Skip to main content

The modern day archer.

I pulled. The gun jumped to life in my hands with a roaring explosion. It sent a jolt up through my arms. I felt the concussion in my chest. The shell shot up in the air and bounced away off the cement, blending into the rest of the casings. A dot appeared on the target. I raised the gun and fired again.

Shooting is not really about machismo, I think. It's meditative. There is a level of comfort you have to achieve with the weapon. It takes focus. I thought about it as I pushed bullets into the magazine. It takes confidence. I loaded the magazine into the pistol. You look past the gun. I armed it. Past the iron sights and through the target. I raised the pistol up. Precision. I took a breath and shifted my weight forward. You let the gun extend your arm.

I pulled the trigger.

My father and my uncle always have the best conversations. They make fun of their age, weight, and skills in regards to pretty much everything. "You want us to put up targets for you guys?" My uncle asked. My father looked at him sideways. "There's no need. We're just shooting through the same bull's eyes." My uncle tacked up the targets and got back behind the table.

"Alright, fuck this!" He said. He pulled a shotgun out of the case and loaded it up. He pumped it and blasted the target. Target stand, I guess. He emptied out the gun and blew the target stand completely apart. "Alright!" My father said. "Now you can finally hit the target!" "Smartass." My uncle replied. "Hey, you want to shoot this thing?" I leaned back on the railing. "No, I have a little too much self-respect for that." I said. "Come degrade yourself a little bit." So I shot at paper printouts of Saddam with a shotgun from five yards away. It was pretty glorious.

Pistols are fun, but they've never been my preference. Rifles are much calmer. There is a sense of dignity in them. A sense of nobility.

Also, my rifle has a bayonet on it. It's pretty cool.

We shot rifles for a few hours, which is something I love doing. Maintaining accuracy at 100 yards takes skill. It takes concentration. It takes patience. I loaded my rifle. The leftover bullets rolled across the table. I drew in tightly, pressing the gun to my shoulder. My shoes scraped the empty brass on the floor. I drew a bead on the silhouette target we had posted up.

"Shoot 'em up, shoot 'em up, pow pow!"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pseudo-science (like psych).

I consider myself a man of science. I try to approach problems and deal with them logically, using observations previously recorded to handle new problems. So of course my interest was piqued when someone I knew posited that men are needier and more complicated than women. An interesting theory. But to properly examine it, one must understand the concept of sexual selection and its two aspects: male competition and female choice. Which brings us to point one: men are needier [in relationships] than women. This is true. In a natural/primal setting, the males are generally love-'em-leave-'em kinds of guys. Their main objective is to reproduce as much as they can. Humans, in their infinite wisdom, have decreased the emphasis on this to the point where it has become a footnote in male purpose. Civilization dictates that, instead of finding a partner for the sole purpose of reproduction, males find females for life companionship. With the effective removal of their natur...
5 comments
Read more

I'm a geologist, not an alcoholic.

I thought I had seen people drink before. Hell, I thought that I had drank before. But, clearly, I thought wrong on both of those counts. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a reason to justify all of the drinking that transpired down there last week. There was no rhyme or reason to it, it just was. Field work just makes a man thirsty. Taking this class was easily one of the best things I've ever done. We worked hard every day out in the field. Wake up at 7, leave the beach house by 8, hit the water by 9. My first three field days were in service on the R/V Acadiana , a 58 foot vessel that towed the CHIRP fish , the air gun, and the streamer to measure all the seismic data--looking at the subsurface of the seafloor we drove over. My second ship was the R/V Itasca using the multibeam , sidescan , and grab sampler --getting seafloor surface bathymetry. They were long, exhausting days and we returned to the docks around 6 or 7 every evening. And then, drinking. So much ...
1 comment
Read more

What the fuck am I looking at.

Today, I went to the gym and found something new. I found a room with pads on the floor and walls. A room with a punching bag hanging from the ceiling. It was like walking into a dream come true. It was exactly what I had been looking for for months. For years , even. And I attacked that bag. I'll be spending a lot of time there, I think. I have been in such an inexplicably good mood these last few days. I don't know what the deal is. Maybe it's because I've been eating so many bananas. It's probably because things are going pretty well and I'm just feeling good. Doing nice things, feeling confident. Good things. And most importantly, I'm feeling less tired. Maybe it was a diet change. Maybe it's all the exercise. I will probably never know, but that doesn't bother me.
4 comments
Read more