America's Army

As a boy, I used to spend entire weekends at my town's brand new, state-of-the-art video arcade, lobbing bombs at terrorist command centers. Every now and then, just for shits, I'd frag an ice cream truck, a school bus, or a baseball game. Years later I read that the arcade had been a property of the American military, and the images on my screen had all corresponded to real bombs and targets in southern Iran. I felt that my will had been hijacked. Worse still, as time went by I couldn't help seeing parallels between this crisis and other aspects of my life.

I once coveted my brother's wife, for example, and the two of us used to nurture our love in secret. Because it felt like a dream, because we assumed it would never see daylight, because we thought we were stealing moments out of time and sealing ourselves off, we felt free to act with abandon. But we had been wrong. Our affair grew until it broke through its crust and terrified a crowd of onlookers, which included my young nephew. And as it turned out, to my surprise, I didn't really love the woman after all. She tried to marry me, civilians perished, etc.

Or this. When I was in high school, I developed a rabid obsession with the 1950s actor James Dean. I watched his movies regularly and I studied his whole life history. As I fantasized about my future life -- from my lowly, lowly vantage point -- it was always checked against the life of James Dean. When I reached my late twenties, I paused to assess my situation. I had indeed risen from the onanistic doldrums of my high school years. Just like my onetime hero, I was an amateur car racer and had experimented with homosexuality. I was making inroads into a local acting troupe. I realized at this juncture that I no longer even liked James Dean. This was all wrong. My fantasy was never supposed to succeed, especially not in this perverse, halfling fashion. Was I an insane person? Whoever thought I should be given mastery over the course of a life?