Mem Day

 Yesterday I bicycled 29.9 miles, up to Newberry and back. Wrote for a couple of hours at a Subway in Newberry, working on my current novel, WORK DONE FOR HIRE.

The story's set in the near future. The protagonist is a writer in his late twenties who's been out of the army for a few years. He fought in a place only identified as "the desert," which I suspect is Iran.

The fact that it was Memorial Day probably affected what I wrote. Here's part of it:




     I looked at the batteries and recorder on the seat next to me and had a melancholy recollection, the last time I saw my grandfather before he died, just before I shipped for the desert. He and my dad and I had all had too much to drink. It was his 80th birthday, and we had a recorder like this one going, while he talked about the past.
 
      Grand-dude and I shared the bond of both having been drafted (Dad’s generation was spared), and we traded Basic Training memories. Then he started to talk about combat, which he never had done before.
   
      He started to cry – not weeping, just his eyes leaking a little, dabbing, and he delivered a slurred soliloquy about how useless it all had been – how much less freedom we had after his war, Vietnam, than before; how the government used war to increase its control over its citizens, what a fucking waste it had all been. Dad got upset with him, me headed overseas in a couple of days.
  
      But I said it wasn’t that different from what I heard in the barracks every night. Grand-dude said yeah, same-same. Soldiers aren’t fools.
   
   
      But we go anyhow.

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Joe