05 December, 2004 - "Horror, Horror"

"Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin' all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program."--Captain Williard from APOCALYPSE NOW

I still am not well but much better than I felt yesterday. I take responsibilty for this as it is the third time I have been in with the same symptons. Yet I never sought medical help on the prior times this occurred. Monday I will call my doctor whom I know will chew me out as I did not go to the emergency room as he said to yesterday. But I feel better and will be going tomorrow, though if there are any flair ups at all I will go directly to the hospital today.

That and get a new job this week. It's odd that my life unraveled a year ago.
Now a full year later I am finally getting somewhere with it again. I don't know if I am weaker or stronger, though I have learned many things.

Just got a hold of a ton of books that I will be reading over next few months an will be sorting through them. I watched Apocolypse Now Redux yesterday on AMC. I never want to watch that film again unless it is the widescreen/letterbox version.

Here are some quotes from that wonderful film:

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving."--Colonel Kurtz

"Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions. What are you going to land on, one quarter, three-eighths, what are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something -- that's dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you either love somebody or you hate them."--Photo journalist

"I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."--Colonel Kurtz

"On the river, I thought that the minute I looked at him, I'd know what to do, but it didn't happen. I was in there with him for days, not under guard, I was free, but he knew I wasn't going anywhere. He knew more about what I was going to do than I did. If the Generals back in Nha Trang could see what I saw, would they still want me to kill him? More than ever probably. And what would his people back home want if they ever learned just how far from them he'd really gone? He broke from them, and then he broke from himself. I'd never seen a man so broken up and ripped apart."--Captain Williard

Captain Willard - "They told me that you had gone totally insane, and, uh, that your methods were unsound."
Colonel Kurtz - "Are my methods unsound?"
Captain Willard - "I don't see any method at all, sir."

"We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write fuck on their airplanes because it's obscene!"--Colonel Kurtz

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