A Gun is a Farm Tool

I don’t feel like I could be any farther left politically without falling off the political spectrum, at least, at times, but much about this story has me baffled. It’s not just that I’m now imagining Campfield and Ford, armed and dangerous, but it honestly never occurred to me that any politician, especially in a state full of farmers, could somehow not know that a gun is a farm tool. Regardless of how you feel about guns or about hunting or whatever, sitting around debating about whether a farmer should be allowed to have a gun, and whether he should have to have special training to shoot at a snake?!

I’m sorry. Like I said, I’m a died in the wool lefty and I find this painfully embarrassing.

Are we going to debate whether a farmer should be able to have a tractor? After all, they could be very dangerous if someone got drunk and drove it through campus. Or fertilizer? Need I mention the Oklahoma City bombing? What about augers? You know how many old farmers I grew up with who were missing hands or fingers because of augers? And yet, they are still on farms.

I don’t own a gun. I think I’d even be nervous about having one in my house.

But it would strike me as weird if I went to a farmer’s house and there wasn’t at least one shotgun. Like I said, it’s a farm tool.

And using a gun to shoot a snake? Not only is that not weird, I’ve seen at least two different stories in the Commercial-Appeal about flood victims carrying shotguns to shoot snakes when the gun owners have to be on their flooded property. So, it’s weird that Memphis Democrats wouldn’t get the importance of that task. Do they not read their own paper? Skip the stories about the defining current event in their city?

Again, I’m not a gun expert, but I think the whole point of shot was that you were shooting something–like a bird or a snake or a deer–that moves quickly and may not be exactly where you aim by the time the load gets to it. So a wide spray of metal makes it more likely that something will hit it.

I don’t know. I don’t feel like some great second amendment absolutist and I don’t believe anything in the Constitution is off-limits for discussion, but it’s embarrassing to me, as a Democrat, when Democrats talk like there’s no good reason for a farmer to have a gun. It’s like saying there’s no reason for a police officer or a soldier to have a gun. A shotgun is part of the standard equipment of a farmer.

Sure, I guess not every farmer has one, but it seems like that kind of basic misunderstanding of who uses a gun in their jobs and for what and how is one reason that gun nuts never trust Democrats to have a legitimate discussion about guns–prominent Dems sound like they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

I’m Back In!

Oh, people. I hope the next thing I write is as much fun as this thing is. Anyway, I’m back in. The self-imposed exile is over. I’ve gotten some excellent notes from E. and I should have K.’s comments this week and then… well, I don’t think I’m going to make my goal of sending out my first agent query on the 22nd…

Sorry, I got distracted by the itchy spot where the tick bit me yesterday and I see something strange. I have freckles on my upper arms and shoulders. Don’t get me wrong, the only thing cuter than shoulder freckles are boob freckles, but it’s not like I’ve been out in my yard shirtless. How am I getting freckles all the way up my arms? I like them, but I am perplexed.

Anyway, so, yes, agent query by the 22nd? Probably not. But I’m still feeling good about the end of the month. I was going in and reading some of E.’s notes and I got to reading the manuscript and I still really like it. I still feel like “Yeah, this is a book I’d like to read.”

But one of E.’s queries has led me to turn to you, dear Internet. Let us all be in the mind of Western Kentucky. Picture it–not bourbon country. Not Appalachia. More like eastern Iowa, hilly and green, with a huge sky and wide expanses of farm land. A Yankee woman, unmarried, comes to a house somewhere between Cadiz, Hopkinsville, and the Pennyrile State Forest. Do the adults call her “Miss Hannah” or “Ms. Hannah?”

I have a sense that it’s far enough north that they’ve slipped into “sss” instead of “zzz” but I’m now doubting.

I should put the question to my new shoulder freckles and see if they arrange themselves into the answer.

Ha, I wonder if there is divination based on freckle patterns?

Ephelidy maybe?

Questions I Know the Answers to and Yet…

As I was sitting in my backyard yesterday, talking to friends and getting happily drunk, I said to myself “Why don’t I do this more often?”

This is a question I know the answer to.

It is, indeed, a question I knew the answer to when I was all “Why yes, I will have a second beer and a third and so on.”

And yet, I pushed the answer out of my mind, as if that happens sometimes, and maybe not this time.

But there is no “sometimes.”

Ha, upon rereading this, it makes it sound like, every time I drink, I get drunk and fuck the people across the street in some kind of shame-fueled orgy.

Bu no.

And, not only did I spend all night with the unpleasant side-effects of dumping too much bread and sugar into a system regulated by medication, I had a fucking tick on my shoulder.

Blah, nature. Beer. You both suck.