don of all trades

The Original Admiral…i barely knew thee…

Posted on December 7, 2012 by donofalltrades

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, 2012. Aside from contemplating its historical significance, Pearl Harbor Day reminds me of two things, (1) that it’s my wife’s birthday and (2) of the wife’s, no, of our Grandpa Bud. I’m not really sure why it reminds me of Bud, but it does. He watched movies about it on tv a lot, maybe that’s my only link.

Admiral “Bud” Crone with his buddy C Admiral Re!

I’ve been blessed throughout my life and haven’t missed out on much, so I don’t have many regrets, but I certainly have some. One of those regrets is that I never really engaged Admiral “Bud” Crone in anything other than small talk. Like many from his generation (I am of the Tom Brokaw belief that Bud’s was the Greatest Generation, in spite of very good arguments to the contrary) he was tight lipped about things that related to himself. Old men and woman (in their 80s and 90s now) are, for the most part, much more modest than we are today. My Great Uncle Art parachuted out of planes during WW2 and never said a word about it! Kids today zipline in the woods for half an hour and don’t shut up about how awesome it was. Zipline in a strange country with people who don’t know you but still want to kill you aiming guns at your ass and then let us know how awesome it was.

Bud was the same way. I dont’ know if he’d have ever opened up to me or not, but I sure would have loved to had the chance to talk to him about some things, some of which I never knew until he was buried last year. I saw some of his life’s momentos and accomplishments posted as an afterthought on a bulletin board at his wake and was very impressed at the man I had already missed.

Bud was in the military, and you’d always have known that because he proudly wore his Navy cap with pins everywhere he went. I still see those men out and about, though their numbers are dwindling, proudly wearing the hat that represents which ship they were assigned to during certain wars. Those men came from all parts of the country and, without questioning why their lives were being disrupted, banded together to win a most important war, not only for the USA, but for the entire world. They and their sisters helped pull this country out of a depression and into a time where a man with some work ethic could flourish in the middle class and live a very satisfying life.

Bud made a living working on the trains, back when trains were relevant to this country’s economic growth and dominance. I imagine he saw some pretty hilarious things while riding that train and could probably have written a book about it. There was a newspaper article at his wake about a time he got off the train to save two black kids who were drowning in a nearby lake. We’ve talked about police incidents before and crazy situations, but he never mentioned to me that he was a genuine hero!

Admiral “Bud” Crone with his little namesake…

He was also a great sportsman. He bowled at least one 300 game that I’m aware of. I’m no Arnold Palmer, but when I moved back to STL from Texas, I had a decent golf game going. Once, Bud let me tag along with him and a couple of his friends to play a round that I’ll never forget. That bastard (sorry Bud, I’m still a sore loser) beat me HANDILY! Not even close and he was using persimmon woods that he probably had since the 60s! I was 25 and he was nearly 70! What he lacked in power, he made up for in accuracy and smarts. It was a course he had played many times before, and I never had, but I have no doubt that he’d have beaten me no matter where we played. He was just one of those guys who was a winner when he competed.

I’ve seen Bud drink once, literally one beer in the 16 or so years that I had the pleasure of knowing him. It was after that round of golf and I had a hunch that he and his buddies regularly hit this watering hole after a round. He orderd a Michelob and I had the same. Per his wishes, I never told his wife that he had that single beer that day…lol, I assume Jean won’t read this Bud, so your secret is still safe.

Finally, he was invited to tryout for the St. Louis Browns way back in his youth. He was, by all accounts (none from him, of course) a fine ballplayer. There was a letter from the organization at Bud’s funeral inviting him to come tryout. It was very cool and something I’d have really enjoyed hearing about.

Alas, it never happened. With the kids and work and all the other excuses, I never made the time to sit down and talk with Bud about Bud. My own grandpas both died when I was fairly young. My dad’s dad (who also drew interest from the Browns) may have lived long enough to see me turn 1, but if he did, not much longer after that. I don’t remember him at all. My mom’s dad (St. Louis Soccer Hall of Famer) died when I was in the fourth grade. I remember both my parents picked me up from school, which was unusual, on the day I learned he died (oh the silly things we remember). I do at least have memories of him at family get togethers and waking up early with him to eat bacon and eggs before he went off to the firehouse for work. Plus, of course, visiting him at the firehouse and sitting in the trucks. Those were good times.

Bud was my most recent and last grandpa and I’ll always remember him as though we shared the same blood. He had a sharp mind up until the day he died. He could tell you anybody’s birthday before he even blinked. He also had a vice grip handshake that he administered with no effort. He wasn’t squeezing hard or showing off or anything, he just had one of those grips that made you take notice, even in his 80s. Years of hard work made them like that. My wife always tells me I have soft, pretty hands…thanks, dear, why don’t you kick me in my vagina while you’re at it! Oh, crap, almost made it through an entire post without using profanity or referring to a sexual body part!! Next time!

Anyway, we all know people a little bit, but could learn so much more by just talking to them. If you’re lucky enough to have a grandpa, go sit down over a beer or coffee with him and chat him up. At this point, he’ll probably think you’re after his money when he dies, but if you can get him past that, you may learn something you never knew about him before!

God bless you Bud and thank you for letting me be a part of your family!

Posted in Family, The not meant to be funny stuff | Tagged admiral, bud, family, grandpas, veterans | 2 Comments

Honkey Bus

Posted on December 5, 2012 by donofalltrades

On days when I have nothing going on after work, like more work, I try to get up early and take the Metro Bus to and from downtown. The 410 Eureka Express is my ride, and it requires only that I make a two mile trip to the park and ride in time to catch the bus. There are no transfers required and the bus drops me off right across the street from work.

Driving is one of the few things in life that really gets my blood boiling. I’m not sure why, and I have no control over it. I’ve tried to remain calm while driving, but I can’t seem to travel even short distances without having to call somebody a stupid f’ing bitch or a dickhole. If you cut me off and can read my lips in your mirror, I’m sorry. I don’t mean it, but you’re an asshole. Shame on you for making me say that in front of the boys! Stupidity and ignorance are two traits that I abhor in people, and driving seems to bring those qualities to the forefront in otherwise tolerable human beings.

So, taking the bus saves me much aggravation and stress by letting the bus driver deal with all the idiot commuters on I-44. It also saves wear and tear on my 10 year old car as well as some gas money which easily converts to beer money.

There are plenty of other people riding the bus as well, of course. In fact, as gas has gone up in price, I’ve noticed more and more different people riding the bus pretty regularly.

Of the 40 or so people who ride this bus everyday, nearly 100% seem to be white folk!

Maybe because I haven’t ridden a Metro Bus regularly since I was in high school jumping on the southbound Kingshighway bus to grandma’s house, this observation escaped me as being unusual. It took an astute black gentleman to point it out to me.

This observant fellow got on the bus a couple of weeks ago at the Grand Metrolink Station. He was quite a sight in his yellow, velour sweat suit with matching yellow straight brimmed hat and…wait, really? Yes! His shoes were yellow too! I hope to be as bold when I’m in my 50s as this guy clearly was!

Anyway, in spite of the fact that there were no less than 10 empty seats, he chose to stand with his ass in some old woman’s horrified looking face. Because I’m nicer in person than I otherwise appear, and I always figure God gives you credit points for trying to be nice, I invited him to sit next to me…”no sense in standing when you can sit,” I said. He looked at me like I had two heads, but sat down next to me anyway.

As usual with good intentions, I immediately regretted it because the dude smelled like ass (this explains the old woman’s horrified face!). Ass with feet protruding from it! I have a terrible sense of smell, so for me to recognize funk, it’s pretty funky!

After a few seconds of looking around, he turned to me and said, “What is this bus doing?”

Me: “huh?”

Him: “What is this bus doing? There are a lot of honkeys on this bus. This a honkey bus?”

Me inside voice: “(laughing my fucking ass off!!!) Holy crap, did he just say honkey bus?!!”

Me outside voice again: “Yup, honkeys gotta work too, I guess.”

Him: “Mmmm hmmm, you right I guess.”

“Hey, let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya!”

Then he proceeded to put his fist up and we fist bumped each other like manly men who had just made some kickass discovery or something.

My new friend told me to take care and got off the bus after riding about 200 yards (lots of people do this and it drives me nuts!) and I was left to ponder my existence among the others on the honkey bus.

There was a goth looking woman studying her paperback Star Wars book as though she had a test on it later in the day. I’ve seen her many times before and she’s always thumbing intently through that same Star Wars book. WTF?!

Others were joyfully reading their Nooks or Kindles or listening to their country music on their iPhones. I know it’s country because I can hear the music the guy behind me is listening to as clear as can be. Uh, sir, I don’t think you have the buds plugged all the way in to the phone!!!

This woman didn’t even bother using ear buds:

I mean seriously, who does that? She’s watching a video about how to knit or some such crap on her phone with the volume up as high as it will go! Don’t worry about everyone else around you…I hate you lady!

The conversation on the bus is no better. Apparently, being unable to speak in low tones is a prerequisite for talking on the bus. Either that or people think that everyone else on the bus is interested in their lives because we’re all a happy bus riding family. Either way, it’s infuriating, especially on the morning commute.

Were it ever a conversation about some guy’s misadventure to a strip club or something, it might be worth having to listen to, but it’s almost always Joe Accountant (I know he’s an accountant because he talks loudly about it often) discussing his son’s behavioral problems with some accommodating woman or the two scientists discussing peptides or polypeptides or hypothermic centrifugal something or other or some random person discussing something he or she knows nothing about. Envision my wife, who couldn’t tell you who Tony Romo was for $3 million, talking loudly about why she thinks the Dallas Cowboys still have a chance to make the playoffs…that’s a 410 Eureka Express bus conversation. You know, the honkey bus.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bus, commute, honkey, transportation | 21 Comments

Here’s your baby….good luck!

Posted on November 28, 2012 by donofalltrades

You can’t please everybody ,so 2 out of 3 ain’t bad!

It’s funny what the brain remembers, especially as we get older. I often struggle to remember why I walked into a room or where I put my keys, but there are still some memories from years ago that I can visualize like they happened yesterday. One of those moments was when we brought our first-born home from the hospital back in 2003.

I remember a couple of nursing students tending to the baby right after she was born because it sort of annoyed me that my first born was being handled by rookies. I know they have to learn somehow, but find a second or third born to practice on! She had swallowed some fluid that you’re not supposed to or something like that on her way out of the birthing chamber. Her own feces maybe? I’m not sure, but it was disgusting sounding and it delayed our getting to see her and hold her, so it was an unexpected aggravation.

I remember my brother, Dario, bringing a good-sized cooler of Natural Light to the room and not being razzed by the nurses on the floor about drinking like a bunch of white trash hoosiers in the room while my wife and newborn adjusted to all the newness a first-born brings. Just take the empties with you so they don’t stink up the room! That was the only rule and I thought it was fair enough.

I remember many more subtle details nearly ten years later, such as all of her birth numbers and a couple of great nurses who I meant to write nice letters about, but never did (sorry nurse Kimberly).

I also remember that the hospital staff was very demanding about making sure we had a car seat properly installed in our vehicle before they’d let us take the baby home. I had taken the car to a fire station because apparently, firemen are car seat installation experts? Even though we lived in the City, I took the car to a suburban fire station in Mehlville because the City firemen actually get a lot of calls, whereas the Mehlville folks seemingly have more free time to help soccer moms and Donnie Res with car seat issues. Anyway, a couple of them were kind enough to wake up and check the seat for me. I was fairly confident that installing a car seat wasn’t that difficult, and that I’d done a fine job, but to appease the wife, I let the firemen check it out.

It was obviously loosely strapped in as they shook the crap out of it and asked me if I let a retarded monkey install the seat. They said it couldn’t possibly be more unsafely installed. Geez, it’s not like I had it upside down! I laughed and assured them I knew no retarded monkeys and proceeded to lie that my third trimester pregnant wife installed the seat incorrectly and that I’d deal with her when I got home!

I was certain the seat was fine, and that a little jiggling was to be expected, but I’ll be darned if a 300 plus pound firefighter didn’t nestle himself in that seat while another one pulled the crap out of my seatbelt and buckled it in so that the seat wouldn’t budge an inch. It was impressive and I couldn’t wait to lie to a nurse at the hospital that I had installed the seat myself!

As promised, a nurse pushed my wife and baby to the exit in a wheelchair (why does everyone have to leave in a wheelchair?) and demanded that I pull the car up to the door so she could see the car seat. Apparently, the immovable car seat did not impress the nurse as much as it did me because she made me unbuckle it so that she could cram some colorful swim noodle contraptions under the seat so the baby wouldn’t be uneven or some such nonsense.

After more inspection and delaying our eagerly awaited departure another 15 minutes, the nurse had appeased herself that the baby wouldn’t somehow escape her seat and bounce out the window of my moving vehicle and finally told us we could go. Really? Who made you the we’re ok to go home with our baby boss? What if we hadn’t brought a car seat with us? Do they have a stash of $200 car seats that they’d have installed for us? Do they keep the baby indefinitely? In hindsight, the whole thing seems ridiculous and semi-aggravating. However ridiculous, that nurse may have been the last person with any sense who has tried to make sure that we were doing what we were supposed to be doing with respect to raising our kids correctly.

After the nurse went back inside, I remember sitting in the Xterra (which I had to sell my F150 to purchase since, apparently, a non-extended cab pickup wasn’t family friendly) and asking the wife, “now what do we do?” The moment was surreal…we had this new person in the backseat of our car (probably wondering herself what the fuck was going on) and the three of us needed some guidance! We sat in silence for a bit until I finally made a command decision. Like any responsible new parents, we took our 3 day old baby to Rich and Charlies for lunch because we were starving! It wasn’t totally irresponsible in that it was on the way home anyway, and it was the end of July, so it’s not like we brought her there during the height of cold and flu season.

I guess that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, because before I had kids I worked at Grant’s Farm during the summers of my college years. I used to think people who brought their week old babies into the Bauernhof area during late July and August, where it was often well over 100 degrees and filled with beer swilling sweathogs eager to trample each other to be first in the free beer sample line, were total idiots. Look at my new baby! Uh, ma’am, I’m no doctor or parent but that doesn’t look like a healthy shade of red for a tiny baby and her crying indicates to me that she’s not having as much fun as you and your fat-assed boyfriend Cletus are. But, to each their own I guess.

Part of the problem is that there’s no instruction manual on how to raise a child properly, so we’re stuck with our instincts and what we’ve learned up to that point in life to figure it out. This is why stupid people mostly raise stupid children. Stupid is all they know to pass on to the next generation. Stupid people seem to breed with other stupid people instead of finding smarter people so the chain of stupidity continues on and on.

I was 30 when Addi was born and the wife and I were both college educated, but we still find it amazing at how difficult this child rearing is. It’s physically and mentally draining sometimes. There is no one size fits all for kids and we’ve learned in our little family that boys are different from girls, and our two boys are completely different from each other. It’s total insanity and nobody has any correct answers as to how to do it right.

Anybody can raise a child, right?

The very hospital that made sure I purchased a $200 car seat and that it was properly installed could have, at the very least, given me a pamphlet with instructions on what to do in certain situations and how to best not raise a future sociopath. When can they eat M&M’s? Am I not supposed to put Frank’s Red Hot on their tongues to see how they like it? Can my 1 month old have Kool-Aid? How long can the baby lay next to me while I drink cocktails in the hot Florida sun on the beach? There are all sorts of future unanswered questions that come home with these kids, and you have nothing but your own collection of what passes as common sense and the internet to help get you through it.

I suppose, if you didn’t mind doing a half-assed job of raising kids, that it’d be ok to just wing it and hope it doesn’t affect your life too much. That seems to be how trashy people do it, but that’s risky and the wife insists on some effort being made at raising decent human beings.

If you don’t mind one day being the parent of a malcontent who climbs a bell tower with a 12 pack and an assault rifle to finally address life’s little ass-rammings, which he’ll blame on you, then parenting may not be that difficult. If you could give two shits whether or not your kids grow up to have a better life than you, or at least have the same opportunities as you because you’d rather watch Oprah and drink Milwaukee’s Best in your underpants instead of help your kids with homework, then it might be doable with very little stress.

Unfortunately, the work of parents who’d like to see their kids grow up to be productive members of society is a little bit more difficult. Even though I’m not above drinking beer in my underpants, I like to believe that the wife and I fall into this latter category of parents. I know my wife does all she can to see that it happens. I assume she read a lot of literature about babies while she was pregnant and on maternity leave, because she knew and still knows lots of things that I’d have never considered. Were it up to me alone, these kids would have missed out on lots of things in life already, like vaccinations and preschool.

The wife found a pediatrician and she’s gotten the first two into school on time and she makes sure they all brush their teeth and knew when they could eat regular food and all this crazy stuff that I would no doubt have bumbled by myself. Once they get past their first year, which is where we are with all three, you can sort of treat them like regular people so it’s nice. Aside from the little man, who insists on yelling and screaming and babbling, but for a couple of coherent words, it’s nice to be able to have conversations with the kids.

It’ll be interesting to see how they all turn out. How three kids, from the same two parents, raised in the same environment, can all turn out so differently, is stupefying to me. It’d be boring were they all the same I guess, and I’m glad for their unique differences, both good and bad.

Posted in Parenting, Uncategorized | Tagged breeding, car seats, Parenting | 4 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving…Where’s the Tylenol?

Posted on November 27, 2012 by donofalltrades

The Thanksgiving week post was delayed by the day after hangover…

In spite of my words and actions and oftentimes my thoughts, I really do love my extended family and friends and mostly enjoy having them over to the house, in part because I like to cook for them while I drink lots of beer.

During a normal party or dinner, I can just make whatever I want and nobody cares. If I’m in the mood for steak, then that’s what we’re having. If I feel like making chili, then it’s a done deal. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. People expect there to be certain things, cooked a certain way and everyone’s a critic. One year we made garlic mashed potatoes instead of regular mashed potatoes and you’d have thought we added dog shit and toenails to the potatoes the way my mother carried on. She’s resistant to change, and apparently what goes into the mashed potatoes is not exempt from that no change policy!

Much of my family lives in the City of St. Louis itself, while my little crew lives in a suburb about 30 miles outside of downtown STL. Although I commute it every work day, as do many, many others, there is much griping amongst my family members about having to drive so far for Thanksgiving. I assume the griping about the distance travelled is simply good-natured ribbing though as I don’t recall anybody else jumping up and volunteering to host Thanksgiving at their place.

There’s a good reason that nobody else volunteers. I remember as a kid, my great Aunt Marilyn used to host it. We kids used to run around her house (I recall it being much colder on Thanksgiving back then so we stayed inside a lot) and touch all her crap. Then my parents got stuck with the day, probably at my mom’s insistence because she’s the oldest of her 7 siblings and very demanding that some sort of holiday tradition be maintained (again, resisting change).

For whatever reason, the day has become ours to host. Admittedly, I’m to blame as I volunteered to do it last year for selfish reasons. It was the first Thanksgiving with three (count ’em, fuckin’ 3!) kids, so it was easier to just stay home rather than pack them up and drag them wherever. There were other reasons too, but that’s for another day.

With a little help, the holidays are a breeze…

I really don’t mind doing it, but I hadn’t planned on this becoming a tradition because, quite frankly, it’s a pain in the ass. But, like I said, it was a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving and nobody had said anything about it. Had I not “volunteered”, I’m quite sure that two days before Thanksgiving somebody *TT* would have said “uh, so you’re hosting Thanksgiving in two days, right?” That’s not nearly enough time to prep the dinner or my brain to deal with the day.

For reasons I haven’t quite figured out, I enjoy watching the Foodnetwork. I don’t feel as though that makes me queer any more than the fact that I like Bud Light Lime. In fact, most of the people cooking and hosting shows on that channel seem to be men. Anyway, the Thanksgiving episodes recently were especially fun to watch because they’re completely fucked up and devoid of reality.

As an example, there is a woman who calls herself the Pioneer Woman. She lives on what I assume is a 100,000 acre ranch property with at least two gigantic houses each having no less than two ovens that looked like they’ve never been used before and there was enough refrigerator space to hold thirty Thanksgiving meals in their entirety. She cooked her meal alone in her kitchen and had plenty of space to do everything and then all of her family arrived at the same time, just as the meal was ready to eat, each with a dish in tow and a good time was had by all!

Well, that’s not how we roll!

To start with, we can count on my parents and my wife’s parents to show up for sure. After that, there could be anywhere from a couple more to ninety more people than that showing up for dinner. Nobody calls to say “hey, asshole, thanks for hosting Thanksgiving, we’ll be there to eat or we’ll be there later after you’ve already eaten, but we’ll expect to eat again on your leftovers…” Nice. Strike that, I did have one cousin who told me they wouldn’t be there for dinner but might come by later. My mom has 7 brothers and sisters and there are many cousins (19+ at last count) so it’d be nice to ballpark who’s coming or not.

We just sort of guess how much food we need to make and wing it. We got lucky this year because the turkey I smoked came out ok. Had it failed (which was entirely possible) we’d have been hurting for poultry.

Dinner is so anti-climatic. It reminds me of our wedding day. All the money and worry and planning and money and stress and money and then, POOF! It’s over and you’re left wondering what the heck just happened?!! The fun starts after dinner anyway.

By the time dinner is over, I’m already about 23 beers into the holiday (I know, I paced myself this year). There was some Apples to Apples played (poorly I might add since “Chunky” and Demi Moore is a terrible match) and somebody brought a bottle of eggnog with bourbon in it. Did you know they sell that? Should it have been refrigerated? It was fairly awful and made even more awful by adding some cheap whiskey to each shot and then just doing shots of the cheap whiskey once the egg nog crap was gone. Just like the Pilgrims!

I’m not sure who brought the egg nog, but I know my parents brought several bottles of liquor, some of which I think I opened at their house 20 years ago as a teenager. I guess liquor doesn’t go bad, but the hurt the next day was just nasty and made worse by the fact that we didn’t have any Tylenol, Aleve, Anacin…nothing!!! Not even any Gatorade, so I was left to man up and let the pain run its course while the children, (count ’em again, fuckin’ 3!) ran around the house oblivious to what it’s like to have drank (drunk?) more rancid liquor and beer than any man should at one gathering that isn’t hosted in a frat house.

All in all, it was a good time.

In the spirit of the holidays, I’ve deleted the individual grievances with particular persons that I had all typed up (and was really the only reason to read this post) because that’s better left for in-person Christmas Day fun, which will NOT be at my house!!!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged family, hangover, holidays, thanksgiving | 8 Comments

Hunting…uh, yeah.

Posted on November 14, 2012 by donofalltrades

November is the opening of rifle season or something like that here in Missouri. As such, several of my friends have already bagged their trophy buck, or the first tiny deer they saw at least, and posted pictures of their haul on Facebook. It certainly doesn’t offend me to see white-tailed deer mothers and babies strapped to the back of four-wheel, souped up golf cart, motorcycle looking contraptions that probably cost $10,000, but it does make me chuckle.

The photos remind me of comedian Ron White’s bit about his cousin Ray who apparently thought killing a deer was magic in the forest. You remember the one; Ron was unimpressed with cousin Ray and mentioned that he, Ron, had once killed a deer with a van going 55 miles an hour with the headlights on and the fuckin’ horn bloooowin’! Ooh, that’s an elusive little creature! Ha, pretty funny stuff! I empathize with Ron White, as driving westbound on I-44 in my neck of the woods can sometimes be a hairy proposition come deer season. For about a 10 mile stretch of travel, it’s a goddam slaughterhouse floor of deer carcasses and bloody entrails all along the highway. It’s every other day, if not everyday, that a deer gets obliterated by a motorist.

I see them a lot, especially late at night when I’m coming home from work. Their beady, glowing eyes on the side of the highway just watching and waiting. “Stay there you stupid fuck; I see you!!”, I think to myself as I warily drive past in the fast lane, farthest from the woods. I’ve been lucky thus far. I’ve not had the misfortune of whacking one with my car. I think they sense when a driver sees them and prefer to run all kamikaze in front of a completely oblivious passerby instead of someone who’s seen them and might be able to avoid the collision. They can’t possibly be as stupid as cliff jumping lemmings, and that makes me wonder if they’re running into traffic on purpose. The highway has been there for all of their lives and it’s not like they’re running onto the highway because wild dogs or lions are chasing them. I imagine that deer season is very stressful for deer and in some form or other, older deer must be able to communicate to younger deer just what is going on. “Hey, little man, you see these empty camouflage and orange Busch Beer cans? The men who drank these are fixin’ to find us and put a bullet in our heads to make sausage out of us!” Yikes! Deer don’t have access to tall buildings, and they have no trigger finger to speak of to blow their own brains out, so running in front of a fast-moving truck isn’t a terrible option for a suicidal deer.

Back to hunters. I don’t hunt. I don’t hunt for the same reason I don’t do home improvement projects around my house, because my dad never showed me how to do either. His dad never introduced him to hunting and there’s a whole line of non hunting DOAT men before him I’m sure. Presumably, grandpa didn’t hunt because when he came over on the boat from Italy there were markets selling meat in his neighborhood that was just delicious, and there was no need to go hunting. I would guess that most hunters are into it because

: Hunting is easier than you might think…

their own paw dun took em out to hunt when they was yungins. Well, mine wasn’t into it and I never did get myself into it. I did, however, enjoy going to JCPenney with my mom. Sometimes she would buy me army style camouflage clothes. Playing army in those clothes was sweet, and essentially, that’s some of what hunting offers. Hunting also seems to offer many other things that I enjoy as well. I like to be outside, especially around a fire. If there’s outdoor drinking and outside peeing involved, even better! Plus, few hunters bring their wife and kids with them, so there is that as well! And it’s all done while wearing silly camouflage outfits, just like when I was a kid.

At this point in my life though, I mostly don’t hunt because I’m fairly certain that if I asked my wife if I could go spend a few hundred dollars on some hunting gear and leave her and the three kids for a week or so that she’d clasp my balls in her hand and start squeezing before I got the word please out of my mouth and threaten to crush them completely, if I finished the very sentence I had started.

Though I don’t hunt, I do enjoy hearing the stories about the hunt from these mighty suburban hunters. I listen intently, mouth agape and can only imagine myself having to sit quietly in a deer stand that I purchased from Cabella’s for many hours in my warm, electric socks, waiting with a thermos of hot coffee and an 18 pack of beer for a deer to approach the area around my tree that’s been baited with feed for months prior, until the moment I could line them up in my uber telescopic lens equipped rifle and blow its freakin’ head off! They often say it’s very challenging to be out there hunting deer, it takes patience and skill.

Good luck outwitting this mensa qualified creature!

Really, Cletus? Look, I enjoy deer sausage and I have no problem with hunting or hunters, other than to hear them talk about what a challenging, skill requiring thrill it is to hunt deer. While I’m sure it’s thrilling to get out of the house, I’ve almost fucking literally bumped into deer while jogging on trails. I’m lucky to run a mile in under 11 minutes, so don’t tell me hunting is a real challenge. You’re not an 1700’s Indian, hunting to survive. There are deer in people’s’ yards in parts of suburbia that could literally be shot through a bathroom window while a man was taking a shit on his toilet. There are almost no other predators, so the deer are super abundant and everywhere! You aren’t hunting an elusive, endangered creature for God’s sake. They’re huge compared to other animals indigenous to this area. It’d be almost as difficult for me to go domestic dog hunting in my suburban neighborhood as it is to hunt for deer with a rifle in Missouri. If you get through rifle season in Missouri without having shot and killed a deer, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are a failure as a man and you should have your very own balls removed and hung from the bumper of your overpriced pickup truck.

Aside from the fact that deer are everywhere, there is very little work that goes into hunting anymore. Once the already manufactured deer stand is in place, the most difficult part of hunting is making sure you don’t drink so much beer that you fall out of the stand and break your neck. Otherwise, what’s it entail? Sitting in a tree and waiting for a deer to come by? If you jumped from the stand and plunged a knife into the beast’s throat and wrestled it to the ground, I’d be impressed with that. Hell, if you shot it with a bow and arrow, I’d be impressed, even with a five-hundred dollar compound bow or whatever they’re called. But to shoot a deer from a stand with a rifle equipped with a kickass scope isn’t as challenging and skillful as I think many hunters want us to believe.

Even the weather has pussified deer hunting. With global warming keeping freezing temperatures at bay these days, who wouldn’t want to sit outside with their own thoughts for a few days in November before the hustle and bustle of the holidays is upon us? And once you do kill the deer, who is skinning and taking the meat off that bad boy? What, you’re taking it to a butcher and paying to have it done? What the fuck is that?? The least you could do after killing this animal is have to drag or carry it like a man back to a camp, hang it by its hind legs and skin that prick yourself! But today’s hunter doesn’t even do the dragging or carrying. The deer is strapped to the aforementioned four-wheel, golf cart looking device and driven wherever, with no effort, to be relieved of its meat.

So, while I love me some deer sausage and appreciate that hunters are keeping the deer population in check, you’ll pardon me if I chuckle a little bit when you tell your wife what a challenge it was and how manly you are to be able to put meat on her table.

She had your kids alone all week while you were out in the woods. I’m pretty sure her week was the challenging one.