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The Thirteenth War – Short Story

July 1, 2010
by benjacoby

Another story from my writing club. Let me know how you feel

He loads a bullet into his rifle and pulls a pack of cigarettes from his holey denim jacket. As he lights one, he wonders whether he loves his country. He decides he does not. He is not religious either – if his family discovered his tattoo, were they still alive, he would certainly not be allowed home.

He is sitting on a rickety stool and tries to answer a question.

Should he kill the soldier on the street corner below?

He had loved America when he was younger. He admired the founding fathers and forgave them for owning slaves while pronouncing that all men were created equal, the great hypocrisy of their time. He forgave them because he knew he would like to be forgiven too, were he living in accordance with the hypocrisies of his own time.

And of course, the man knows how one influences others – or himself – with the subtleties of language. For instance, the difference between killing the soldier and murdering him.

That he is killing a soldier, an American soldier, instead of a man, or an American man.

Killing a father – perhaps. But certainly a son.

In primary school, he wrote an essay on how he respected the American justice system, even if it meant a few innocents would be wrongfully convicted. He wrote how it hurt him to say this, but that if finding justice in this world were easy, it would not be notable enough to write an essay about.

He takes a drag of his cigarette. Is he ending a life or inflicting death? Does he intend to inspire terror in the enemy (whose enemy?) or bring hope to his people? And are the people on the streets below his people? If they knew of his tattoo, of his beliefs, he would certainly not be one of their people.

He is, of course, a bringer of both war and peace.

That is to say – peace eventually.

In secondary school, he researched the Vietnam War and its American domestic opposition for a school project. He sketched out a peace sign on a scrap of paper and took it to the neighborhood grocer rumored to have a tattoo on his body.

The store was empty of product and customer, it was missing patches of ceiling. The grocer smiled at the teenager with the scrap of paper and admonished him to be careful, to consider his choice a bit longer.

He stamps his cigarette on the cracked cement, stands from his stool, and lets gravity carry him downwards, where he sits cross-legged on the floor and unzips a black duffel. He pulls out a folded tripod and begins to snap the legs in place.

Snap, like setting a bone.

Snap. He would consider thinking about all the bones he’s set, the bones of his dead and dwindling friends, but he doesn’t want to get sentimental.

Snap.

He flips the tripod up, reaches into the duffel for his rifle mount, centers it on the stand, runs his fingers along a groove in the metal that he readies to twist and lock into place.

The woman he loves – she had traced her fingers along his tattoo the nights they had been given together, nights without end that passed too quickly.

Snap.

Three months later, the teenager was sitting in the dank, back room of the grocery while the grocer traced the outline of a peace sign on the boy’s arm.

“I suppose there is no one to stop you now,” the grocer said, and the boy had nodded and looked away, as if staring at a pitiful creature cowering in some dark corner of the room. “Other than God’s insistence you shouldn’t.”

A soundless splash hits the floor. Hot today, – it’s just sweat, he tells himself.

He nestles his rifle in the mount, and it is weightless within the natural crook of arm, shoulder and chest. He lights another cigarette, leans forward, his jacket tight against his slight frame, and stares through the sight.

He sees the soldier, and a little boy cowering in the darkened corner of his ruined bedroom.

He sees a little girl holding up a flowering cleome for the soldier, its yellow petals flecked with sand and dust, and himself, standing over an open grave in an improvised cemetery, bringing his family together after being torn apart.

He lifts his hands from the rifle and wipes them on his jeans, as if he could clean them. He asks himself a question, like he has many times before – should he kill the soldier on the street corner below?

“I know I shouldn’t,” the boy had said to the grocer, as he prepared his needle and ink. The boy then asked whether Lyndon Johnson had ever cried while contemplating the dead boys he sent to Vietnam.

“I think he did,” the boy said. The grocer shrugged and said that this was not a question he concerned himself with. The boy then asked whether Richard Nixon cried while contemplating the dead.

“I think he did too,” the boy said. The grocer smiled and told the boy to be still as he dragged the pulsing needle across the boy’s shoulder.

To this day, he still believes they cried.

Another soundless splash hits the floor, and he imagines a bullet in the soldier’s neck, a clean kill – he wraps his fingers around the handle of the rifle, rubs his thumb along twelve crudely carved notches in a hesitant ecstasy, oh God, how clean kills are the dirtiest.

And should he kill the soldier on the street corner below?

Amidst the silence and distant death of modern war, there comes a simple and familiar answer: of course he shouldn’t.

And then – a damp trigger and a dead man, a flower falling in a desert of peace.

Easter Sunday – Flash Fiction

July 1, 2010
by benjacoby

Howdy…I’m sorry it’s been awhile. Here’s a little piece of flash fiction I wrote for my writing club with my friend Joe Kovacs. Let me know what you think! It’s called ‘Easter Sunday’

—-

Every Easter, to celebrate the holiday, I make the drive to my family’s gravesite and sit against my father’s stone.

I imagine my family rising from the dead, like Jesus Christ, and my life with them.

I see my mother, my father – I wake up on Easter Sunday, drive to my old family home to find them in the kitchen among heaping plates of French toast and bacon, and God, the smiles on their faces, a celebration of being alive through love and breakfast. After we eat, my parents go upstairs to make love and celebrate the warmth of each other’s bodies.

And my brother, my sister – they hurry me along as I wash my dishes so we can start searching for the Easter baskets. They both forget that we are no longer children, but age is not so important anymore. We prowl around the house like detectives – it has never seemed so big, so open.

I move into a new house, closer to theirs, so I can spend more time with them – to devote myself to life as part of a family again.

A few months pass. My father has started looking for work and my mother has begun to restock the wine cellar. My brother is just thrilled to carouse around town and smoke marijuana with his friends, and my sister reunites with her ex-boyfriend – there is no more time for the resentful pride and egotism that once ruined them as a couple.

Now it’s almost been a year since the resurrection. I pick my brother up from the sheriff’s office on a DUI charge, and we go to the family house for Good Friday dinner. I walk in and my mother sneers at me with familiar tannin-stained teeth. My father asks for money – when I inquire about his job, he pins me against the kitchen door with whiskey on his breath. My sister is pregnant again. She hugs me and scratches her cheek with nicotine-stained fingernails and tells me she wants to keep the baby this time. She bursts into tears and falls into my arms.

I excuse myself, walk outside, load the shotgun I keep in the trunk of my car, and shake my head.

Jesus, this is why I killed them in the first place.

A Facebook identity crisis

May 10, 2010
by benjacoby

When I was younger, I enjoyed using Facebook. I interacted with distant high school friends and learned more about the people I was meeting at college. Facebook was a means to an end – using Facebook made my real-life social experience better.

What is it now? When I log on to Facebook, I see the status updates and miscellaneous activity of the 50 or so friends that Facebook deems to be my ‘best friends.’ Someone has filled out a survey, the title of which is a provocatively sexual song lyric taken out of context, and the questions are personal, and in some cases, obscene.

‘What is bothering you right now?’ the survey asks.

‘I bet you miss someone right now,’ the survey asks. Is that even a question?

Three or four people state how much work they have left until they are finished for the semester. An innumerous number simply list the number of days until the last day of classes, and another innumerous number ‘like’ those status updates.

A girl posts the insecure lyrics to their favorite song, as if the lyrics reflect what’s going on in her life right now.

There is more than that, too. Take a look on CareerBuilder or Monster.com and look for how many companies are hiring ‘Social Media’ interns, consultants, and analysts to develop Facebook fan pages and to build a Facebook presence.

In short – Facebook is becoming a culturally accepted form of narcissism, a means to broadcast thoughts and ideas to a large audience, rather than one person connecting directly to another for the mere sake of connecting with someone.

Facebook wants to make a universal ‘like’ button so you can advertise what you like to all your friends. Already, your Facebook friends can give your interests and likes to external applications and companies. Essentially, it is creating an environment where your digital presence – interests, likes, friends, and relationship status – is quantitatively you, a set of raw data for advertisers to peruse and take advantage of.

Am I being too cynical about this? In theory, it’s a tool for your friends to find all of this out about you too.

But really, anyone who’s my friend should already know that my favorite movie is… (go ahead, guess)

*checks Facebook*

Die Hard.

-ben

The end of an era

April 19, 2010
by benjacoby

There are quite a few ways to measure my time at Cognito, which has sadly come to an end:

-          One website, which I came to see as my baby (by the way, it’s the mark of a good parent when he knows to let his baby run free)

-          Two events, spent talking (perhaps ‘hobnobbing,’ one might say) with clients and journalists

-          Three published written pieces! Oh baby!

-          Four months

-          Ten lunch trips to the schnitzel truck

-          One hundred morning commutes (and three broken trains)

-          One hundred fifty cups of coffee

I’m not going to get sentimental (or I might just burst into tears, right here, in the Starbucks). It was a fun and valuable experience, and now the New York adventure continues.  I will be applying to jobs, working on my book, diving deeper into digital marketing, and savoring every moment of free time I have.

Who knows…maybe I’ll even budget some time in for fun.

-ben

Tag Clouds

April 11, 2010
by benjacoby

My friend Joe showed me a cool website, www.tagxedo.com, where you can make your own fancy tag clouds. Here’s one for the home page of my website:

And here’s one for my short story, ‘On Fire,’ that you can read elsewhere on this website :)

I am pretty sure that this is how cool people spend their Sunday nights.

And yes, I know they are just little.

It’s all right though – I think you will somehow survive.

-ben

This economy has gone zero days without a financial accident

March 9, 2010
by benjacoby

Since so much of what I do during the week revolves around financial reform, I thought it might be appropriate that I write about it here.

I can appreciate, however, that financial reform is not the most compelling subject in the world, so I’ve been trying to think of an metaphor to make the topic more interesting to the uninformed reader, i.e. my audience (sorry…two paragraphs in and I’m already insulting you).

The general background is that Wall Street got too smart for its own damn good, it played with complicated financial assets, convinced people they could get something for nothing by investing in them, and then, well, by god all those people DID get something.

They got broke.

This is what I call the “non-biased background,” of course, and it’s already pretty boring. But today, I finally came up with a metaphor that’s *hopefully* not offensive to the bankers, and it *hopefully* won’t sway your opinion one way or another (do we ever expect to change anyone’s opinion?).

Anyways:

Let’s say that the Wall Street hot-shots and the bankers are, collectively, a five-year old boy.

Let’s say the five-year old boy was treated like an adult, and his parents left the cookie jar on the counter because they trusted their son. And why not? They raised him well, he was good to others, made sure all his friends in kindergarten were making sound investments with regards to the building blocks. His parents knew he snuck a cookie now and then, but you know what? He studied hard in school, he really made some nice towers out of those blocks, he deserves an extra cookie once in a while.

But then one cookie becomes a few cookies, and one day, when he’s stretching on his tip-toes for the jar, it comes crashing down.

Cookies everywhere. Mommy (the Democrats) yells at him, sends him to time-out, and from then on it’s a cookie-free house.

Do you think she’s being too harsh? Remember – her son just broke a trillion-dollar cookie jar.

Well don’t worry, that part didn’t really happen.

What is happening is that the child is still sneaking cookies because his parents haven’t really decided what to do yet. His mom wants the new cookie jar put on the high shelf, and his father (the Republicans) says that boys will be boys – he’s learned his lesson already.

The mom, however, holds more of the power in the relationship – she can withhold certain benefits from her husband.

By that, I mean the mom can essentially stop Congress from accomplishing anything at all.

Why…what were you thinking?

Anyways, they start installing a high shelf to put the cookie jar on. The child pouts at mommy and whines and screams and pounds his fists on the floor and switches his funding dollars to Daddy.

I sense the metaphor breaking down right about now, meaning that we’re at the part where I’m expected to come out and say my opinion, right?

The child complains that financial regulation will hamper the markets. Well, news flash says mom – the child does a pretty good job of hampering his own damn markets. The dad argues that too much regulation will prevent legitimate risk-reduction techniques, and the mom asks the dad just how effective those ‘techniques’ are (…that’s what she said). Dad scoffs and says mom doesn’t know what she’s talking about, mom throws the roast across the kitchen and tears off her apron,

“You never say you love me anymore!” mom wails.

“That’s because I don’t!” dad says.

Oh boy, I’m losing focus here. Ultimately, it’s pretty simple – when cookie jars stop crashing down from countertops across the world, no one will be talking about financial regulation anymore. The end.

It just kills me that as the economy begins its recovery, I can already feel everyone’s eyes on the cookies, as if nothing had happened.

I shouldn’t have written this while hungry.

-ben

You Know You’re Old If….(Pt. 2)

February 1, 2010
by benjacoby

Again, I know this isn’t a real update, but I have been swamped lately. Traveling all the time, working two internships, still fitting in time for creative stuff…essentially I sacrifice sleep. Here are my relevant life updates, for those of you who care (and if you do care, you probably know this already…)

1. I’m about 7 weeks into my 10 week internship at Cognito, a financial services PR agency. It is an absolutely fantastic place full of terrific people, and I’ve learned an unbelievable amount about how PR works from the bottom up. A lot of the copy I write gets used by actual clients, which is a thrill, and by week’s end, I’ll be able to link to what I’ve been working on.

2. I’m starting to pull ideas together and get some writing done for my next big book project. Hopefully this one will actually be, you know, good.

3. Learning a lot about search engine optimization. When I get some more free time, I’ll do some more independent research so I can be the best at it.

That’s about it.

Also, you know you’re old if you root through public trash cans (taking off the lid, arm deep into the muck) for a newspaper. Yuck.

-ben

You Know You’re Old If…

October 29, 2009
by benjacoby

You have ever said, “Oh, we had a lovely conversation.”

You have designated times during the week where you sit on a specific bench. No newspaper or book or anything…you just sit.

(Not a real blog post…I just noticed these things :-P )

-ben

How Not to be Found

October 27, 2009
by benjacoby

I’m always amused by the college-aged job seekers who change their Facebook name so potential employers won’t find them. A common tactic is to change last name to middle name – delightfully hip, and in most cases, you will sound more like a porn star (Benjamin Lawrence, anyone?).

But this is a game you will lose. Unless your name is John Smith, if employers even bother to look for you, you can’t hide. If they care enough to look, you can bet they will release the hounds. There’s no point in pulling the middle name trick if you’ve registered your profile URL under your real name. There are a lot of things I don’t understand. Why de-tag pictures if your profile is private anyway? (unless you look ugly in them – very probable). Protect your tweets, keep your LinkedIn hidden – it’s funny that these things are intended to be social tools and lubricants, and this obsession with corporate snooping is making people clam up. Kind of defeats the purpose, right?

With increasing parts of our lives under scrutiny, do people behave differently? We all know someone in college who refuses to have their picture taken at parties. God forbid they’re seen with that distinctive red Solo cup, full of some ambiguous, sinful substance.

So, a tip for people worried about what’s on the internet about them: Google your name, take a look at what you see, decide what you don’t like, and FIX IT!

ANYWAYS,

If I were in human resources, and it was my job to research and report on candidates (same job function as a KGB agent), I’d make sure they drank out of at least a few Solo cups. A few Solo cups means well-adjusted in my book. Otherwise, they’re either neurotic enough to painstakingly delete all of their pictures, or they have no friends.

Or they don’t drink in college.

Which is ridiculous.

-ben

 

 

The Good Wife

October 26, 2009
tags:
by benjacoby

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/26/elizabeth-edwards-marriage-is-a-great-love-story/

So, John Edwards cheated on his wife. You know, the wife with terminal cancer. No, I won’t joke about this. Recently, she’s been quoted as saying their marriage is a ‘love story,’ and that she’s trying to make the marriage work.

To be honest, I planned on writing something about this, but I’m not really sure what anymore. I suppose I was wondering what was going through her mind. whether she based her decision on courage or cowardice. But I don’t know…unless I meet her, I can’t ever know, and even then, she wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) tell me.

I’m really too young to have any perspective on love, and if I were in her shoes, I don’t know what I would do. I would have trouble being happy, that’s for sure. I hope she is, though, or is as close as she can get to it. I think that’s what I wanted to say here. Have a good one.

-ben

Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking.
It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.

I Corinthians 13:4-8

UPDATE: 2/1/2010:

The Edwardses are now legally separated, and they intend to file for divorce. Some love story!