My Blog Was One Year Old

One year ago, on a rainy Monday evening, I found myself singing up for something called a blog. Everybody was talking about it and it was for free, and even though I had no idea what this thing was, I had to be part of it. You can read here my very first entry ever.

Instead of putting a picture of a cake with candles and 'happy anniversary' in capital letters and stuff and make this a silly reason to celebrate and drink and get high and perhaps get laid and maybe just go out drinking and driving and throwing money out of the window and screaming and yelling and so on, I've decided to take this opportunity to reflex and think.

My first name starts with J and my last name with G, Francois is my middle name. A big part of me is Latino and the rest is European from where I got my name. Looking through the casualties of American soldiers in Iraq I ran into a guy who shares my initials, J for his first name and G for his last name: Juan-Guadalupe Garza, his family is originally from Latin America. No Jean-Francois' on that list.

A soldier of barely 20 years old from Texas, Juan-Guadalupe was kill by a bullet for only God knows what reasons at this point. Only 20 years old. . . At that age I was in college thinking that I was invincible, the last thing in my mind being my own dead. This little anniversary is dedicated in part to Juan-Guadalupe Garza and the almost 2,000 soldiers who came back to the US in a plastic bag.

And is also dedicated to Shahir Faisal Shakir, an Iraqi who died on June 8 2004, the day after I published my first entry. He was taken away by gunfire and his age, picture and other details are not available. He was perhaps a guy like you and me, with a girlfriend who liked to have a couple of beers everynow and then, who visited the mosque regularly; grew up in a family with a couple of siblings and had a lot of friends. He wanted to be a doctor in order to "save lives" as he said so many times, but the first war, the embargo, the stupid government and lack of opportunities pushed him to work in the hospitality business. Times were hard for him and his family and they struggle for many years, always optimistic he dreamt of a better life in the future. He wanted to get rid of the government and live a peaceful life where he could have more opportunities and eventually start a family. But the invasion took away his most precious gift: his own life.

This post is dedicated to the more than 23,000 people who have died in Iraq. The liberty that the current US government wants to create comes with a very high price tag, doesn't it? Or was it the WMD? Anyway, whatever the reasons the cost is just too high in human lives to justify it.

This anniversary is a time to think about all of them.

And is also a time to think about the whole direction that this STRANGE blog has taken. Current changes in my life and the need to pursue other writing goals that I've been procrastinating for a long time, have pushed me to end this little exercise. In other words, this blog is coming to an end. No more Jean-Francois talking about his daily life and the silly things that happen here in the Bible Belt on regular bases; no more trashing of co-workers; no more trying to re-write the rules of grammar for the English language; no more silly little pictures beside my posts; and [thanks God] no more posts about caffeine.

I'll keep this blog alive though and maybe an entry once in a while would prevent Google from deleting this part of my life. As everything in life is dynamic and things change, perhaps in few months/years I'll pick up from here and will start bloging again, but until then there'll be silence -and perhaps a little whisper once in a while. For those lost souls who've came here and who have commented and/or linked me on their kick ass blogs I'd say: Behave. . . I'll be watching you!

Cheers!

Deepthroat

That was the title of a porn movie. I never watch it but when I was a young and innocent kid, everytime I'll talk to my friends about sex, we'll end up mentioning it. I think they never watch it either, but as far as we knew, that was a porn movie and in porn movies people have sex. We didn't know what sex was about nor what was the proper way to do it, or for that matter how to do it. Yeah we were kids full of questions and with hormones going through the roof back then.

At around the same time the movie came out, the other version of deepthroat was being cooked in a parking lot somewhere in Washington D.C. A guy in a top position in an agency in charge of spying on American citizens, end up spaying on the president. Kind of odd I guess, it's like if my antivirus starts deleting my files and screwing up my hardrive. The rest of the story is well known and we know the outcome: the president went into early retirement -instead of jail- and a couple journalists wrote a bestseller book.

It's funny that the code name "Deepthroat" was selected to make reference to an anonymous whistler blower that brought down a president (the movie was produced in 1972 and Nixon resigned in 1974). Was it maybe due to the 'screwing' of a president? Or just to make a parallel on how fucked up American political life was at that time? I mean, if there was movies of people having sex with blow jobs and stuff, the next logical step would be to bring down a president, right?

Hmmmm. . . that of course leads us to the present. With porn today so available, having grown to a multibillion dollar industry and being almost mainstream, does it have any relation with having a guy such as George W. Bush in power?

Rollerblading

I should rollerblade more often, such a feeling of freedom and peace.

Kids playing around with their bikes, couples walking hand in hand, birds singing and hunting for insects, a group of teenage girls heading for their cars in order to go and hang out, few neighbors walking their dogs while others are walked by their big-O-dogs, a mom calling her two daughters 'cause dinner is ready, few people driving by and waving hello, and I rollerblading throughout it all.

No iPod nor discman, walkman, radio or anything like it; just the constant sound of the 85mm wheels rolling on the spotless pavement of my complex. In the distance the voices of those kids playing, calling each other and laughing with the background of the city nature. Wind flowing through my not so aerodynamic yet fit 5'7 cooling me down and whispering in my ear: why don't you do it more often man?

Interrogators

The job of the interrogators from the US military is to find out information about all the killing that is going on in Iraq, in order to pass it on to commanders on the field so that they and their soldiers can reduce this attacks and further prevent them.

What these interrogators have to do is to (duh) ask question that leads to clues and facts on who is doing and planning these attacks, where are they getting their weapons from, who is their immediate commander, who's recruiting these fighters and who are their contacts. Further more interrogators have to ask a very simple question: Why are you fighting for, man?

If these interrogators and their bosses in Washington think that the way to get this information out is mishandling the Quran, the US military is going to stay in Iraq for a long, long time.

And while these interrogators play with the Quran, American soldiers are coming back home. In plastic bags.

Stuck

I'm stuck in my whole computer gaming experience. The game that I bought was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and it came with two expansion packages: Breakthrough and Spearhead.

In Breakthrough, which takes place in North Africa, I'm in the middle of a sand storm with people shooting at me from right and left. I have to destroy a Panzer IV using a rocket launcher in order to go ahead to the enemy trenches and do some more killings over there. I found the rocket launcher beside a dead DAK soldier, but it has only one rocket and I need at least three to blow up the tank. Believe me, in the middle of that sand storm and under all that heavy fire, is hard to walk run around looking for it.

In Spearhead, after being parachuted over France and being left with just a handful of bullets, I had to face hundreds of German troops who were not really happy to see me wondering around. Once I managed to steal a machine gun and a truck load of bullets, things really began to change in Western Europe. But then I had to hang up with a group of British soldiers who are useless in the whole sense of the word and we have to go and blow up some AA guns. And the thing is that if they get kill I have to re-start the whole mission! Don't they teach them at their military schools that to stand in front of an enemy soldier with a machine gun is not a very good idea? I got so pist off at some point with them that I decided to take things in my own hands and after a quick court marcial I found them guilty of first degree stupidity and of being always in my way; and the sentence was dead my machine gun fire. Well, I'll be damn! I emptied, yes emptied all my machine gun clips on them and the bastards didn't even bother to pass away!

And finally in Allied Assault, after surviving a rain of bullets in the coast of Normandy I did quite a good job fighting my way deeper into Europe. But now I am in some sort of secret mission where I have to sneak in an enemy camp and blow up some tanks. The funny sad thing is that I'm armed with a little pistol which has a silencer but that can't even cut through butter and a shotgun (?!). So if I try to take enemy soldiers with the little pistol, they'll laugh at me right before shooting at me, and if I use the shotgun the alarm will go off and I'll have quite a few angry enemy soldiers chasing me down.

I'm just going to put my ideas together, rest for a while, plan my next move and eventually will crank the game again later this week. Who am I fooling? I better publish this right now so that I can go back to find those missing rockets in the dessert because Kansas is going bye-bye!