Ponder-osa

I am currently being fascinated by the New York Times’ archives, particularly of the Marines’ fighting in and around Belleau Wood in WWI. Reading articles written by correspondents who were there is very interesting to me. Same with Custer’s Last Stand and other historical events. The NY Times, love her or hate her, is still a chronicle of contemporary writings of historical events. God bless the NYT for dropping their paywall!

These entries are looking mighty slim, huh?

So today’s the 80-day mark. Here is where I make a cute pun about “traveling around the world in 80 days,” leaving the reader to scratch his head in my ambiguous use of a prepositional phrase.

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By way of apology, I was out gallivanting around Iraq for the past two days, so the 81- and 82-day entries are absent. Trust me, they weren’t anything special. Mostly it regarded drying paint and a bit of nonsense about noiseless Velcro.

Sundays around here? Super boring. Especially for a desk jockey such as myself. I wish I could bullshit everyone and say, “Yeah man. I’m out there manning a machine gun, killing people, blowing stuff up.” But the reality is I sit in the air conditioning all day reading reports, answering e-mails, things like that.

Also, doing this daily blog thing is kind of taxing. I imagine after awhile the pain becomes transcendent. Oh well, tonight’s shrimp night at the chow hall. Awesome.

Maybe GamerDad should have been BicyclistDad or RunnerDad or maybe even SwimafewlapsDad. Maybe he wouldn't be PainfulLeftArmDad.

I guess that wasn't very nice, was it?

At any rate, I've decided that I will, indeed, reply to comments, but in haiku form, and only one haiku response per person. That's only fair. I mean, it would be kind of cheating if I was writing 1000-word responses to comments, wouldn't it?

I drank this TRIPLE SHOCK MOCHA. It about gave me a TRIPLE SHOCK HEART ATTACK.

This project is actually kind of masochistic. The tighter the restriction gets – going from 88 to 87 to today’s 86 and so on – the more pleasurable it gets. You know, because I get closer to going home. It’s actually really cathartic to pound out these words, especially given my long-winded nature.

Tragic to lose a warrior like Sheik Sattar, but I think its significance is going to be overplayed in the media over the next week or so. Especially amongst the Salon.com paranoid extremists.

Yesterday, in honor of my 88 days, I watched a movie. Pretty disappointing, for a Pacino vehicle. Understand it may not be widely released.

Also yesterday, started reading House to House. An excellent account of war, despite intermittent whinings of USMC "historical revisionism". Somehow, despite our best efforts, the Army gets all the best movies. At least recently. 

It's a stunning, blow-by-blow dissection of the house-to-house combat that characterized Operation Phantom Fury in 2004. Read it immediately if you give a shit about “the troops.”

This blog is an exercise in constrained writing. I was inspired by something on kottke’s website, and upon hearing how many days I had until I departed Iraq, I knew what I wanted to do.

I have 88 days until I re-deploy. So every day I will post one entry, in which the number of words will correlate to the number of days I have left. Expect significant subtext in the form of hyperlinks to appropriate websites. Everything starts today.

Today is day one.