When Cutting Spills Into Life: My Introduction

puma wrote:Questions:
Can you get off-base treatment in Japan? This would probably have to be a cash deal done on the q.t.,possibly using an alias so that nothing would get back to your Commanding Officer.
I can see where seeking help on-base could lead to problems, as you didn't disclose previous medical history and the military might not find that acceptable.

You are in a better position to find out what exactly the military policy about seeking help is than we are. You could perhaps seek treatment without disclosing your previous diagnoses in 2004. Can you present these questions to a marine doctor in a hypothetical format; i.e. "I have a buddy with...?"

Japan is a big, cosmopolitan nation. I think you should be able to get treatment there, at least alot easier than if you should wind up in the Middle East.

Anyone else here have any advice for our Marine friend, please share.

dpeters911 wrote:I kind of feel like a narcissist asking for help but understand it's probably because I grew up not wanting help from people.

dpeters911 wrote:[side note: I loved Kurt Vonnegut. Too bad he had to kick the bucker before I did]

Kurt Vonnegut wrote:
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collision, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mouse trap, or a South Bend Lathe.**

I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me. I had created him, and he was in my opinion a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at all. But it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling which I am to this day.

Listen:

"What kind of man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?" he said to Bonnie MacMahon.

Bonnie MacMahon blew up. This was the first time she had blown up since she had come to work in the cocktail lounge. Her voice became as unpleasant as the noise of a bandsaw cutting galvanized tin. It was loud, too. "Oh yeah?" she said. "Oh yeah?"

Everybody froze. Bunny Hoover stopped playing the piano. Nobody wanted to miss a word.

"You don't think much of Mary Alice Miller?" she said. "Well, we don't think much of your painting. I've seen better pictures done by a five-year-old."

Karabekian slid off his barstool so he could face all those enemies standing up. He certainly surprised me. I expected him to retreat in a hail of olives, maraschino cherries and lemon rinds. But he was majestic up there. "listen --" he said so calmly, "I have read the editorial against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York."

This embarrassed people some.

"The painting did not exist until I made it," Karabekian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, " that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal -- the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us -- in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

"I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown. Very well -- let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let a five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and the meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light."

Ecstasy bloomed on the barbaric face of Rabo Karabekian. "Citizens of Midland City, I salute you," he said. "You have given a home to a masterpiece!"