I Bought My Son a Shotgun Today

I really, really hate how workshops begin with a forced get-to-know-you segment. I hate them because I can't help judging people. The get-to-know-you format is fertile ground for the seeds of prejudice, and for someone who scorns strangers for buying 52" plasma TV's and Hummers, this is tough for me. Getting to know you is a real roadblock between me and me liking you.

At the start of one of my classes, an earnest-looking, balding, morbidly obese young man tells the class that his life's passion is hunting; all he wants to do is to hunt, and his goal is to write for a hunting magazine.

If this doesn't trip my wire enough, he then tells the class that he's in an "improv band." A band. Like Van Halen.

Tonight at the break of this class, my professor says, "I bought my son a shotgun today!" excitedly trying to make conversation with Deer Hunter, who is the 'quiet one' in class.

You can imagine my thoughts when I hear two people eagerly talking about automatic rifles. I can paraphrase rather easily: Picture me waving my arms at you and yelling, "Why? Why? Why why why?" as they continue to discuss the most absurd medieval sport that ever survived the Middle Ages.

But, here I am, judging away. I'll stop, for your sake and mine.

My opinions on hunting, like my scorn for all things excessive, is just another piece of that good ol' liberal platform which passively accepts abortion and actively poo-poohs war. It's funny how we lefties and them right-wingers are all killers in one way or another; we are just selective about who and what we choose to kill.

But people don't abort fetuses for pleasure.

A student next to me gave me a look, almost instinctively, after my professor said that he "bought his son a shotgun!" It was reassuring to know that I wasn't the only person who gets the opposite of excited when I buy a shotgun. That's right; the opposite of excited. If, for whatever reason, I acquired a shotgun, I would probably throw it out, like I did to the video that my weird Uncle George made of my father's funeral. In similar ways, they are celebrations, maybe even glorifications, of death. Give me one good reason to purchase a hunting rifle and I'll make some popcorn and start rummaging through the trash.

Am I just a lame pacifist? Why can't I begin to understand the thrill of the kill? Is it some kind of exercise in realizing our mortality? Maybe if Deer Hunter could spit out some existential reason for hunting, I could give him some respect. But to be so fascinated with destruction....well, I guess that's pretty existential, no matter how you cut it. Maybe each time he goes into the woods, he realizes how fragile his own life is when he spots a happy-go-lucky moose. Maybe when he sends his moose corpse to the taxidermist, it will serve as a constant reminder that he, too, will die.

No, I wouldn't judge him for that.

I just think he's fucking crazy.