I'm not a true fanatic of S&TC for a couple of reasons, I'm a middle-aged white guy and I'm straight. But tonight I am trying real hard to not see Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay and I already went to all of the other films at my multiplex so I'll go see it after the Yankee game is over. The movies are cool because I get to hang out with other people who are having fun without worrying about getting caught crashing a party that I was not invited to.

I didn't even know S&TC existed until it was almost over, towards the middle of 2004, when in the middle of the night on our shift in Iraq a female intelligence analyst who I supervised would commandeer the break room TV and watch DVDs of it. When we had finished our night's shift work (war stuff) all of the guys played HALO on a huge projection screen in the recreation facility next door (something which I sucked real hard at) so to avoid unnecessary humiliation I watched whatever was piped in on the cable TV feed from our Air Force neighbors who owned all of the entertainment equipment which we Army slugs would then piggyback on.

Usually it was sports but sometimes news. Not after when the care package with the S&TC DVDs arrived though, forever after that was all their was. So I had to choose between dying ugly at HALO or hanging quietly in the back of the break room watching half an episode of S&TC and bailing out before I wore out my welcome and risked being ejected by the DVDs captivated owner.

This particular female analyst was actually a pretty good sport and she even had a callisthenic which we did during PT renamed for her, the '(Name Omitted) Fornicator', which was this thing where you would squat down and while grasping your ankles you would then partially stand up and squat down again over and over until your quadriceps burned like heck. I did not rename it after her. Someone else way above my pay grade did.

So now I will try to remember those nights long ago when I didn't have to crash someone else's party to see S&TC, they were sort of crashing my party even if they didn't know it at the time. I guess I could also try to imagine being the guy who got married to a successful woman, fathered a kid and now lives in an apartment in Brooklyn, a dream I myself once fostered back there in Iraq on those long desperate nights. Turns out that they were actually better than these are.

I really enjoyed reading that, except for the defeated note at the very end.

Surely the thing about dreams is that you never give up on them?

Trainspotter type:

...Surely the thing about dreams is that you never give up on them?

My own dream of love left me, I never gave up on it. Two people either grow closer together in love or further apart in love but love does not stand still for anyone. In plain language, I always prefer to be a walker, not a stalker. Wisdom’s path is littered with the bodies of love’s dead dreams.

I got dumped by a dentist who now is marrying (already married to?) a lawyer. I suspect that I was always the only fool with dreams about love in that relationship anyway.