We

We were arguing for the umpteenth, not a word either one of us would have used, about something related to the exact point at which it became no longer reasonable to throw away trash. Our limits seemed entirely unrelated to each other. You see, when I see a trash can that's nearly full, I see the possibility for unlimited space yet to be realized. I guess you could say I can see the true potential of a bag of trash in a way that is foreign to hers. She would call it laziness, but I would call it a degree of difference in potentialities. In the end the trash generally gets taken out somewhere in between its potential ceiling and the low sort of goal that she sets for it and reinforced on a biweekly basis. At that point in time it's really hard to blame the bag for much. It's clear to me that the behavior is coming from the mother. And on the way out the bag will often say to me, "Hello, good sir. I am capable of holding up to twenty pounds." The same brands all say the same things. And I gently let it know that for today, two pounds, a banana peel, a plastic wrapper for crackers, leftover rice that has gone bad, several wrappers from spent burritos, a piece of paper on which is the phone number of someone I never called is written will have to be enough. The trash usually understands. Np pun intended.

Uh, other writing thing

The fellow to my right has been engaged in onananism, and I’m not the sort to judge a man for what he does to himself. I leave those types of decisions to a higher power. But of late, the man has begun to place himself violently upon me while engaging in the act. One assumes that he is perforce, asleep during what I’d be remiss to call anything but a kind of rape. The landscape is barren and white. Women, oh women. The snow does not make up for the lack of them.

“March on,” yells the commandant, who has, as far as I can tell, has not a good bone in his body. Why, just yesterday we witnessed him shooting a poor fellow who stopped by the side of the road to cough. And what these Russians might call roads, are not the sort of things that you or I would call them. It’s more like a loosely driven path through snow. The soldier, a young man named Hans, was from a village not twenty miles from where I grew up in Paris. I’m not going to write to you about the set of his mouth when he was dead, or even the color of his lips. What’s the point of that? The soul has already departed the body, or never was. What remains is merely a shell, discarded by a hermit crab who yearns for larger things.

I was a baker of some repute in my village before the little man called us all off to help bring glory to France. I was renowned for my baguettes, my rose filled macaroons. I put into my baking the sort of manic energy that a young and foolish man puts into an affair. The women, I told Hans, before he was lying in the road, “you see,” they are like the ocean. Hans, his eyes filled with what can only be described as stupidity asked me to clarify my point. “My boy,” I said, “they come and they go. There is no use chasing the waves, they will always break.”

I was well-known in our small company for being a philosopher of the highest degree. A patent lie that, but one for which I stoked the fires as hard as if I was watching the dough rise in a brick oven. The men constantly came to me with their little problems, and I would listen to them in exchange for some small ration. Bits of flour, stolen from a farmhouse and snaked away before the captain could see, a small piece of chocolate ripped from the pantry of a crying Russian peasant.

“War,” I told Hans, warming myself in a lice filled blanket “is no more ridiculous than anything else in this world. Why would I study a thing like mathematics? Because two and two is four? What does this tell me about being alive, Hans? Not a damn thing! Now, when I stare down the musket, and put a bullet in another man’s stomach. What do I learn? My God, Hans, can you not feel it in the heat of battle? War reminds us how much we enjoy being alive. What a very precious thing it is. Without war, Hans, we’re just shells playing at being human.”

I didn’t believe a word of it then, but it certainly sounded nice to say. And the others in our unit were no doubt enlivened by the nobility of our pursuit, which was, empty and misguided.

In the evening we set up camp at the side of the road. The sky was a grey pinwheel of clouds. We’d just that afternoon begun drinking from the puddles that were low lying in the road, in the company of our horses. Who, despite their solid stink, I regarded fairly highly, though not highly enough to enjoy being mouth to mouth with them over a bit of drainage.

The commander, bless him, keeps insisting that we are going to win a great victory for France, this while his teeth chatter in the numbing cold. And by this point its become apparent to at least half of us that we’re marching to our own death.