273 Pieces.

I went hunting this weekend with my family and some family friends. This being my first time, the fact that I am a vegetarian, and that I am a girl, all were no less than shocked when I was the most excited to get out there and hunt the hogs. First, I need to uncover some humorous details. The guy whose ranch we went on, he is a childhood friend of my dad's who now lives in Dallas. Most people hunt hogs out of pick-up trucks but due to the fact that he doesn't have one, our hunting machine was a BMW X5 with all the lights covered with duck tape and all the windows (including the sunroof) was sucked into the car. I am kneeling on a phone book on the center console with the majority of my body out of the sunroof. I have a night vision scope and my duties as "spotter" is to spot any large animals and to direct the driver, since the lights are blacked out of course. My dad and his friend are carrying A-15 assault rifles, sticking out of a luxury car, with a teenage vegetarian girl spotting out the sunroof on a booster seat giving them direction. We hunted from 8:30 until 3:30 at night, and the entire time, we only saw one boar..at 8:47. I felt like I was in a video game, the world around me completely green and black, seeking out the portal to the next level. I spotted at least 10 raccoons and 6 deer and an armadillo, but no pork portals. Looking back, I am glad that we didn't ascend, for I know that given the chance, I wouldn't have shot a hog. He wouldn't know whats coming, wouldn't know that this trip to dinner is a fatal one. And gauging by my novice at hunting, my empathy with the prey, and the enormous heft and intimidation of the assault rifle, I would have probably made a bad shot, wounding the animal, and leaving it to suffer. Despite all the could be's, the actual adventure was no less than thrilling. Navigating through the woods in the pitch black, armed with assault rifles, hearing faint snorts of hogs, and howls of coyotes in the denser woods beside us, and watching two grown men leap out in full hunting mode simply because I saw a raccoon gave me a very memorable experience. Those raccoons should be proud, surviving a death stare down the barrel of a AR-15, a feat most grown men never walk away from in less than 273 pieces.

OverandOut

Overdose.

Is there truth behind the concept that anything in excess is dangerous? I like to think so, because I would like to add some excitement to the description of my addiction to reading. I read dangerously. I stay up a minimum of 2 hours later every night to get my fix and occasionally wake up at least an hour early. I guess sleep deprivation can be considered dangerous. I must go shoot up some thoughts now so that I can have time to sober up before lunch with the boyfriend.


over and out.

Writer's Block

I hate the feeling that comes between inspiration and the conception of an idea. The desperate yearning to create something accompanied by the right mind-set and infinite directions to choose and therefore no path to take. I just finished a book in which the author started his writing career by writing everything without caring how it retched itself into words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and so forth. Maybe I care too much. I have learned with my visual artwork that the best art comes when you are not thinking, when you are not trying to make it as artistic as humanly possible. It makes perfect sense that the same should apply to writing, but I can’t bring myself to believe that. In every English class I have sat through, I have, at the demand of my teacher, poured over the meaning of each seemingly carefully chosen syllable. Sometimes I felt like one could find meaning in each letter if we searched hard enough. The only issue is that letters tend to affiliate themselves with varying word personalities and lend themselves only to furthering our confusion in our literature safari. Emotion pours, it is not careful and pragmatic. Why then, should an expression of emotion be such? It should not. Meaning surfaces on each word because of the emotion bubbling behind them. They were not carefully chosen to portray the author’s heart, rather, the heart filled up each word with emotional juice that when popped by your pen, ruptures. A burst of epiphanic understanding.