Boot Camp Graduation Quotes

The day I graduated from boot camp was the proudest of my life. An entire crew of hillbillies showed up for my graduation—

In the autumn after his graduation, Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University but spent most of his time drinking and drunk. He rarely went to class and never completed assignments. He was kicked out of school after the first term. His father and he began to argue about his drinking and his father threatened to throw him out of the house. During one of their discussions, his father mentioned that the military might provide some direction to his life, thinking it would make a man out of him. Dahmer never wanted to become a soldier, but he loved his dad and wanted to please him; besides, he thought it would be an opportunity to see the world and maybe forget about the dismembered body in the woods. Jeff signed up for four years and received training as an army medic. Boot camp was difficult, but it challenged him mentally and physically. He began to feel good about himself and was too busy to think about his secret. He deployed to Germany and bunked with several other soldiers. After his shift, he had a lot of free time and began to frequent the beer gardens. His drinking soon accelerated and eventually got him into trouble.

As a result, some thousands of young and angry outcasts who were part of the chans and a galaxy of similar online communities took up the intensive study and practice of basic magical workings without any sense of how to manage interactions with nonphysical beings—or, indeed, any notion that such interactions might need to be managed. That, in turn, pretty much guaranteed that if something other than human took an interest in the situation, a lot of the graduates of the chans’ magical boot camps were going to be swept up in something over which they had no control at all. The shortest description of 2016 is that that’s what happened.

Sometimes, when things get really bad, I just remind myself that life is a boot camp. We all start out soft, weak. And then we’re tested. Over and over. It’s hard. It’s painful. At the end of it—if you survive, if you don’t give up—you’re tough. You’ve earned your stripes. And you get to graduate to the next level.

The Halley Library branch on the north end of Knoxville was the other half of my halfway life, after I graduated from detox-and-therapy boot camp, learned respect for properly dosed Suboxone under the tongue, and settled into my residency situation.