Writing With Anger

          Twelve dead.  Twelve lives over, forever.  Twelve families irreversibly changed.  This is the work of one man in a few minutes.  His tools; an assault rifle, a shotgun, two pistols, gas canisters, an innocent and captive victim pool –an audience really- , and the ability to acquire pretty much any weapon he needed under the protection of our national laws.  News accounts describe it as, “...one of the deadliest mass shootings in recent U.S. history.”  Where it falls on the list of our other “mass shootings” I don’t know but I’m sure I can find out with little effort.  We have so many of these that they’re not just chronicled, but parsed and sorted by the number of victims.  To be honest, I can’t remember if any of those other “mass killings” took more lives.*

Update: I found that 12 murdered is not even close to the top of this list.  That honor goes to an Anders Behring Breivik who killed 80 at a summer camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya in July last year.  Here is a list if anyone is interested: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Some-of-world-s-worst-mass-shootings-3722783.php

            I’m sure in the coming weeks a call will be made to take a solemn and honest look at our gun laws.  That look will degrade to podium pounding on both sides where blame will be laid, beliefs will be challenged, and advantages will be gained and lost, especially with this being a Presidential election year.  Will anything change?  Maybe we’ll see (more) armed guards at movie theaters or maybe we’ll see metal detectors where the tickets are torn.  That might make us feel safer, until the next guy takes his rifle, shotgun, and two pistols into a water park or football stadium.

Eventually the outrage will fade, as it always does.  And you will probably be able to track our interest by how far will live from Aurora, Colorado.  The rest of the country can get back to figuring out which chicken restaurant approves or disapproves of same-sex marriage.

            The shooting took place during a midnight showing of the new Batman movie.  It’s too bad there isn’t a real Batman who could have swung in and saved these lives and captured the murderer.  But Batman, Superman, and Spiderman are restricted from helping a single soul by the fact that they don’t exist.  But maybe we could change that.  I’m not suggesting that we create a superhero to stand watch over us, because according to millions, we already have one.  So let’s call on him.  I’ll start:

Dear Heavenly Father,

            Please disappear all the guns. Please get rid of every pistol, rifle, shotgun, forty-five, 357 Magnum, AK-47, M16, Uzi, Saturday Night Special, and Walther PPK.  I humbly ask you to remove gun powder, bullets, shells, and firing pins from existence.  Use your power and love to erase our collective memories of these things and how to create them.  We regret having invented them and then delivering them upon your beautiful creation that is this Earth.  We most humbly apologize and hope through your loving grace you will forgive us.  In Jesus name we pray.

If this works, how wonderful.  If this doesn’t, at least we know where he stands.

Nocked Up

“Bury me where my arrow falls.”  Traditionally the last words of Robin Hood as he shoots his final arrow through a window into the forest, from his deathbed.

Arrows are flying everywhere.  The heroine of Pixar’s Brave is a Scottish girl who is an expert archer.  She displays prowess with the bow from a running horseback and during a tournament where she provides the movie-required split arrow that would make Mr. Hood proud.  (By the way, why is it that the guy, or girl in this case, who splits the other contestant’s arrow is the winner?  Wouldn’t that just be a tie?)  In The Hunger Games, Katniss is an equally crack shot, downing a bird on the fly early in the film, although I would have like more arrow work during the rest of the movie.  Even the massive summer movie steamroller The Avengers has one hero (Hawkeye) who is as manly as a man can be while carrying something called a quiver.  Although after his arrows are spent, he doesn’t provide much of a “Superhero” skill set.

Right now bows and arrows in movies are where vampires were when the first Twilight movie came out; the books have been read and the films are queued for critique.  While that movie/book series has reduced what was formally a terrifying monster capable of seducing and murdering his way through Eastern European hamlets and castles to a whinny teenager who sparkles in the sunlight, it at least brought readers to the books and moved crowds of people through the snack bars to movie theaters.  I read once that Titanic was such a huge success because it attracted young girls to the theater.  They brought young boys and went to repeat viewings.  I suppose, with two female archers in two hit movies, it is hoped that that same demographic can be captured.  I think it may be working.

For his twelfth birthday we took my youngest to an archery range to shoot for an hour or so.  We brought along his older brother and a friend who happens to be a 12-year-old girl.  While we were shooting, the range manager, after watching the girl shoot, said something like, “You’re a regular Katniss.”  Which I’m sure is something he mentions to every girl who draws a bow at his business.  Will archery ranges see an explosion of business in the coming years?  Would this be a good time to open a business like that?

While watching my older boy shoot, I noticed how strong and rigid his arms and upper back looked when he held the nock of the arrow against his cheek.  His shoulders looked broad and his arrows, when released, thudded into the target with a very satisfying twack, often in tight groups near the center of the target.  He looked strong and with the bow bent and the arrow as still as a crouched panther, somehow noble and heroic.  Maybe I’m beginning to understand the appeal of this Hawkeye character a little bit.

Back when I was in the Boy Scouts, my troop went through a period when we did archery at most meetings.  We even went to an archery camp up in the foothills for a weekend.  For awhile I had a bow and some arrows at home and I would go to a friend’s house and practice shooting into bales of hay in his backyard.  I figured if I practiced enough, my archery aptitude might even become impressive to girls; anecdotal evidence suggests it wasn’t.

They say that the great English archers of medieval times started their training at 7 or 8 years old.  I read that by the time they were grown they could pull a bow of 80 pounds, and “deliver an arrow through the armor” worn by the knights of the time. You gotta like that word “deliver,” as if UPS where simply placing those arrows inside armor like a tip slipped into the pocket of a maitre D’.  Skeletons of longbow archers that have been dug up are recognizably deformed, with enlarged left arms and often bone spurs on left wrists, left shoulders and right fingers.  During the birthday shoot I picked up a bow and shot a handful of arrows.  But my arthritic shoulders and wrists wouldn’t let me hold the arrow still enough to aim properly.  My arrows thumped into the target on one side and the other, and in their flight, pitched and yawed like a skinny ship heading into fat swells.

Maybe this archery craze is a good thing.  Kids pulling bows are strengthening their bodies, and improving their hand-to-eye coordination.  Plus every minute not playing video games and being outside is a better minute the other way around.  Let’s hope archery takes the place of angst-ish vampire worship and new shops start popping up like tattoo parlors and hookah lounges have been over the last few years.  Besides, after the zombie apocalypse, we’ll need someone who can hunt for food.

Quote I couldn't figure out how to get in the blog:

"I shoot an arrow into the air, where it lands I do not care: I get my arrows wholesale!"

-Curly Howard

Forest Fires, Fireworks, and Flares.

            There be fires and then there be fires, as the pirates might say. 

 

One is a forest fire in a steep and deep canyon, carved out by the north fork of the American river over a scant few million years.  That fire started on a hot Wednesday afternoon in Shirttail Canyon some 40 miles east of Auburn, and four or five miles north of Foresthill.  When I lived in the former I worked in the latter.  The fire has been named, as fires are, The Robbers Fire after an outcropping of rock that had been called The Robber’s Roost when a group of outlaws holed up there after, well, robbing.  The name has been around the area for awhile.  There was even a long time out-of-business restaurant in Foresthill named The Robber’s Roost that the telephone company I worked for took over as offices.

Firefighters are hoping that the temperature drops, that the wind drops, and that the fire drops instead of climbing those steep canyon walls.  If that happens it would move faster than a man can run on flat ground, much less uphill, and would threaten homes in either Colfax or the aforementioned Foresthill, depending on which direction providence or God chooses it to go.  To say that the people in these mountain communities appreciate those who fight these fires would be like saying a drowning man might appreciate a boat.

There was a fire of a different kind in San Diego on The Forth of July.  Thousands were gathered around the bay, waiting for a fireworks show they all expected to be within spittin’ distance of spectacular.  It wasn’t.  In a computer glitch that was described, a bit snarkily if you ask me, as a “premature ignition” all of the fireworks went off at once.  I’ve seen the video and basically it’s a bright white light for maybe 15 seconds and then nada. 

When I was a young teen, my friend Mark used to get firecrackers by the brick.  If I remember correctly there are 1,000 in each brick and one day we decided to light off all of them at once.  After a couple of hundred or so went off, we got bored and decided to stop the train of popping and crackling and started stomping on the fuse ahead of the fire.  Kind of like those pirates might kick a line of black powder out of the way to keep that fuse from setting off further explosions.  I learned from this that good fireworks shows, like multi-course meals, need to be delivered slowly for complete enjoyment.  I don’t think stomping was an option for the pyrotechnicians in San Diego but I wouldn’t be surprised if next year’s show was triple-double checked, to borrow a phrase from basketball.

The third “fire” is extra-terrestrial in nature.  The fallout from a solar flare, a solar storm, is bombarding our little blue planet as I write this.  Part of the solar flare is known as a coronal mass ejection – a phrase that would surely provide more joke fodder for the headline writers of the San Diego fireworks articles – that sends a wave of solar plasma our way.  What does this plasma wave (solar storm) mean to us?  Not much.  For those in the northern parts of the Northern Hemisphere it means some more impressive aurora borealis.  To the 2012’ers who are expecting an end of the world Christmas present, this is just one more step to untying the ribbon.

Scientists are obligated to tell us not to worry, like parents proving there are no monsters in the closet.  Solar flares while given a fiery name do not send fire our way; they send a magnetic field that “interacts” with the Earth’s magnetic field causing the prettier northern lights and possibly reaping havoc with satellites and perhaps power systems.  Those same scientists are telling us that our satellites will remain in orbit, beaming down ESPN and Ice Road Truckers uninterrupted, and our lights will stay on.

I’ve not read the resolution of the Robber’s Fire, the “Big Sputter” (my name) in San Diego will likely be rectified next year, and the solar storm, while passing through my body right now, has had little if any effect, although I wouldn’t mind superpowers.  Fire is a daily event on and around our planet since it was stolen from the gods and given to us by Prometheus.  We have choices on what to do with it: fight it, harness it, or endure it.  Probably the only thing we can’t do is ignore it.

Dear Mr. Zeus,

It’s been a pretty long time.  I was wondering if you might release Mr. Prometheus from his punishment of having his liver eaten by an eagle, then being regenerated only to be eaten again, over and over, for eternity.  I’m sure he’s been a model prisoner and is sorry for stealing fire and giving it to us.  Besides, look at all we’ve done with it, aside from the San Diego fireworks fiasco, gunpowder, and nuclear bombs.  On second thought, maybe that argument isn’t the way to go.  How about this?  Perhaps your eagle isn’t thrilled with an extremely steady diet of liver?  Have no field mice offended you?

Sincerely,

one human.