March 4, 2025

Scared to write. Scared of what my hands will do. Scared of what might pour from my mind. My heart sits heavy in my chest like a radio weights down a rucksack. My mind is twisted up like a towel being wrung out. That’s how I’ve lived the past couple months without adding an entry here. I think about it often, but I let time pass me by, content with just the thought.

Maybe that’s my problem. Thinking about what I want is satisfying enough for me. It’s the passing whiff of diesel as the truck that carries my dreams drives on by. I haven’t been man enough to run after the truck, flag it down, and hop in for the ride. I haven’t been man enough to go drive the truck myself.

I am like a plant whose caretaker has left it without water too long. Neglected, forgotten about. I sit in the sun all day but don’t get the water everyone else does. Most plants die in these conditions. Without water, they wither and fall away. They become so weak the slightest breeze will carry them away. I’ve seen so many plants die this way. They were unable to withstand the harsh heat. They couldn’t handle how long it took for rain to come.

But I was made different from those other plants. I don’t need as much water as them because I am cactus. A brief rainfall once a year is all I need. I hold onto those drops of rain longer than anyone else can. Most other plants around me can hardly set their roots in this desert. The sand is too hot, and too loose for them. Instead, they all look for an oasis, for somewhere more comfortable. “The weather is nicer over there, and I’ll have an easier time growing,” I hear them fantasize. They’ve heard the myths of plants who live at the oasis, whose lush green leaves fluorish.

The thing about those plants at the oasis is they are soft. Their growth has been spoon-fed to them. While they get larger on the outside, they have become weak on the inside. They have not been forced to survive off just a few drops of water. The plants at the oasis think they are better than the single cactus along in the desert. They think themselves more beautiful, growing flowers in their excess and fanciful leaves that give them shade. What they don’t know is their own plentifulness will be their very downfall. Their lavish existence by the water has made them weak inside. Eventually, even if not soon, they will pass away.

But the sun has made me strong. Its daily beating all over my body has awoken the resolved within my soul. I’ve even developed thorns to keep away those who want to cut me open and take the water from inside me. Because of the strength I have found within, I will outlive all those other plants. Yes, even the ones at the oasis. Cacti are known to live as long as 200 years. Oh, the tales I will tell after two centuries. These other plants won’t last with me. They will eventually wither away as I watch from my solitary post. They are of the wind. I would help them if I could, but the only help I can give is to warn them they must become tougher. They have become slaves to the pleasure they fell when they get water. I refuse to be a slave. I will take what I am given and move on.

Other plants want the water I hold within, but they can’t get to it. So they will just commiserate with one another in their own thirst, but their misery won’t bring them any more rain. Their thirst will dry up their fake friendships and their true selfish nature will be revealed. The only other people I make sense to are the other cacti. They are the only ones who ever get me. We are the ones who can survive on just the morning dew. They are not wrong, but they are missing the point. I had to become this way. I got this way because I was endured the suffering of the sun’s rays. It was the suffering that made me who I am.

See you in Torbia.

Cactus Jack 2025

The Rising or Setting Sun

October 18, 2024

“I have often looked at that picture behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting.” – Benjamin Franklin

The chair upon which George Washington sat at the Constitutional Convention displayed a half-sun at the top. Benjamin Franklin, analogizing the sun to the new American Republic, wrote that he worried if the sun was rising or setting. The ambiguity of the static sun leaves us to wonder if it is settling in to rest for the night or just emerging to brighten up the world.

The final entry to my performance journal from last year reads “After this meet Plebe year there was a beautiful sunset. This year, the rainclouds blocked out the falling sun.” Two years prior, the sun seemed to be peacefully approaching its well-earned rest. After my Plebe season, I felt that I had beat the odds and succeeded beyond what many had expected me to do. I don’t know that I was content, but in that moment watching the golden sky from the bus window, I could appreciate how far I’d made it. From a podunk town in North Carolina to NCAA Division 1 Track and Field. But last year, after the same meet, I was wistful. The dark sky made me yearn for brighter days. I felt that I had squandered the two years between the two meets, not making any progress. A simple reading of the tape measure would indicate just that, since I had thrown 15.85 in 2022 and 15.93 at the same meet in 2024.

Even so, I think I’ve still got some say as to if the sun is rising or setting. Franklin was able to conclude “But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” My time will come to light up the darkness in this world. The light within me cannot be contained, and we won’t have to question anymore if the sun is rising or setting.

X-Ray

August 18, 2024

I sit waiting in the lobby of a chilly doctor’s office. I am appreciative for the change in temperature. For the past nine days, I have been trudging with 70lbs of gear through the Catskills. Last night, my Platoon ran a mission that lasted seven hours and took us up and down three mountains. In the final part of our exercise, I’ve managed to get hurt. The last part of our exercise was to drop out gear, go down to the combatives pit, and fight. In a moment of bad luck, I had to fight a guy equally as strong as me, but faster and with less knowledge of how to fight. He slipped around to my back and yanked me from my knees backward to the ground. My feet were trapped under me, and my foot was stuck to the ground as my body rotated. “POP POP POP,” shots rang off in my leg. I felt it, but could not hear it over the cheers and jeers of over 100 of my peers, circled around watching the fight.

Immediately upon feeling the pops, I tapped. My peers, expecting a show out of the theatrical Luke Noonan, began to laugh. They couldn’t believe I’d been submitted less than ten seconds into the fight. Their laughs faded as they watched me roll over, grimacing in pain, and reach for my ankle. The first thing that ran through my head was a mental video of me throwing the shot put. “How on earth am I going to do that?” Another video plays of me running. “I’m not going to be able to do that either.”

“It’s probably a sprain,” I am told. The doctor is not in, and I’m seeing a Sergeant who has been turning away people like me all summer. I bet she thinks I am just trying to get out of training. The training is over; I just want help.

All I leave with is an ankle brace and some ibuprofen. For the next 36 hours, I hobble around wherever I am told to go. Finally, when the doctor comes in Monday morning, I am first in line to see her. She orders an x-ray for me, and I go to the hospital. I don’t mind being sent there, because they have their own dining hall. It’s the best food I’ve had in two weeks since arriving for training. The next day I go back to see my results. The doctor has me hobble over to sit down on her table. She’s suddenly much more interested in my injury than she was yesterday. She performs a variety of tests and exercises on me. She then tells me that the x-ray results have come back and I have a fractured fibula.

My mind races as she explains her medical jargon to me. “Fracture in your fibula blah blah blah” she drones on. I am already creating a mental plan of how I can fight past this. I know that I’m about to develop a strong upper body the next few weeks. It doesn’t hurt to do hip adduction and adduction, so I’ll do plenty of that. “The x-ray showed that your malleosis blah blah blah.” She doesn’t know who I am and only cared when she knew for sure I was actually hurt. She doesn’t know that I’m going to be an All-American next year. She doesn’t know that I hit shoulders yesterday at an outdoor weight room.

The doctor opens up her closet and reaches inside. Pulling out a boot and crutches, I feel conflicted. Sure, it’s not the ideal way to begin off-season training. But, at least it’ll prove to everyone I wasn’t just faking it this whole time.

I am going to call the hospital when they open Monday morning and have them send me a copy of my x-ray. It’s been three weeks since it was taken. I will hang it up on my wall and look at it daily. A reminder that even a broken leg can’t hold me back from achieving my goals. A reminder that when I beat you, you have no excuse.

Here’s a photo taken a couple minutes before I went down. Eventually I got that guy off my back, put him in the dirt, and choked him out. Your time will come soon, navy.

Time

Time. All I have been able to think of is time. How much time do I have until my next meeting? How much time will it take me to make coffee? Will I be early enough to that formation? How long is it until the start of the track season? How long will it be until my fibula is healed? When can I start throwing again? When can I start training again? How slow will I be running when I go on my first run? Worrying for the future looms over me.

My worry for the past haunts me. Have I done enough the past three years to be an All-American this year? Have I wasted my time in training? How have I not gotten any better with the hours I have put in? When did things take a turn away from progress an into middling mediocrity?

“Attention all Spartans: there are five minutes until assembly for lunch formation.” I hear the Plebes drone in the hallway, “there are 282 days until graduation for the class of 2025.” It’s everywhere I go, all around me. Time has me strapped to a chair. It beats me and harasses me. It interrogates my darkest fears and tightly kept regrets. Without my own public admission, I might be able to spin it another way. “I wasn’t an All-American because it’s too hard at my school,” “I didn’t set the academy record because I got unlucky with injuries,” “I had to stay at a lower body weight for the Army:” all of these are weak excuses.

Time, however, won’t accept those excuses. I sink deeper into the chair with every blow. Sweat covers my entire body, blood streams from my cheekbone. I hear his clock softly tick by on the wall. As long as he has had me trapped here it has been a steady presence. During some bouts of torture, the tick of the second hand drifts out of my conscious mind and I forget it’s there. Now, it is louder than it has ever been. Each tick like a gunshot in my ear that makes my brain pound. After more of this interrogation than I am able to handle, all I can muster is a whisper. Lowly, I confess “I haven’t done all I can.” “I didn’t train harder than my opponents.” “I didn’t attack every training session with maximum effort.” “I didn’t sleep enough.” “I got distracted on my phone too often.” “I didn’t stay on top of my schoolwork.” My brutal interrogator has flipped the script on me. Now I am to blame for all my shortcomings and failures. My insecurities have been brought to the light

What has become of the once confident man? What has defeated him? He once seemed to work tirelessly with fervor and passion. All the while, he was self-sabotaging; cutting himself off at every impasse and holding himself back from his greatest potential. Only now has he realized that he is to blame for all his shortcomings. Only by the brutality of time.