He looked me square in the eye, across a sweaty beer—turning piss warm on this hot July morning—Inhaling the filterless Camel I watched it burn down damn-near an inch on one drag. The conversation is lost for a moment as I watched, preoccupied, with the ash about to fall and land on his dirty dungarees. 

“It’s harder now to answer as a man, but it was hard to answer as a boy, too, I reckon.“ He took the unfiltered butt from his mouth and licked his lips, dry and burned from the unrelenting sun. “As a boy all I feared was snakes and hay and my old man’s belt. Ain’t so simple now is it?”

I stare across the shaky, old table and say, “Hayin’, ain’t nothing harder than hayin’“

“War is harder than hayin’ boy. Ain’t nothin’ harder on a man’s soul than killin’ another man. Other than that I’d agree with you, hayin’ is hard as fuck.“

He pours back the piss warm beer and says, “Trouble is today too few men know the reality of war or hayin’. Everybody is either sellin’ or buyin’, Ain’t nobody breaking a sweat, or smellin’ the blood of another man, or that burning pain from a copperhead bite when them son’s-of-bitches hide in the wet hay.”

My Mustang is lowered three inches and for four summers I’ve been trying to get the exhaust right.

If it hangs down even 3/8” of an inch it scrapes in driveways and speedbumps. If I get it up too tight it rattles.

Saturday morning I took to fabricating. By Saturday afternoon I had a good solid fix in place, finally. Some combination of thick tire rubber, exhaust clamps and 1/8” perforated sheet metal.

My only bitch of the entire day was that can be no reason whatsoever for 1/2” bolt heads and 13mm bolt heads to exist on the same car, or in the same universe for that matter.

It was a good day spent with dirty hands and a minimal amount of knuckle blood.

It was a good day away from my phone and news, spent under my car and in my shed at the vice.

Then about 4pm, I came inside to wash up. I heard about El Paso and I worried about my daughter and her girls, not because they are in El Paso, but because I love them and it makes me sick this is the world they got.

I went to bed Saturday night annoyed at myself for being so shallow. Nineteen people we dead in Texas, yet I was happy about my exhaust fix. I figured you need to find peace and happiness where you can, in America 2019…

Then I woke up Sunday morning.

I try to be a moderate in most things. I’ve supported my friends and family who are gun enthusiasts—and not insane white nationalists—but that shit is wearing thin.

I don’t want the government to take away the guns of my sportsman friends any more than I want the government to ban bicycles and Mustangs.

But, it’s going to get to a point where you sportsman’s refusal to stand up and speak out about anything other than YOUR goddamn rights, your refusals to demand some solution from within is going to result in your loss.

I’ve been saying this for years. There is an onus on you. Please, now, for your own sake and those of us who don’t want to get killed for simply walking outside, start demanding some sanity.

You are the NRA, I truly believe many of you are still the NRA I knew as a boy, the NRA my father and uncles belonged to, before it became a cash machine for Congress. You need to demand change. Maybe Mitch McConnell and the Congress will listen, but I doubt it. There is a lot more money being pumped into the gun lobby than the measly $5 million the NRA collects from you guys, but maybe, just a chance, they will listen to you.

If hoards of insane cyclists were running down and killing citizens by the dozens, daily, I’d be the first one screaming to do something to get the bikes away from the psychotic bastards doing this. You need to do the same, or own the consequences, while the rest of us die at Walmart.

Thoughts and prayers…

Staring at my grandfather, holding my tongue; I need to drink in this hot July. I need to stop and taste each drop of sweat. I need to feel my skin burn crisp in the hot-high sun. I need the July-burning wind, raging maple’s leaves upturned betraying the coming storm. It’s ninety-six degrees at sunrise, it’ll be hundred and four by noon.

Now immersed in the day I walk with the old man out to the edge of the parched and cracking fields of wild berry bushes.

From our vantage point, huddled amongst a massive white stone outcropping, passing a bottle of his blueberry tinged moonshine, we watched the young girls working, picking and talking softly, bending over in their light cotton dresses, a field of pastels against the cloudless blue sky and green of the knee-high bushes.

Looking close, I see the salty-sweet droplets of sweat running rivulets of mud on their skin, and the wet red and blue and yellow bandanas, a feeble, but well meaning defense against the fire in the azure above their heads.

Jimmy B. turned to me, taking the bottle and a long drink he spoke softly—uncharacteristicly softly—saying, “it’s been a hagridden life boy. The whores, the wives, the good church ladies, your grandma; ain’t no cure, boy. Just a hagridden life. All of it, all you heard and read, all the stories and the lies, the bigger the story, the more I lied to make it a bigger lie. It was all fer that and nothin’ else but that and nothin’ more.” He raised his arm and pointed away across the field with the now near empty bottle and the pretty young girls.

“That dead man, down outside town, the one who got runned over by that train. I know’d you heard about it from yer grandma. Me and one of them town boys, we found him there, all cut in two, a bloody goddamn mess. I think he fell out the train drunk and get his ass tangled up in the wheels. He had over a hundred dollars in his purse. Me and the boy, we had a hell of time gettin’ that purse, and he had a gold watch too, and a couple rings. It wasn’t easy work, he was pretty goddamn gruesome, all mangled and bloody and bone stickin’ out. You ever try to pry a ring of a dead man fingers? It’s goddamn gruesome work.”

“Jesus, anyone think they was easy work? I reckoned he was never using the hundred dollars again and his time for usein’ that watch had sure as Hell long passed. It was hard work and he’d started to smell a might, What with all the heat coming off that gravel they use to lay down the railroad ties.”

“I come home and I’m feelin’ like a rich man, with my fifty dollars, my cut of the work, and the gold watch. The town boy couldn’t tell time good, so’s it wasn’t much good to him. He kept the rings. So I come home and I’m happy and proud and I shows yer grandma and she starts hollering and screaming and saying shit like I desecrated the dead, and I’m yelling back I didn’t desecrate no-damn-body, I just stole his money and stuff.”

“But she went runnin on down off the mountain and said she was going to report me for desecratin’ and I had to go hide my half the loot.”

“Pussy-whipped and hagridden. Story my whole goddamn life.”

“I’m not sayin’ it ain’t been fun, some, the preachin’ and the healin’ and the all the money. But now it’s all seems to be catchin’ up and they askin’ a lot of goddamn questions, not about that dead guy. That’s old news, no they’s asking about my preachin’ business and taxes and such, and I stand here, with a good drunk on before noon, and I look out across this field, and I think I could’a figured out a better way.”