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Look, I’m a little sensitive about my snubby, okay?

Weasel's S&W 686 revolver

Whoa! What’re the odds? That’s Enas Yorl and his brand new Smith & Wesson 686 onscreen in the background there, me and mine in the foreground…turns out Mr Minority has one and McGoo has one, too.

This is my bedside cannon. My “holy shit, lady, you aren’t kidding!” piece. It is very big and shiny. It makes an extremely loud bang. I suspect it would make exceedingly large holes in bad guys, but happily I’ve never had to test this theory.

When I moved to Rhode Island, I arrived unarmed and stayed that way for twenty years. I knew the rules were more restrictive up here in Yanquiland and I figured buying a gun wasn’t worth the trouble.

But then I bought a house on a corner lot. Sound travels funny here. Somebody slams a car door, it sounds like bad guys moving around in the basement. One night, I found myself creeping down the stairs clutching a tack hammer like Conan the Ovarian, and I thought, “this is too stupid.”

Turns out, while it’s nearly impossible to get a concealed carry permit in Rhode Island, all you need is a “blue card” to buy a gun and keep it in your home. To earn your blue card, you need to pass a background check and a written exam.

I am now going to tell you how to pass the written exam. Ready? Here’s the secret: there is no condition under which any gun can ever be considered unloaded. None whatever. Just fired six rounds out of a six shooter? Still loaded. Just completely disassembled your pistol into its umpty-ump constituent parts? Still loaded. Crushed it flat with a backhoe? Loaded. Aliens blew our lovely blue earth to smithereens and just as your lungs collapse in the cold nothingness of outer space a molten glob of metal that might possibly once have been your favorite revolver sails past your ear into the void? Count on it, it’s loaded.

Yup. See, they took the old common-sense recommendation that it’s safest to regard every gun as loaded and morphed it into a nonsensical declaration that every gun really is loaded all the time. Put your hand on your heart and say something stupid, and we’ll give you that blue card.

I wonder how many rosy-necked sons of the soil were too proud to say something that dumb to earn their papers?

November 29, 2007 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 69

The Summer of Disemboweled Chickens

Going moonbat all over my own comments section reminded me of one glorious Walt Disney Summer on the farm. I guess I was 15, stuck by myself out in the middle of nowhere, bored silly.

We kept a small flock of Araucana chickens for the eggs. Well, probably not genuine Auraucanas, which are quite rare, but a mongrel breed more properly called Easter Egg Chickens. Ours were white and laid blue and green eggs. I wonder why they’re called Easter Egg Chickens.

At some point, my mother decided we needed a rooster. Being a good hippie, Mother believed all animals had to have lots of sex to be happy, so she bought our hens a little Rhode Island Red rooster. He was half the size of the hens. Mother called him a “banty rooster” — which I suppose is a corruption of “bantam.” She called obnoxious little men “banty roosters” too.

And he sure was an obnoxious little fucker. He screwed those hens halfway to perdition. After a month, not a one of them had any feathers on her back. They sure didn’t look happy to me — whenever a chicken saw him strutting nearby, she plopped down in the grass in a frantic effort to deny him snootch. When he took his afternoon constitutional, you could see them pop up and down like fluffy white mushrooms all over the lawn.

He had a crap sense of timing, too. Used to crow at three in the morning. My room was actually a little trailer on the opposite side of the chicken house from the main house (a trailer! Let the banjo jokes commence!), so I bore the brunt of all that cocka-doodle-doo shit. God, I hated that bird.

Once, I leaned out my back door and pitched an entire box of miniature Gideon New Testaments at him, one by one, trying to shut him up. The question is, what was I doing with an entire box of miniature Gideon New Testaments? This I do not know.

But one morning, it wasn’t crowing, but a weak, fluttery cackling that woke me. I found him lying in the hen yard, disemboweled. If the hens were just a leeetle bit brighter, I might’ve suspected them, but this had possum written all over it. Possums chew out the soft bits and leave the rest.

Oh, dear god. He was still breathing.

I went back in and got a .22 target pistol. The chicken yard was fenced in, overhead and all (another reason not to blame a dog, but something sneaky like a possum). The only access was through a window in the henhouse, so I couldn’t get all that close to him. It was a crap pistol and I was (quite frankly) a pretty crap shot. I steadied the barrel against the chicken wire and squeezed the trigger.

He hopped up like Lazarus and ran, trailing extremely important parts of himself. Shit. Now I’ve got a running target. Every time he slowed down, I took a shot, which didn’t give him much but a renewed vigor. All hail the mighty chicken torturer! I finally ran out of ‘mo, and he fell over, whether dead or exhausted, I don’t know. I was too rattled to check for sure. Anyway, he’d be better off dying his way than having me continue to shoot bits off him.

Sure enough, I was walking across the yard a few days (and another disemboweled chicken) later and saw a possum bumbling through the grass. He did the standard thing when I walked over. Have you ever seen one play possum? It’s eerie. Even if you know they’re faking, you don’t quite believe it. I kicked him over with my toe and then went in for a gun. He was gone by the time I got back. My stepfather was furious with me, but what was I going to do? Crush his ickle skull?

Mother let the chickens roam free after that, thinking they’d be safer roosting in the trees. They really do come home to roost, you know. But still they kept disappearing, one every few days. Now it probably was a neighbor’s dog; now there was nothing left but a dusting of white feathers.

I wanted to redeem myself. I took a flashlight and taped it to the barrel of my grandfather’s old .22 rifle. As tactical assault weapons go, it was better than fluffy knuckles or ninja throwing kittens.

And finally, late one night — I think we were down to our last chicken — I woke to a squawk. It was a nasty damp, hot August night, like being snuggled in Satan’s armpit, and I burst out the back door in nothing but my underpants and plinking rifle. Shoes would’ve been so sweet right about then.

My flashlight picked up a clump of white feathers. Too late? No, no…it was a trail. I followed dollops of white across the front yard and around the side. It was black as india ink and all I could see was a bouncing ring of grass under the flashlight and that eerie white dotted line disappearing into the black. When I got out onto the long, sloping field out back, the thing stopped and turned to face me, and this is exactly what I saw:

houndeyes.gif

My stepfather was positive it was the neighbor’s german shepherd. Me, I’m pretty sure that there is the Devil’s slavering flame-eyed sulphurous spectral soul-sucking weasel hound from hell. Whatever. With my marksmanship, I sure wasn’t taking a shot at it.

What if I missed?

What if I didn’t?

March 21, 2007 — 5:57 pm
Comments: 3

Paperwork

This was Bill Paying Weekend, a monthly trauma I endure under the soothing alfluence of incohol. I have the money to settle my accounts these days, but I still dread this ordeal…sorting through a month’s worth of special offers from credit card companies cleverly designed to look like overdue notices so I’ll open them for sure (thus pissing me off so thoroughly they’d have to be Pretty Damn Special offers before I’d take a second look) and all the other irritations and stupidities that fall through my mail slot in thirty days.

Like this thing. This is a thirty page questionnaire from the Census Bureau. Why am I getting a questionnaire from the Census Bureau in 2007? Presumably because I blew them off in 2000.

I know, I know…I’m a Constitution-humping ‘winger and the Constitution says the government must do a census every ten years. I wouldn’t mind being a part of a head count. But I got the long form in 2000, too. Remember that? Some people got the usual few questions, and a random selection got a thirty page beast that asks nosey junque about years of schooling and income and how long my commute is and a bunch of other nunya bidness stuff. Oh, and about twenty different precise choices for race, of course. I’m an Eskimo princess, fuck off.

I wouldn’t, perhaps, be quite so set against it, if it weren’t marked “YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW.” And inside there’s this “title blah-blah-blah of the US Code, section blah-blah-blah, imposes a penalty for not responding.” Without, of course, mentioning what that penalty is.

OH! Threaten me? They can smooch silky weasel ass. I ain’t doing it. I assume the penalty is a fine, but you guys’ll visit me in the pen if I guess wrong, mmm?

Then I get four more pages of nosiness from Blue Cross. Do I smoke? Did my doctor tell me that’s bad? Naw, I gave up cigarettes so I could afford more heroin. Jesus.

So it was like a breath of warm Spring sunshine to get this in the mail. It’s NRA sweepstakes time again. I love the cheerful, breathless way the NRA flat-out fails to comprehend it’s supposed to be ashamed of itself. Guns, guns and more guns! Get one for grandma!

Though I prefer the one where they give you a page of stickers with photos of guns, and you have to peel off ten of your favorites and stick them on the Grand Prize page so they know what to send you when you win. I can spend a happy hour working out the logistics of that, maximizing the flexibility of my arsenal but minimizing the different kinds of ammo I’d have to keep in stock. Plus, colorful stickers!

Ooo! Mustn’t forget a shotgun for Grandma!

March 12, 2007 — 7:12 am
Comments: 5