At times life can be better than a movie, as someone who writes, if I was to write the following scene I would throw it straight in the trash and laugh at the amount of cheese involved. But everyone has those times, when life is perfect or far from perfect when you feel as though the camera is on you. This morning I got off of work here in Kabul and went downstairs to the gym. I worked out already but there is a room off of the gym that has a big screen and when hockey is on I sit on an old metal chair with my feet up on the pool table and watch the games. Tonight it was the first game of the Stanley Cup. During the dreadful military commercials I pick up my iPad and sort through a collection of pictures that I have amassed over the years. Shots I either took, involve me or just love, I have about five thousand to the ever growing collection.
I was scrolling through them and came across a black and white shot taken about four years ago. It is of me, nomex jacket, sunglasses with messed up hair and a smirk standing in front of my jet that I just signed to be left in the desert for all eternity as part of AMARC. It was one of my last flights in the hoove and within a second of flicking my finger across the screen a song came on.
A song that we actually all know, that baseline waltzing through my mind which is a part of my favorite scene in any movie of all time. Tom Cruise in a crisp white T shirt, Charlie laying on a couch outside in the San Diego sun, him talking about his old man. Cowboy boots are visible, white wine and a young man's lament of never really knowing his father nor what happened to him. As somewhat laughable as the movie itself can be I'll stack that scene up against all others.
And who would not want to be either one of them? Two people about to fall in love, that part when things are new and playful, when you worry about the date as you walk away from it, going over everything you said to ensure you didn't mess it up..."The stink of it was, he screwed up, no way, my old man was a great fighter pilot". Just as that epic bridge is playing in the background.
Life takes you a lot of places, when I first saw that movie at nine years old in the theatre I thought two things, planes were cool and how nervous would I be to kiss a girl on a big screen like that. Years later I ended up in flight school before I even really thought about it, there were old school Top Gun Tomcat guys, not the fags there now and they were everything I thought they would be, doing pops on cars on the highway coming off a low level, shit hot breaks at the numbers. BFM in the hot Pensacola sun would fade until I found myself in San Diego a few hundred feet off the beach in my home listening to the surf, thin and tan; young and alive.
I never thought they would be but those days are over and on a daily basis I try to get back to that weight and mindset. At times I win and do. But tonight watching a game I played with hopes of being there one day only to come so damn close, close enough to know a decent amount who did, looking at a picture from the second chapter of my life that has closed I felt no regret nor want to go back, I'm just happy I fucking did it, did it right and laid it all on the line and happy now looking at the first few pages of a new chapter which I am sure will not read as I plan it to. I'll find myself somewhere, just like in Bruins camp, just like in Flight school without realizing it. Life is funny like that, life is great like that.
