When I saw this comment in my inbox, your name attached was a surprise. If anyone had asked me if you might read this one, I would've said no. That would've been an intuition-based answer– I don't have anything solid to base it on, except, yeah, I know you, too.
As for comfort... I'd like to know why you found it comforting, motek. If you wanna tell me. Email's good for that.
Thanks for reading, and pleasantly surprising the hell out of me.
There's a whole lot of fucked up going on in this story - some of it is the kind of shit that happens (the initial kick for the specific situation), some of it is the kind that people who are shits create (Steele), and then there's the blatant injustice of the past nine years of Grimes' career.
And in this situation that has at least three different kinds of fucked up in it, Grimes is a good person and a great soldier who's maintaining that in a situation which would've worn out less-resilient person, and he excels, and he finds good and capable persons, and there is mutual recognition and this mutual recognition is being rewarded - at least one part of the fucked-up is looking to be eliminated at the end of the story.
This? This is about as good as it gets, in a hell of a whole lot of real-life situations. This is better than it often gets, in a lot of real life situations. I have an appreciation for the degree and intensity of relief one can find when things happen this way, intermixed with the grief and the terror. I know how important it is to keep up that sort of a faith, and that it takes continuous effort to maintain.
How is this not comfort? How is this not a promise?
Fixing things for Grimesy just seemed *right*. I mean, when you first see him in the film, it's easy to write off his complaints as coming from someone who really should be at a desk, but disagrees because he has a high opinion of himself. Later, when he's tested, it becomes plain that no, this guy is totally wasted at that desk. Choosing to tell his story was an easy pick for me, another fix-it aspect to the overall fix-it urge behind writing this one. In a way (looking at it with post-SLEEP! clarity today), this story is hurt-comfort for ol' Grimes.
But I think yesterday "comforting" surprised me because I was still in that place (to a certain extent, I'm still there) where the external fix-it aspect of writing this piece was a comfort to me. I was writing from a place of a lot of anger and somewhere, somehow "Just fix it" switched to "This *has to* be my best work," because there are names in this story that belong to good men who died on Oct 3rd/4th 1993. I couldn't include those names in a mediocre piece of writing. So I didn't just write this one: I pushed my craft to the limit and learned new tricks along the way. A story that I could've written in one day flat ended up needing a lot longer than that. Hard work, and the attitude behind it, and the end result... comforting in a weird way.
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Needled_Ink_1975 Fri 16 Aug 2013 05:47PM UTC
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Hagar Fri 16 Aug 2013 07:17PM UTC
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Needled_Ink_1975 Sat 17 Aug 2013 11:22AM UTC
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