DENIABLE | 2006-06-10
I was at my recovery club recently talking to one of the many hellaciously impressive people you meet there.
Many a war hero dies because he cannot survive his addictions. I can personally testify that the death rate "in the program" is so high it makes combat seem safe.
I was talking with a hell of a guy, and I laughed in the wrong place. This gentleman had gone through ROTC, been an officer in Nam, got wounded, and, from a grateful country, he had been been sent, all expenses paid, through med school.
Not just everybody gets their MD, much less their residencies. He did.
But the addiction took all that away from him, so now he is living on disability.
How could a sane person find anything humorous in this?
But those of us IN the program have had to laugh a LOT.
If you have been through something yourself, sometimes hearing it seems funny.
So this gentleman described to me the last wound he got in combat.
I spent several hours convinced that I was deaf for life.
Worse, I once spent a period of time I cannot measure convinced that I was a quadraplegic like the Superman guy. These are very personal things. But heroes who have been through all that regularly die of addiction.
We talk about how unspeakable we made life for ourselves, and we laugh about it. We HAVE to.
But since the Greatest generation began its sixty year whine session, the idea of laughing about anything on a battlefield is verboten.
So this guy said to me, "I got hit in the gut and it ripped me open, but what REALLY hurt was...."
I started laughing. I couldn't stop.
What he was explaining was that shrapnel had hit him in the JOINT of his arm, and that really HURTS. It hurts on and on and on. It hurts him today.
I understand that.
But I immediately thought of how this conversation would sound from the OUTSIDE, which makes my sense of humor so WEIRD. I was thinking of the average person listening to someone say his guts had been ripped open, but that wasn't the problem.
This is not a concept that translates easily if you happen to hear someone saying it and you are not in on the talk.
Just LISTEN to it:
"I got hit in the gut and it ripped me open, but what REALLY hurt was...."
Can you understand why this was so funny to me?
I am sure no normal person could.
But I am not dealing with normal people here.
The scary thing is that I am dealing with commenters to whom what I just said would make perfect sense.
What is a nice guy like me doing in a place like this?