i found a loaded gun in my mom's garage
okay the bullets turned out to be blanks but still
so now i’m thinking about guns and i’m thinking about how i was around so many guns when i was younger and come to think of it some of the gun situations were not particularly safe now that you mention it. like for example we used to shoot guns up at The Cabin, where i was the youngest out of maybe 20 men and older teenagers and none of their wives or girlfriends and i was like 14 and boy did those guys like to drink, and to shoot guns, and to drink and shoot guns. sometimes, long after dark, they would shoot the guns into the sky, although, at the cabin, the sky never truly got dark, because they would burn piles of wood skids so big that the flames got to be several stories tall, and the flames would burn so hot that they would burn underground and tree stumps thirty yards away would begin to smoke. and i never cared too much about guns but i thought it was kind of cool to tell people that i shot famous guns like i shot an AK-47 (purchased illegally from a guy in montana) and the dirty harry gun, yeah that’s right, the 44 magnum, i shot one of those and the recoil was so strong that my arms couldn’t hold steady the gun kicked back and almost hit me in the damn face. but i was never much of a man and even at 14 i knew i was never going to be a man like these guys were men, not that i think much of their definition of manhood and maybe even then i thought the whole thing seemed juvenile or maybe i was just kind of scared and wished it would stop.
so yeah i grew up pretty rednecked, like for example my class ring had a deer on one side and a snowmobile on the other, an odd choice given i was really into radiohead by that time, and i dutifully went hunting every fall and i would tie my rifle to a string and climb up the tree and then pull the rifle up by the string and and i would sit in that tree and i would read A Wrinkle In Time and when a deer came i loved to see it and i never thought seriously about shooting at it. shooting a deer is fine to do, but i didn’t want to do it, so i didn’t, and i would tell my dad that i saw some bucks but never had a clean shot and he would say, well, tomorrow.
fishing on the big lake (the greatest lake, you know the one) was a big part of my life around that time too and it might surprise you to learn that occasionally guns were involved in that as well. sometimes when the fish weren’t biting we would go into hang-out mode with beers and cigars and a little charcoal grill that mounted to the boat’s rail and sometimes someone would pull out the shotgun and look at the other guys inquisitively, mischievously, and we’d be like, let’s do it. and then we would shoot clay pigeons off of the back of a boat tens of miles out in the middle of lake michigan, nothing but water visible in any direction. i would stand there and use the hand-thrower to launch the targets to, ideally, a safe distance and then CRACK the sound of gunfire would shatter the anticipating silence and ripple out across the liquid glass surface of the water and i imagined the sound traveling like a low flying jet outward in every direction and one time another fishing boat of guys we knew showed up and they had a gun too and some guy shot a seagull dead right off of a big steel buoy and i thought to myself well that kind of takes the fun out of it, huh. and i think that was also the day i smoked weed with my dad for the first time and i had to tell him, dad, i don’t think it’s good for you to smoke weed out of a beer can, is this how you always smoke weed? and he was like what are you talking about it’s fine. and as far as i know he’s still alive and now i guess he makes his money growing weed and now he is in a wheelchair although it would be silly to imply that the wheelchair had anything to do with smoking out of aluminum cans, it’s just a detail that is maybe meant to tie the story in with the present or maybe i can admit that it’s a detail i want to share because the truth of that whole situation feels like a fiction to me and putting it in a story and putting it out there like it’s no big deal somehow puts another insulating layer between myself and the truth.
when i unzipped the leather pouch in my mom’s garage and found a handgun in there, my mom was in disbelief; she had no idea there was a gun in there and when i realized it was fuckin’ loaded i said “jesus, it’s fuckin’ loaded!” and right then we looked up and a lady was walking by with her dog and i waved to her but i was holding the gun in the hand i was waving to her with like a fricking cartoon character and me and my mom laughed but the dog lady didn’t laugh. mom and i were both catching quite a thrill from suddenly having a gun. and i always said i would never have a gun but goddamn if i didn’t wish i could take that gun with me on the airplane back to texas and pop some charges. and this was right after we saw Twisters (2024)1 in the big theater and i had just said out loud several times, i gotta get a truck. so in the course of a couple hours i became a big guns and trucks guy.
anyway the bullets that were in there turned out to be blanks.
the thing about the boat made me think of a thing i wrote. i used to mostly sleep while i was supposed to be fishing and my uncle would get so mad at me about it. fishermen are superstitious and so when i would finally emerge from the bottom of the boat, blinking into the sun, and ask, are we catching anything, he would say, no, but that’s because you’ve been sleeping all morning. and i guess he was usually right because we won all those trophies.
so here is this thing i wrote and i am sorry about the bit about jacking off especially because my mom is one of like five people who will read this. sorry ma!
cool movie, in my opinion. i loved the parts where it was like, oh shit, ahhh, drive that way!! doing car chases but instead of cops it’s tornados; that’s that movie magic. still can’t believe we lost bill paxton. feel like shit i just want him back
First or something
pls don't get a gun