Shooting

Sunday, June 9, 2002 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

Did I tell you the Rarebit Fiend wears glasses? Not all the time, he wears 'em sometimes when he's working, and most times when he's driving. I told him yesterday that he looks like this fellow

when he wears his glasses. And wields his guns. The Fiend has a "Tomb Raider" BB gun and a "9mm Beretta" BB gun that he uses for distressing his furniture, for when he wants to make pockmarks. He uses an old Parker shotgun for similar but messier effects, when he wants more damage. The birdshot makes the furniture look like it's riddled with wormholes, a faker's trick, but the Fiend leaves the lead in the holes. He would like to sell the Parker, which would fetch a very nice price from gun collectors, but it was a gift from his father. His father is a passionate aficionado of Parker shotguns, but the Fiend is no gun-lover by any stretch of the imagination, and only regards his Parker as a tool that does an adequate job of shooting up furniture. Otherwise, it's just a piece of junk, sez the Fiend.

The Fiend comes from a gun-totin' family. His father and brothers love guns. They're not hunters (unless you think skeet is good eatin'), they're just gunmen. They're also idiots, which could be cause for worry, but fortunately they're harmless idiots who would never dream of shooting anything but a target made of clay or paper. God knows, they have their pretensions, but I think it's kinda sweet that they don't pretend to have aspirations to bloodletting. They won't even watch turkey shooting on the telly (unlike my mater, who otherwise is an Aquarian pacifist of the first water. I'm trying to understand the mater's attraction to televised turkey hunters. Maybe she likes the cute mating calls they make, or the resplendent camouflage they wear. Or the way they speak in urgent whispers, with bated breath, as they creep thru the underbrush.... Oh. Um. Hm. Well, yeah, I guess I can understand the attraction of breathless young men in the wild. I admit, I've uttered a few mating calls of my own, in that sort of situation.)

The peaceable males in the Fiend's family don't even watch football, they only watch bloodless sports like tennis and golf. I'm gonna teach the Fiend to love football. He sez he's ready to be initiated into the mysteries of the gridiron. He's already watched The Replacements twice, and he's watched Joe Montana and the Forty-Niners win the Super Bowl four times, courtesy of NFL Films. So he's made a good start. Meanwhile, since it's not football season, we've fallen into the habit of watching golf on Sundays. We lounge in bed, in various states of undress, cuddled and coiled around each other, drowsing before scenes of green pastoral splendor, the dulcet tones of Ken Venturi dripping honey into our ears. ('Tis a pity Ken retired last week.) Since we're already lying barely-clothed on the bed, we usually fiddle and fondle each other to a certain degree of hardness, but we're too languid to get off. And more often than not, Jer is with us on the bed, ostensibly to watch the golf, and his presence keeps us chaste. But we don't stop touching each other, and we gather Jer into our snuggling whenever he wants it. I can't claim that the way we touch Jer is non-sexual, but it's really not about carnal stimulation, it's really all about reassurance and brotherly affection. I know that sounds like a prevarication, but it isn't. Jer is a 17-year old male, so you know he's thinking about sex all the time, but he's given us every indication that he's not ready to enter into sexual relationships with other men. His family fell apart a few months ago, so I don't blame him if he wants to pause on the threshold of his adult life, before his boyhood slips away from him entirely. But at the same time, it's no surprise that he's hungry for tenderness, and he's curious, and he wants to explore within the limits he has set for himself. So we indulge him with a little petting, now and again.

But when Jer isn't with us, golf is still too sedate a sport to be the background to a sexual climax. For that, we need to flip channels to a NASCAR race, where the unrelenting whine and throaty growls of the engines, and the inescapable Good Ol' Boy drawls of the commentators, and the incessant clamor of the beer commercials, and the in-and-out frenzy of the pit, all combine to create an atmosphere of mindless maleness.

Damn, it's an aural aphrodisiac.

(I wouldn't call myself a big fan of NASCAR. I think Jeff Gordon is just as cute as he can be, but I only get really interested in a race when Mark Martin is in contention for the lead. And that's only because my brother once crewed for Mark.)

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

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