans face. Afraid to confront the realities of the world we live it. Like people who eat meat, but are disgusted by the brutal process of killing and butchering an animal. My aunt & uncle don't like watching intense movies because they like to be happy-go-lucky. Life is LIFE, people. It's not all good. It's not like everyone has to embrace the most terrible things they can find out there, but shying away from that stuff is no good, either. That's the thing I like about movies like Requiem for a Dream. I mean, I don't like really love watching Requiem for a Dream...it makes me want to die. But t forces you to THINK. Someone told me once that that movie was disgusting, and the just most depressing things ever put together and shoved in your face...and I said "Yeah, of course. That's the point!" If you never knew these things, you would just go on about your life living in a content and censored world of happy things that don't add up. I just don't want to live that way. I don't want that. And I guess I'm willing to not ever be fully accepted by society for it. Maybe people like me are one of these realities that nobody likes to face. Well...so be it then.

Jess Goodell's book, Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq, named for the task of having to diagram the body outlines of the corpses, and in instances of there being an piece of the body which was missing and unable to be recovered, they were instructed to "shade it black."