Greetings, friends. (XXXVIII)

Greetings, friends. Today I was driving around in Leto II, getting supplies before the big storm that snowed on Portland, and then really dumped on Minneapolis, comes tonight and drops a trifling 6-8” here. At least that is a trifle by New Hampshire standards. It is not a trifle to me when I have to shovel it.

Anyway I was driving around thinking how nice it is to have a motor vehicle that isn’t over 20 years old and has loose steering and makes strange creaking noises and is perpetually in need of some kind of maintenance. It feels… decadent. Almost like I don’t deserve it. Oh well. It’s a privilege I get to have and I hope to make it up to humanity in some other way.

Also, it makes me slightly anxious that I own a vehicle that I probably can’t, or at least, shouldn’t wrench on. I remember when I was a kid I would mess around in the garage, keeping my dad company on a weekend afternoon while he wrenched on one of his cars. I was fascinated by the dials and switches on what was probably an average automobile dashboard.

I promised myself that, when I owned a car, I would add lighted switches to the dashboard, and label them things like “Machine Gun” and “Rocket Launcher” and “Oil Slick”. The switches wouldn’t do anything besides light up. But I thought it would be cool. I’ve never actually done it. I wonder what happened to my childhood dreams. Maybe when I get home I will look into taking Muad’Dib’s dashboard apart. There’s a busted transmission indicator light under there anyway.

It’s not like I need another project, though. But I’m definitely not putting holes in the Tacoma’s dashboard until it, too, is at least a couple decades old. That’s the great thing about Toyotas, man. Change the oil and do the scheduled maintenance and see how many hundreds of thousands of miles you can put on them.

I am living another childhood dream, though. I had to go to the auto parts store last time I was here for screws to attach the front license plate. While I was there, I got a pair of fuzzy dice on a string. You know, the license plate says “FRESH” and there were dice in the mirror.

Well, if I put the on the rear view, they hang down over the cell phone mount. I guess that was a problem the Fresh Prince never encountered. I hung them on a coat hook over the rear window, where I can at least see them in the mirror.

So I stocked up on food, and bought water. I find it odd to buy drinking water. Drinking water seems to me like a thing that should just exist for everyone for free. That said, my mother’s well coughs up something that contains enough arsenic that it made her ill, and moreover in recent years has also taken on a powerful odor of swamp gas. So I’m buying drinking water.

Did I mention that we’re trying to sell the house?

I also bought 64 cans of lime flavored fizzy water. I fucking love citrus-flavored carbonated water. At home, I have one of those Sodastream thingies that I got like 15 years ago but it still works. I keep a bottle of key lime juice in the fridge, and voilà. I suggested to get one for Besha and she demurred, saying something about boycotting Israeli products because apartheid state.

What’s funny is if we were talking about South Africa in the 1980s, I would have instantly agreed. The Zionist inculcation runs real deep with me. Anyway I might do what Brent did and refit mine to use a high-pressure industrial CO₂ canister. Probably cheaper in the long run. Meanwhile, for Besha’s, and for my mom’s place, I buy it by the can. Some day I’ll build a foundry and melt down all the aluminum and cast things with it.

I also may have gone over to the local big-box electronics store today to buy a PlayStation 4 controller to connect to my laptop, so I can fly aircraft in Kerbal Space Program without jacking my right wrist even further. Or maybe not. You never know. Anything could happen.

Then I went to the shooting range. Wouldn’t you know the watch battery that powers the red-dot sight, and which everyone says should last like a year, is already kicked. Looks like someone forgot to power it all the way down.

The range has a sign-in process there that requires to certify each time that you have not been an in-patient in a mental health institution. No, not since the last time I was here.

On Wednesday afternoons, there is no one there aside from the staff and a few idle customers in the shop. I had the range almost entirely to myself, and it was, dare I say, almost peaceful.

Anyway, I put about 120 rounds through the Sig Sauer P320, and I gotta say that thing shoots real nice. Unfortunately, I am no great marksman. At 15 yards, I can put at least some of the rounds from a whole magazine into the critical zone at the center of a torso-sized paper target. Most of the rounds wound up on the paper, at least.

My main problem is that I keep pulling the gun down and to the left. I asked my dad about this. He reminded me that I’m right handed but my left eye is dominant, and suggested I try shooting left handed.

So I tried it, and now I shoot low and to the right. I need to learn to relax when I shoot. I tense up and this is the result. I should probably take a class or something. Practice makes perfect, or so they tell me.

The price of going to the range is I have to force myself to clean the firearm(s) as soon as I get home, no excuses. This is probably the most disciplined I am about anything in my life. Because it would be just like me to get distracted, forget to do it, and come back months later to find my expensive handgun pitted and covered in rust.

Anyway, I’m over word and time budget, as usually. I think when I sit down that I have nothing to say, and then a half hour goes by. I haven’t even gotten to all the topics I wanted to mention today, but tomorrow I’ll be snowed in, at least for the first part of the day. Yay, shoveling.

If you’re reading this, I send my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Stay warm tonight.