Did you get what you wanted for Christmas?
We've been waiting on a new dinghy which, I suppose, is this year's Holidaze present to ourselves but it would seem to be taking the slow boat... Maybe we'll get it by New Year's Eve?
Growing up in a fairly outdoor oriented family, there were many years that the idea of firearms under the tree was a much looked forward to possibility.
I can't quite recall how old I was when I got my first gun (a BB gun by Daisy) but that pretty much settled the fact that every couple of years as our prowess and maturity with things that go bang increased there would be guns... A Benjamin pellet rifle, a single shot Savage 22, a 410 shotgun by Mossberg and more were all the stuff of the holidays and an ongoing education of guns and their associated responsibility...
It's interesting that I remember every gun I ever owned (though the same could be said for guitars) and I would be lying if I said I did not look back on those days of guns with some fondness... That said, those were different days and the gun culture of my youth is a far different animal than the gun culture of today and the changes are not pretty ones.
Which is not to say that we were unaware that guns had a dark and ugly side. It was a fact drummed into us constantly by my parents, various shooting instructors, and coaches... We knew where the line was and, looking back, it would seem a lot of the reason we had guns at all was simply to show us where that line was and how to stay on the right side of it. Not so much these days as it would seem current gun culture is all about embracing the other side of that line...
The last time I wandered into a gun shop, the first thing I noticed was that it simply felt wrong as if this was a place that no good would come from and folks drawn to such a place were not people you wanted to be around or come across after dark... Not unlike some of those broken perverted "things" Stephen King writes about.
Truth is, I have no idea why these thoughts are going through my head today other than I was once that kid in the ad and about that age I received a pump action Winchester Model 1890 and it made me really happy and I'm more than sad that those days are gone...
Listening to David Bowie
So it goes...
