My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

Me, my shiny shirt, and a gun

So, as I mentioned earlier in the week I have this Things to Do list, just things I want to experience before my lights go out. The list has kind of been on pause for awhile, a long awhile, but today I crossed something off. A small something, but something just the same. A fun something, at least. I went to experience a shooting range. My assistant, Lauren, it turns out her fellow is military, so after she mentioned that I wanted to visit a shooting range, the rest just fell into place. He recommended the range at Knight Shooting Sports, came with us, and brought a gorgeous little 9mm semi-automatic pistol. It was fun, I got to dress all in black, touch a gun for the very first time.

Now some pictures…

Me at the range

Lauren and her fellow

I think movies and tv capture guns pretty well, pretty much perfectly from an aesthetic perspective. We see all sorts of guns, handguns, giant cannon-esque shotguns, rifles that fire hundreds of rounds in just a few seconds. We see how to hold these guns, reload these guns, we hear all the little clicks these guns make when they’re taken apart and put back together. We know all these things without ever actually physically being anywhere near a gun. There is, however, one aspect of guns that I now realize movies and tv cannot capture, guns are LOUD, not 5.1 movie theater surround sound loud, or crank your tv to 99 loud, it’s an entirely different kind of loud. That tiny-looking 9mm pistol, I’ve never experienced anything like it. It really became clear when Lauren went all Reservoir Dogs, pulled the trigger bangbangbangbangbang, fuck aiming, let’s do this, motherfucker. Every time she puffed that trigger, my cheek bones vibrated, even hurt a little. It was intense and unnerving and completely exhilarating, all at once, and I was several feet back from all that power. I mean, I was at a shooting range with a 9mm pistol, with my ears protected, and it felt that palpable. War, for example, is like what I experienced, times ten thousand. The thought is mind-blowing.

So, that was my today. Something I’ve really wanted to do, done. If I kept writing, kept this sentence going, things would turn really melancholy. I’ll, just, not.

Okay, so, I enjoy guns, guns as thing. I like the sound a rifle makes when it’s cocked, I like the sound a revolver makes when one pulls the hammer back, I like muzzle-flash, I love the cracking sound machine-guns make… Aesthetically, I love everything about guns. I don’t like how guns are a thing people use to end other people’s lives, in a perfect world we’d only use guns to put down zombies.

Anyway, I have this Things to Do list that really isn’t getting done. I’m thirty, I’m old, the list needs to get moving again. To that end, one of my things is to fire a gun with an assistive technology switch. I have no idea how this would work. Would the switch connect directly to the gun? Would the gun be fired by way of software running on my MacBook Air that I’d access by way of my NeuroSwitch? I don’t know.

Do any of you know how I might fire a gun with a switch? I really don’t care what kind of gun I’m firing, I just want to fire at some target until said gun is empty. Can anybody help? I live in Tampa, I especially totally welcome local help.

A few days ago I saw a fantastic and hilarious movie called, Things to Do. It’s about a guy who, for reasons we learn later, leaves his spirit breaking office job in the big city to return to his parents’ small-town home, which is depressing in its own way. One day he’s watching some “teens gone wrong” day-time talk show and the host says that to be happy in life a person has to be organized and have goals, advice our protag closely follows. He creates a Things to Do list, a list of anything he wants to do, but has never done. Then he tackles the list with the idea that it will help him find his place. I’ve been seriously thinking about the same issues, so I’ve also begun a Things to Do list page, linked at the top right corner of the blog. My list is public and dynamic. I will add things as I think them up and cross them off as I do them. I’m making it public because of a post I read on Ecstatic Days by Catherynne M. Valente. She posted about writing a novel in 30 days, but the part that really struck me was about how it’s important to make goals public because it’s so much easier to quietly fail in private. People are welcome to join me in tackling the list.

Here’s the list so far:

Spend a day theater hopping at the movies

Go sailing

Have a home and a family of my own

Stay in a dive hotel in a city like New Orleans or New York

Go on a post-trache trip without my family

Ride a riverboat

Visit the Canadian side of Niagara Falls

Visit a New Orleans cemetery

Ride a Greyhound bus

Write a novella

Go to a shooting range

Fire a gun with a switch

Camp at the Grand Canyon

Spend an entire night on a beach with a woman I love

Sleep at a New England bed and breakfast