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

Popular posts from this blog

Side effects include constant irritability, being an ass.

It was a typical day in MUS 307 . A typical day where nobody pays attention to anything the professor talks about. A day where people play shitty flash games instead of take notes. A day where people sit and refresh their Facebook newsfeed instead of follow the slides. A day where people roll their eyes and go to sleep instead of listen to the music examples. A day where people get up and leave ten minutes before lecture ends instead of having the God damn decency to stay the whole time and pretend to be interested. I mean, if you're going to be so unaffected by the music we're studying in class then why the fuck did you take the class in the first place? Fuck it makes me mad. And I haven't even started talking about that fucker who sits in the back and tries to whistle along with every song that gets played in class. Alright, dude, we get it: you are just too cool and you know everything about jazz, ever. You know every standard ever written and everybody's so...

So, I mean, there's that.

So I went to church again. I slept through most of it but I woke up to hear this: "Oh Lord you are holy indeed. You are a fountain of holiness." Dang, I thought. That is pretty holy. I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas again recently. That is still one of my favorite movies. I never get tired of watching it for some reason. I remember the first time I saw it quite clearly. I was about 5 years old at the time, I think. My dad and I were in the Albertson's video store looking for something to watch as was our Friday night custom. I walked through the aisle, glossing over the scary movies as quickly as I could without looking like I was scared. My dad pulled me aside with a video in hand. "What do you think about this one?" He held up a cover with a skeleton on the cover and 'nightmare' in the title. "It doesn't look very good." I said nonchalantly. "It looks lame." I rolled my eyes and turned away, playing it cool....

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...