A long, long time ago, I had a friend who lived next door to me. When I say a long, long time ago, I mean around 30-plus years ago, the time of my life I remember only dimly. My friend’s name was Rusty, I think his last name was Stavely, but it has been so long my memory is very hazy. I think we had a couple of years to form our friendship before he and his family moved away into a bigger house.

After he moved, I went over to visit him in his new house one time for a sleepover. I recall his mother making us pancakes the next morning with smiley faces on the pancakes. I never went over again after that first sleepover. I have no idea even in retrospect as an adult what stopped the visits, other than possibly the bipolar disorder my mother was diagnosed with about a decade later, when I was in my twenties. She may not have been able to handle me sleeping away from home, or having someone else sleepover at our house.

I look at the experiences of my stepson and stepdaughter, and how they are maintaining many of their friendships despite our recent move to a new neighborhood.

I have always had problems maintaining friendships at a distance. I am glad that it seems that my stepchildren do not seem to have the same problem, but it makes me sad for what I have missed.

…and that is the human element that we are changing by our collective decisions and actions:

I’ve spent hours taking in the world through a rifle scope, watching life unfold. Women hanging laundry on a rooftop. Men haggling over a hindquarter of lamb in the market. Children walking to school. I’ve watched this and hoped that someday I would see that my presence had made their lives better, a redemption of sorts. But I also peered through the scope waiting for someone to do something wrong, so I could shoot him. When you pick up a weapon with the intent of killing, you step onto a very strange and serious playing field. Every morning someone wakes wanting to kill you. When you walk down the street, they are waiting, and you want to kill them, too. That’s not bloodthirsty; that’s just the trade you’ve learned. And as an American soldier, you have a very impressive toolbox. You can fire your rifle or lob a grenade, and if that’s not enough, call in the tanks, or helicopters, or jets. The insurgents have their skill sets, too, turning mornings at the market into chaos, crowds into scattered flesh, Humvees into charred scrap. You’re all part of the terrible magic show, both powerful and helpless.

It doesn’t end with the quote… it never truly ends….

We pack into the trucks after midnight, and the convoy snakes out of camp and speeds toward the target house. I sit in a backseat and the fear settles in, a sharp burning in my stomach, same as the knot from hard liquor gulped too fast. I think about the knot. I’ll be the first through the door. What if he starts shooting, hits me right in the face before I’m even through the doorway? What if there’s two, or three? What if he pitches a grenade at us? And I think about it more and run through the scenarios, planning my movements, imagining myself clearing through the rooms, firing two rounds into the chest, and the knot fades.

The trucks drop us off several blocks from the target house and we slip into the night. As always, the dogs bark. We gather against the high wall outside the house and call in the trucks to block the streets. The action will pass in a flash. But here, before the chaos starts, when we’re stacked against the wall, my friends’ bodies pressed against me, hearing their quick breaths and my own, there’s a moment to appreciate the gravity, the absurdity, the novelty, the joy of the moment. Is this real? Hearts beat strong. Hands grip tight on weapons. Reassurance. The rest of the world falls away. Who knows what’s on the other side?

One, two, three, go. We push past the gate and across the courtyard and toward the house, barrels locked on the windows and roof. Wells runs up with the battering ram, a short, heavy pipe with handles, and launches it toward the massive wood door. The lock explodes, the splintered door flies open, and we rush through, just the way we’ve practiced hundreds of times. No one shoots me in the face. No grenades roll to my feet. I kick open doors. We scan darkened bedrooms with the flashlights on our rifles and move on to the next and the next.

He’s gone, of course. We ransack his house, dumping drawers, flipping mattresses, punching holes in the ceiling. We find rifles and grenades and hundreds of pounds of gunpowder. And then, near dawn, we lie down on the thick carpets in his living room and sleep, exhausted and untroubled.

Many, many raids followed. We often raided houses late at night, so people awakened to soldiers bursting through their bedroom doors. Women and children wailed, terrified. Taking this in, I imagined what it would feel like if soldiers kicked down my door at midnight, if I could do nothing to protect my family. I would hate those soldiers. Yet I still reveled in the raids, their intensity and uncertainty. The emotions collided, without resolution.

My wife moved to Iraq partway through my second deployment to live in the north and train Iraqi journalists. She spent her evenings at restaurants and tea shops with her Iraqi friends. We spoke by cell phone, when the spotty network allowed, and she told me about this life I couldn’t imagine, celebrating holidays with her colleagues and being invited into their homes. I didn’t have any Iraqi friends, save for our few translators, and I’d rarely been invited into anyone’s home. I told her of my life, the tedious days and frightful seconds, and she worried that in all of this I would lose my thoughtfulness and might stop questioning and just accept. But she didn’t judge the work that I did, and I didn’t tell her that I sometimes enjoyed it, that for stretches of time I didn’t think about the greater implications, that it sometimes seemed like a game. I didn’t tell her that death felt ever present and far away, and that either way, it didn’t really seem to matter.

We both came back from Iraq, luckier than many. Two of my wife’s students have been killed, among the scores of journalists to die in Iraq, and guys I served with are still dying, too. One came home from the war and shot himself on Thanksgiving. Another was blown up on Christmas in Baghdad.

Thinking of them, I felt disgusted with myself for missing the war and wondered if I was alone in this.

I don’t think I am.

What have we wrought, not only in Iraq, but in the minds and hearts of those who will return to the US after making the penultimate sacrifice for us?

What indeed?

I’ve had a while to come up the learning curve for Vista on my replacement laptop that has a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 bit processor in it. The dual-core Athlon doesn’t score as well as comparable Intel Core Duo processors, but I’ve already noticed a much better response time than my older, single-core processor machines, even the higher clock speed 64 bit Athlon laptop that was destroyed by a milk spill (of all things). Unfortunately, the dual-core Athlon seems to run rather hot, and the placement in this laptop is such that the heat makes it up to the touch pad and palm rest area on the top of the laptop.

Perhaps I should be one of the testers for hardware designers because of my heavily multitasking ways. I generally have at least 10 windows open, from at least 4 applications, with multiple tabs open in my four browser windows. I use the alt-tab key combination to switch back and forth while I read/write and otherwise use the computer. In the past, within a few days, I would overwhelm a single-core processor computer, no matter how high the clock speed, once I had installed all my applications and had configured everything to my liking. This new dual-core laptop seems to be taking it all in stride.

I think my ultimate machine will be the Macintosh that will eventually come out that has two Intel quad-core processors. Of course, I won’t be able to afford it, but I can dream, can’t I?

I’ve always been a big advocate of efficiency in resource use and minimal generation of pollution because it’s not simply poor form to crap in your own bed, in the long term it is deadly, regardless of what those who would like to think otherwise say.

On the face of it, increased use of ethanol seems very promising in reducing at least some of the petroleum usage of the United States along with improving some aspects of the pollution generated by cars. Unfortunately, when you look deeper, the cost-benefit ratio is not so clear.

Oil, what we like to call the organic liquid mixture more properly termed petroleum, has many benefits that have created the worldwide economy we have now.

What is it about oil that makes it so special?

For one, it is a true energy source, very little energy is needed relative to the amount of energy gained to pump oil out of the ground, transport it, and refine it to forms more useful to us. For the case of ethanol, we have to grow the source material, whether it be cellulose from trees or sugars from corn or other plants, then we have to convert the raw materials into ethanol using any of a variety of processes that while they do not consume more energy than is contained in the product, it is certainly not as high yielding as the oil-based system.

In short, petroleum is a source of energy that has a low energy cost to convert to a useful, easily transportable form (such as gasoline among other products) whereas ethanol is a complicated method of converting the energy of sunlight into another form of energy, using water and other precursors (not to mention the energy costs associated with growing the raw materials and transporting those bulk solids to a conversion facility) to make the useful, easily transportable form of chemical energy.

I am not trying to argue against ethanol or any other alternative ways of transporting chemical energy (for that is what gasoline, ethanol, or other alternative energy sources are, ways of transporting chemical energy that is released through burning), but we must understand the energy economics of the cycle we are proposing along with the monetary economics.

Ultimately, true practical sources of energy involve either sunlight, uranium or other fissile material, fossil fuels, or in limited amounts geothermal. Other “sources” are merely converting these fundamental sources into a different form. For example, hydroelectric power, in addition to requiring dams that are not exactly environmentally friendly, is merely a way of converting the sunlight that evaporated the water that fell in the watershed as rain into electricity.

Ethanol burners, hybrids, not even fuel cell cars will avoid these fundamental energy economics, because the power has to come ultimately from somewhere. The true solution to the oncoming crisis of petroleum lies in understanding how to harness the fundamental energy sources, not short-term slogans that proclaim that ethanol or some other quick fix is the panacea.

Today (a Sunday) my wife’s church group (she is Catholic) came over to our home to assemble bags of food to give to the homeless. It was an effort to make something that could be given to the homeless and others who populate the busiest intersections in Austin that provides real help rather than money to support whatever addiction they may have.

As a part of the lesson, the children listened to some arithmetic on how much income is considered the poverty level for a family of four in the United States, followed by a subtraction from that income of minimal amounts that must be spent on housing, food, medical bills and insurance, utilities, and other necessities. Even discounting “luxuries” such as new clothes and educational expenses, the amount of money available to a family living at exactly the poverty line was less than that required to live a minimal life according to the statistical averages. After the lesson, the kids put together the bags intended for the homeless along with making some cards or notes to put in the bags from their families (omitting family names, of course).

What was interesting to me was the text of many of the cards that were made, messages that were written without adult prompting. The most poignant message, repeated here verbatim, including the grammatical error, “Your not alone.”  Disregarding the grammatical error, this is an incredibly powerful message, one that is often not understood by many who do not understand the utter loneliness that is felt by even those who have no real reason for that emotion, much less by those who truly have no one to turn to in a time of need

Somehow, I suspect those children who wrote those words, “Your not alone,” understand the feeling better than their parents.

Some lessons are forgotten despite our best efforts and intentions, especially if we allow cynicism to color our view of life and humanity.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
   -Oscar Wilde

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
   -Rene Descartes

I just got the new laptop as a replacement under my accidental damage protection policy, the supposedly “worry-free assurance” that wasn’t so free of care. This new laptop is replacing my 1 year old one that suffered death from a massive milk spill. I shouldn’t complain about the upgrade, because I now have a dual-core system (AMD Turion X2, not the current best-in-class Intel Core Duo), but I’m already encountering two issues.

The first, and most concerning, is that the top of the laptop, where the heels of my hands rest when I’m typing, is getting warm, I suspect from the CPU. I’m not even seriously taxing it, so both the amount of heat generated along with the location of the hot spot do not bode well.

The second problem is with the operating system. It has Windows Vista, and unfortunately my favorite firewall/antivirus software currently does not have a version for Vista. I can’t figure out how to get the pre-installed Norton Internet Security to recognize an IP range as my home network, and it doesn’t seem to want to recognize individual computers that I have put in IP addresses in the “allowed” list. In other words, I haven’t been able to connect to my home network to print or download files.

Not good…

Hopefully I’ll get this all figured out soon, but the security features of Internet Explorer are making me crazy already. I much prefer Firefox with the security plug-ins that I use.

Oh, well, it is a new computer, so that gives me at least one more year before it is obsolete and bogged down like all my other systems.

I’ve managed to reload my old posts, but in the process I broke access to my new posts since the reboot to the new host.

I should be able to recover them, but it’s not like I wrote some deathless prose or had some outstanding ideas in there, but I’ll likely lose the comments.

Oh, well, now on to fixing the layout, post categories, and blogroll, along with trying to generate some original, interesting, and hopefully entertaining content.