nmu_gentleman

*sigh*

As I finally come to the end of my Naval career, I've sat down and made a list of all the things I did, all the places I've seen, and all the accomplishments I........well, accomplished. It's been a WILD ride, to say the least...from literally making off with a piece of the Great Pyramid and seeing mummies thousands of years old, to caring for my supervisor as he puked all over himself and having to witness a Djiboutian relieve himself behind a shipping crate...from transiting the Straits of Gibraltar and drinking absinthe with cannibis (STRAIGHT...burns like HELL), to getting lost in the backstreets of Split, Croatia and fending off drunken female Sailors who want to find out if this Jamaican is really packing...from seeing the very city and areas where Jesus walked during his final days and visiting my very first Hard Rock Cafe in Cairo, to damn near punching entirely overzealous street vendors and getting my arm sliced open in a scuffle with a would-be terrorist...this career has taken me through all sorts of highs, lows and in-betweens...and that was just the deployments!!! While I am glad to be done with it (getting orders to a command that is as fucked up as my current one has become was just too much to risk...my sanity, my temper and, subsequently, my paycheck was at stake), the moments I experienced while I served could NEVER be duplicated. It doesn't matter even if I were to win multiple lotteries all at once and became a multi-billionaire...I could never recreate the experiences that I went through in the service of the USA. Would I do it again??? That remains to be seen...

Now I look ahead to a new chapter in my life...one fraught with dangers, successes, uncertainties and sure things...one that I will write according to MY whims, nuiances, and spur-of-the-moment decisions. While I am quite possibly scared half out of my mind (if I am, I don't know it yet), I am also excited beyond anything I've ever felt before, because I will be truly striking it out on my own. Let's see how long it takes before I either become an award-winning writer/journalist or a drug dealer with the intelligence of a Rhodes Scholar...