floorpie

I like shooting.

It’s fun, and, in the best possible way in that it’s challenging as well. Not having grown up in a gun house, I found out that I was naturally pretty good at shooting through the Boy Scouts. Skeet shooting was pretty easy and target shooting quickly became so.

I always really liked target shooting over skeet. Shotguns were too loud and dumb and inaccurate. Target rifles were stealthy and temperamental and smart. You needed patience. You needed control. Even after earning my rifle merit badge I would spend hours in our backyard with my little pellet gun, laying in the prone position and slowly squeezing off rounds into a target 25yds away. I saved the best ones…the ones with 5 shots within a quarter-sized area and always tried to better my score.

As I got older, my Dad would take me to the shooting range every once and a while. We’d rent Glocks and 45’s and spend an hour shooting at man-shaped targets. It’s funny that how odd that was never occurred to me…to be clearly training how to shoot a guy. Maximum damage in the chest where there’s the biggest area and most possibility for damage. Headshots are impressive but not tactically advantageous.

In recent years, a lot of people, with a lot of guns, that are short on sanity, have killed a lot of people. There are the philosophical arguments as to whether these people would still kill people regardless of if guns were around to help them. Would they go on a massive wooden club spree? Would they bludgeon people with frying pans if AR-15’s weren’t available? And that argument is used to (usually) attempt to prove that guns don’t kill people, people do. I don’t want to get in a debate on this, but there’s one thing for sure: if people kill people or guns do, guns sure make it a whole hell of a lot easier.

I stopped by a large magazine rack over the weekend. The kind that has every US magazine you could think of plus several imported from around the globe. I was looking for guitar magazines, and was having a very difficult time of it, and eventually found two buried behind some non-related teen magazines. What I had no trouble finding, however, were the 10 gun magazines, all at eye level, front and center. The one with the the “defense for housewives” article that features a triple-barreled semi-automatic tactical shotgun. For the little lady who just needs to feel a little safer.

I like shooting. But I don’t like it enough not to give it up completely.

More on the AR-15

I was always good at english in school…whereby “English” I really mean all of the classes that weren’t math or the sciences. I was also really good at those classes, if I’m allowed to boast, but I was less good. Or, at least, they came with a bit more effort than did the literature-based classes, which required no effort at all. My mother always thought I should do something word-related…like be a writer or a lawyer.

Instead, I chose the hard route. I went into Engineering, which is a subject heavily-dependent on the subjects that I had to work at to be good at. And I did this on purpose…the English stuff seemed like cheating to me. I mean, if it was so easy to come by, could I have really earned it honestly?

This short little story should prove to illustrate why, when re-counting my book list of read books, I discovered that I had mis-counted by two. Good at literature, not quite so much at math.

The weird thing about not knowing exactly what’s wrong with you is that you become absolutely certain that whatever it is threatens your mortality. Every now and again between the day I last saw my doctor and the tomorrow of our next appointment, I’ve watched the swollen infection on my leg change colors and attitude, though not size, and for the most part seemingly not react at all to the two kinds of antibiotics I’m on. I conveniently choose to ignore that I can passably walk on my leg now (a first) and that it would appear that the infection hasn’t spread further or gotten larger. I’ve already started thinking about how I would react to amputation (with horror) and the hardship not so much physically but psychically. I can already feel the dooming depression of having to experience that and it’s given me a new appreciation of those who actually have. It seems so obvious in retrospect, how horrible it would be, and I think the only missing detail between my epiphany of today and my ignorance of yesterday is the taking of time to actually think about it.

Which leads me to my next thought: that feeling of invincible youth? It’s not invincibility in retrospect. I don’t remember thinking that I couldn’t die when I would climb out the windows of a moving car, jump off of roofs, or the like…I just didn’t think about it. I was a fairly smart kid…I have to imagine that, if forced to consider the potential ramifications of, for instance, leaping between two unstable boulders on the side of a mountain with 100’s of feet of freefall between them and missing, I’m sure that I would come to the conclusion that I would be either horribly injured or dead. I doubt I would have thought that I’d just walk away. Therefore, not invincible just not thinking.

But I digress. Or at least I now carry on down another lane of my local’s backroad way to the point. Beyond the amputation or at least horrible scarring from where they cut this infection out of me, lies the spectre of death. And it looms. Almost menacingly and almost real enough to actual feel the breath of. Frankly, it’s terrifying as I again, really think about it. I don’t want the oblivion, and at this point of my life, don’t understand how anyone could ever be at peace with that idea. The waste, the loss, the erasure of something so incredible (meaning Life not me personally), just feels unspeakably sad.

I should probably go wash this wound out, no?

I have been on crutches 3 times in my life (so far).

The first was in High School when in a fairly bad accident. My girlfriend, Missa, was driving us back to school from lunch? band practice? making out? I can’t remember. We were in her red Fiero, which I know now to be an absolutely horrible car; but, I must admit was fun to drive back in the day. Plus she looked hot in it. We were turning left with a green arrow when a lifted, white, Nissan pickup truck went around a car stopped at the opposing light, into the opposite left hand turn lane, proceeded to instead pass straight through the intersection and right into…me, basically, in the passenger seat. I remember how the bottom of the truck’s grill was in-line with the top of my head right before impact.

At any rate, the impact crumpled the passenger door and threw it into my knee, which would later swell alarmingly. I had to climb out of my luckily open window to get out and physically lift my screaming and crying girlfriend out of the driver’s seat who was, miraculously, completely uninjured. The Fiero was totaled and the pickup truck was apparently drivable because it was a hit and run.

Crutches for about a week.

The second was when I was living in the Bay Area and playing basketball in an all-asian league (except for me). I spent a lot of free time at a local school shooting baskets alone and I noticed how some people played games in the gym. One time they were playing on the outside courts for some reason or another and they needed an extra guy. Enter the white man. I played a few more pick-up games with them until one day one of the few english speakers told me it was $25/month for the rental of the gym. I took this as being accepted into their circle. I wasn’t the best player on the team, but I also wasn’t the worst and it felt good to have “friends” even though I didn’t know more than two of their names and no one ever spoke to me (or perhaps could speak to me.

One day, I chased down a player on a fast break, went up to block his lay-up, and destroyed my ankle on the way down. I iced it with peas that night and went to bed with my leg propped up on pillows thinking that that was the worst of it. The next morning, I lightly placed my now purple, zeppelin-shaped foot on the floor and screamed in pain. I crawled on all fours to the bathroom and washed my face leaning into the tub, went to urgent care, and was told that it would have been better if I’d just broken my ankle, because this was as bad a sprain as I could possibly get and it would probably never heal to full strength (which has so far proven to be true).

Crutches for about two weeks. Special prize for also being on said crutches when I was laid-off…which made for a particularly pathetic figure as I struggled to hold my box of belongings and crutch my way to my car.

And the third is right now. A large half-baseball sized pus-filled swelling appeared on the back of my knee two days ago which has since been diagnosed (at the ER) as a staph infection. It hurts, I can’t straighten (or really bend) my leg, and walking is extremely difficult at best without crutches.

Crutches for two days and counting…