Writing Prompts

A former Amy Medic sits on a park bench, packing a bowl of weed, listening to me say, “I wasted five years.”

“Five years of healing,” Says the medic.

Independence Day, 2014, he and former Army Chaplain invited me to a march with The Smedly Butler Brigade. We made a video that included a leader in the peace movement telling wild war stories. It took me tens of hours to edit and upload.

A few months later, the medic sent me an article from Counterpunch, dissembling the stories that man told, and I took the video down. This marked the beginning of a long and sorted multimedia project involving Veterans for Peace, Warrior Writers, The Joiner Institute, The Mission Continues, The Ahren (not Ahrens) Foundation and eventually the Veterans Administration. It turned into this minor clusterfuck that got me feeling nostalgic for the four years I served.

Conceived in conversation with an eclectic group during a fellowship with The Mission Continues in 2017, as a space to showcase collective artistic efforts by veterans, this website devolved into a log of my meandering imagination set in contrast to the wiles of several people who participated in Occupy Boston and the anti-war movement.

“You don’t have to publish everything you write,” Marc Levy, creator of MedicintheGreenTime.com, once suggested.

A lot of this represents a practice that slowly deteriorated into a dark and gas lit void of uncertainty and madness. Imagine how many local community meetings and small artistic achievements in Mattapan might have gotten coverage without all of this naval gazing. All of this focus on the contents of my gut got me acting salty.

“I want to be a part of a community that is building each other up, not tearing people down,” A friend said during drinks at a poetry get together in February 2020.

Agreed. Confused, feeling personally targeted and torn at by people who I had considered friends, confronted by a cult like movement that looks distressingly like a Hydra, circling a swamp of VA claims that seem more focused on defining disabilities than on developing abilities, this private effort pauses to reflect.

What are we trying to accomplish, and why?

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