We are now squarely in the time of year wherein I am reminded how much of a pussy I am. A huge percentage of my friends are taking work off today to go shoot animals. My friends that, while driving and happen to notice a flock of geese flying, aim an imaginary gun out the window and open fire on them. My friends that talk about flushing birds, tree stands, thirty-point bucks (don't get me started on that annoying song) etc. etc. etc.
Meanwhile, here is the complete list of guns that I have fired in my lifetime:
1. The gun from Duck Hunt- and I usually had to cheat and put the gun directly on the screen in order to hit any of those effing ducks. Yes, I was that guy. And fuck that dog that laughs at you, while we're at it. If I'm gonna hunt anything in my life, it's gonna be him.
2. A lasertag gun- and I was always pretty awful at that, but it worked in my advantage because getting shot by a lady was an excellent flirting tool, and those lasertag trips were all about hitting on the cute girls in our Wednesday night church group anyway. Also, the lasertag setup at the Air Force Base was sneaky good- it was sorta like the Complex multiplayer level of Goldeneye for N64. Damn, anyone wanna play lasertag right now?
3. The gun from Big Buck Hunter. I had always boycotted this barcade game (See what I did there? Combined bar and arcade to make barcade?) since in North Dakota, the popularity of this game is the main culprit for the removal of multiple Golden Tee machines in local bars. I finally broke the boycott and played....and got repeatedly trounced by a friend of mine, who also happens to be a girl. There's a common theme here somewhere.
4. A BB gun that looked EXACTLY like a real glock, that was given to me by some ruffians in elementary school (I hung out with EVERYONE in elementary school at one point or another. Grab a yearbook for Ben Franklin from 1989-1994, point to a random kid, and I've probably been to their house. Cool kids, nerds, hoodlums, everybody. I was a friend slut.) I hung out with these kids for a few days, we committed some petty elementary school-level crimes, and we never talked again. That is, until one day a few years later, when these two showed up at my front door looking shifty-eyed and asking if I had still had the gun. I returned it to them, then was unsurprised when I read a newspaper article the next morning that reported two youths had robbed a gas station (that just happened to be less than a block from where these guys lived.) They got away with it, as far as I know.
And that, my friends, is the list.
I'm sure that this weekend my dad, besides hunting and bonding with my brother, is also commemorating "If I Had Known How He Was Gonna Turn Out, I Might As Well Have Had a Daughter" weekend. I would send him a card, but Hallmark doesn't seem to have much for this occasion.
If my plan was to drag myself outside at the crack of dawn in the freezing cold to sit around for hours on end just for the opportunity to shoot at a living thing, I would just go ahead and end it right there. I'll stay inside, thanks. I've got beer in the fridge, and I'm balls deep in the Forest of Illusion for Super Mario World right now. But get out there and kill some deer for me, you know how much I love to eat venison.
