(You can read part 9 here)

(Dedicated to Sofrep family brother: WayTooMuchGear [WTMG])

The next two days went well enough well, boring actually. I had little to no money and had resigned to wandering the streets to avoid an inevitable seizure by the scoundrels who sent me here. ‘Play the game’ was the mantra that ricocheted inside my head; ‘always play the game; if not, the game will play you.’

That was an interesting phrase, one that urges you to take and keep control of a situation. It is pithy enough, but it doesn’t explain how you are supposed to achieve anything. I guess you will recognize it when you see it and take action. It sounds cool though, especially when you find yourself in situations with nothing clever left to say. But then we do what we have to do, and that’s what makes us who we are… right?

It puts me in mind of a day of dirt bike riding in the pine forests surrounding our compound back at Bragg. Most of us were novice riders, or at least of the beginner sort. Several of us had dumped our bikes on a particularly hairy turn in the pine woods. We lay in momentary peace in a tangle of men, machine, and slowly seeping hydrocarbon.

We basked horizontally in the reverie of not being up vertically on hateful metal monsters leaning low, revving, and trying to stay on the thin dirt trail. I had at one time been gifted a wrist injury while engaged in such riding, one that I did not recover from for nearly a year. “If you’re not getting the $hit kicked out of you, you’re not trying” one of the better riders explained.

Speaking of the better riders… it was Mark “Cuz” C. Who revved up to our pig pile and came to a halt with his four-cycle purring. We each looked up at him longingly, waiting for his aphoristic prose of wisdom that would guide us through our next hairy hairpin turns:

“Ride the bike; don’t let the bike ride you.”