Did some Christmas day visits.

My one friend from high school invited me over to join her family at her grandparents' house for gift-opening and dinner, so I did that yesterday afternoon. They had a gag-gift exchange, and her cousin got a giant rubber nose that you suction cup up in a shower and gives out green oozing shampoo through a nostril when you squeeze it, and her uncle got a stuffed chihuahua that humps your leg if you turn a switch on its belly on.

Her aunts and her mom and her and me and her cousin also started to play this dice game, where everyone starts out with seventy-five cents in quarters and you roll as many dice as you have quarters, though no more than three, and the dice goes around in a circle, and for every six you put a quarter in the middle, every five you pass a quarter to the person on your left, and for every four you pass a quarter to the person on your right, though we had a hard time remembering whether 4 or 5 was left or right, though we finally remembered that "right" has 5 letters and "left" has 4, and you do the opposite of that.

"Imagine doing this when you're drinking," her one aunt who works at the funeral home said.

Later, her other aunt called my friend a whore since she was doing so well, then took the dice from her and promptly rolled a 4.

"Where does that go again?", she was like, fingering a quarter.

"Four to the whore," I was like, and everyone got the giggles.

Later, on the way home, I stopped by to see my one friend's sister and my one friend's mom who's a kind of New-Age-y 2nd wave feminist who sweeps around the house wearing a muu-muu all the time and smokes a lot, and exudes this very comforting vibe, though my one friend's sister was zonked out on the coach from being tired out even though her two kids were up still playing with their toys.

Anyhow, me and her mom talked about the calendars I saw at the gunshop, and she was saying she always found that sex and violence were linked on some primal level.

From that, she talked some about her ex-husband who used to love to hunt, and how on Christmas he bought her a rifle and taught her to shoot, and the first deer season they went hunting, they shot a few rounds at a target at one of his friend's properties, and when she shot her round off and she and her ex-husband went to go check the target, right away he was like, "Nice shot, [her name], that wasn't anywhere near the deer," but he hadn't even looked at the target, and in the little black circle behind the deer's shoulder there were her bullets, all a hair's breadth apart.

Later, when they walked out to the blind, he said she could shoot first at anything but a buck, and when they were waiting there, after a couple hours this beautiful buck with a huge rack steps out and is a hundred feet away standing just like the target, and her ex-husband got his new rifle ready -- he was always buying new equipment and sights, she was saying -- and click, nothing happened, and he tried again and click, nothing happened, and then the buck wandered off and like five minutes later he heard a shot from over by the blind from where his father was, so they ran over there...

When they got there, it turned out that his dad had shot it, and the buck was lying on the ground still breathing, and she wanted them to finish it off, but they tried to convince her that it wasn't breathing since they didn't want to shoot it in the head, since her ex-husband's dad wanted to mount it. So, she said, they'd alternately be like, "No, it wasn't breathing," when she'd point out its chest intermittently heaving, and sometimes like, "But it's not in any pain," to say anything to convince her.

But, her ex-husband was so pissed that he didn't get the buck, that he went back to the blind to hunt more, and left her and his dad to field-dress the deer and drag it back a a few miles to the car, and the thing turned out to be 150lbs, and her dad had had a heart attack not half a year earlier.

"Looking back, I realize how wrong it all was," she was like, and said that you would think that he had killed so many bucks in his life, he would have given the first shot to her no matter what came in front of the bait pile in front of the blind.