Update.

I had dinner with my friend at her parents' house the other night... Her dad is the brother of 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.

Anyways, he was saying one time he went hunting with her ex-husband, and he came across some deer shit and he picked it up and rolled it between his fingers, and was like, "This is five hours old."

"Hmph, I'm never shaking hands with him again," a friend of my one friend's dad was like, who was also over for dinner.

Later, the one friend of my one friend's dad, who is on disability and runs the local food pantry, was saying that the worst thing is when people don't give an answer right away when you ask them how many people are in the house, since you can tell they're thinking up some inflated number and how to justify it, and you have to challenge them since the number of people going there is up and donations are down. There's been a lot of lying lately, he said.

Two songs.

I've heard bits and pieces of MIA's "Paper Planes" on the radio forever now, but somehow I never listened closely until the other day -- it was a nationwide Top 40 program, and Ryan Seacrest was like, "I just cannot get that song out of my head, folks!", too! -- and then I realized that it was the first gangster song I've ever liked. Usually I've made fun of white people like that, but what do you know, now I've turned out to be one.

I've also heard Beyonce's very self-serious "If I Were a Boy" lately, though it makes me always think of a Steve Martin line, "If I was a woman I'd sit around and play with my breasts all day."

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.

Was at the gunshop the other day.

My dad took me and my brother down to the local gunshop in the small town just south of me the other day, to show me all the work that's been being done on it since he started helping out the local garage owner who's starting it up to renovate it. There were security windows installed, as well as cinderblock walls ran through with metal struts, so no one can break in, and a walk-in vault with an electronic padkey where the really expensive guns are kept (though to me the pistols and rifles looked just like the ones elsewhere in the shop).

There was also a calendar of a perky blonde girl in a black bikini holding up a pistol as if about to fire.

Anyhow, the garage owner and the owner of the local convenience store/small grocery store were in there drinking beers, so my brother and my dad got some, though I just had coffee, since I had just woken up. At one point, though, my dad went to the fridge for some reason and found one of those sausage sticks I like there, so he brought it out for me and was like, "Hey [my name], snack on this!", and as soon as he did that, the owner of the local convenience store/small grocery store started being like, "So [my name], you like those? Do you like them mild or hot?" in that really excited way of his, since he was born in Greece and likes giving away things to people. I tried to stop him, but the next thing I know he called up his store across the street, said he was tipsy and didn't want to come over, and told the counter girl to bring over an eight-pound bag of snack-size sausage for me, which she did, entering the gun shop with it balanced up on one hand like a waitress carrying a full tray.

Later, me and him talked about the Bible some, too, and he said it's an endless and endlessly interesting area to study, and that everything in the future is in the books of Daniel and Revelation.

My brother at one point was also saying that all his neighbors up in the Upper Peninsula know that his dog likes to chew on deer legs, so whenever they get one, they drive by and throw the legs in the driveway for his dog, and that right now there's eight of them out there in various states of chewed-uppedness.

Test / Ethics.

So, my dad turned out to be a "Fieldmarshal" personality according to the Meyers-Briggs test. So, lately he's been goose-stepping around the house and then every once in a while stopping to take off his baseball cap and point at his bald head and shout out in a German accent, "Mein Herr!"

In winter when the roads are ice-y I always wonder about the ethics of driving through yellow lights -- yes, it's illegal, but is it better to try to stop, and then slide into oncoming traffic if you hit a patch of ice at the intersection?

Number / Reason for the Dream I had Two Nights Ago?

Today I went to the DMV to renew my license. When I took my number, it was "69", and the old lady at the desk had to announce it.

I think I might know why I had that one dream two nights ago - my mom had set out a DVD that was an interview with L. Ron Hubbard in my room that had come through the library donation bin and she had taken for me, and I saw it sitting out right before I went to sleep, and I got a chill like I always do whenever I see L. Ron Hubbard's face, or think about him.

Had another dream last night.

I dreamed I was in bed, and a demon was over to my left in my bedroom, the very same one in which I was actually sleeping, and he (the demon was male) held such power over me that I couldn't open my eyes or even summon up the power to get out of bed.

Addendum.

One of the books my one friend's mom showed me was this book by excommunicated Mormon heretic cum lesbian separatist Sonia Johnson, "Wildfire: Igniting the She/volution". It was written in the late 80s, and flipping through it with my one friend's sister we came across this chapter entitled something like "The AIDS Crisis: Men Making Their Problems More Important Than Women's Problems Once Again," where she argued that though AIDS was horrible, it was more a gay men's issue than a lesbians, and that you had all these grown men being matronized by everyone and though the situation was horrible, to infantilize their community was to cut short the necessary discussions and growth that could come out of it, and to postpone dealing with problems like domestic violence and discrimination against women once again.

"Wow," I was like, "She kind of has a point."

"I know, doesn't she!", my one friend's mom was like.

Saw my one friend's mom and sister the other night.

The other night I went and saw my one friend's mom and sister... The mom is the one 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.

At one point, we were going through her shelves looking for some old feminist books she had mentioned, and when I found one and went to take it down from a high shelf, she was like, "It'll be dusty. Blow it!", and then laughed at what she said.

She was also saying how she always found confirmations of patriarchy back when she was a court recorder. She said that it was a bitch to indicate interruptions in a transcript -- you'd have to put in hyphens and then the interruptor's name in brackets followed by their comments and then go back to the original comments -- and whenever there was an expert testifier, the males would never get interrupted, but like every woman who was an expert testifier would be interrupted on practically every comment, and she'd always be putting in the brackets.

She also said that she hated doing all the typing, and that one year when there was a bunch of CSC cases coming through the court -- Criminal Sexual Conduct cases, she explained further, all involving kids -- she was very glad when the judge would begin his sentencing remarks, since it would mean type up two more paragraphs and then stop typing for that trial.

Anyhow, she said that for like a month all the CSC cases were for girls, and then one day it was for a little boy, and when he began his sentencing remarks, she was glad since she would be going home soon, and then like four pages later and the judge was still going on and on about how the little boy was traumatized for the rest of his life and how hard it was for him to get up there and testify, she was thinking to herself that that was bullshit since the little boy hadn't faced worse CSC or circumstances different from any of the little girls who had been through the court that past month.

She also said that patriarchy is exemplified by the one time she saw "Deliverance" -- she was disturbed for days afterword by the male rape scene, whereas that never happens with female rape scenes in movies since it's old hat.

My mom on her generation.

My mom was saying that the other night that she thought Clinton squandered his presidency, and that Bush wasn't any good either, which pisses her off, since her generation had her chance and now it's gone, now the torch is passed on to Obama and those younger.



"Tells you a lot about the Baby Boomers, huh?", she was like.