Argggghhhhhh

Its 30 minutes prior to election day and I am up - sleep is fleeting these days. I know it shouldn't be but I know I'll be here writing in another two hours and work is only six hours away. I don't know if that makes me manic, a moron, or a writer.

I think maybe manic and moron.

I'm in a why me mood today. Its not my BBG's fault and its not the kids fault. I think I own this one all by myself.

That just makes it worse - ownership!

Do you think "Dubya" is up at all hours owning what he's kicked into motion?

I've been offered a slot as an assault pilot for a guard unit. Here is where you roll your eyes and call me a moron. Go ahead - I keep saying it to myself but then the little red devil on right shoulder says; "Do it - you know you want to" and the little white angel on left shoulder says in an appropriately squeeky and less manly voice "If you do..." If you have ever been on your first airplane ride, you probably know the wonderment and freedom of soaring among the clouds.

"... put out my hand touched the face of god" (Gillespie Magee, 1941)

Now - imagine doing it at treetop level, flying a hundred plus miles an hour wearing night vision goggles with the tracers floating up in the distance. I would kill to do this again. I was born to do it. After a few years off of flying I still dream in NVG Green. I sat down with my books and in two hours I had memorized word for word every EP and limitation on the UH-60A/L and I can do blind start-ups like it was yesterday. My apologies to the wife and kidlets but nothing aside from finishing my novels has ever given me the raw emotion of a long night mission in a shitty place. Just writing about it causes the sights, the sounds, the feelings, to well up from inside of me - magnetic!

My BBG was very supportive when I broached the topic. We haven't talked in ten days.

I am a centurian trapped in the poets body, saddled with the guilt of a wife broken in my stead, and father of children who would certainly deserve to resent my flying off to inhospitable places in search of an unforgiving mistress.

I know what the answer should be but I agonize over it all the same. Am I less of a man because I stay behind and pick up the broken pieces for the next couple of decades or am I less of a man because I desperately want my chance to fly fast and low in the dark?

I should have gone to law school.