i hope everyone is having a great christmas season. as you can imagine there ain’t alot of christmas festivities going on here. i only realized today that it is the 21st. where did december go? november too for that matter? either way i hope you all go out to christmas markets/light shows or whatever. take advantage of what you have. this year is going to end and you ain’t getting it back. it’s easy to just stay at home but what is the point of that?
i am going to have an un-traditional christmas to say the least but it won’t be that bad. the army and especially deployment really makes you grateful for what you have, or don’t. man’s focus narrows when he reaches a crisis. the illusions of modern life are swept clean. i will tell you that is the one thing good about being here: not dealing with garbage like this:
there is so much more to life.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
