Six Chambers
November 4th, 2009by Matt Baldwin
SAN DIEGO, CA –
On a late spring day in 2001 my sister’s drug-dealing ex-boyfriend crashed the pool party she was throwing at our house in the suburbs and shot two people on our front porch. He used a small, snub-nosed revolver from a distance of less than ten feet, firing off all six rounds. Five of them hit their mark.
This isn’t my story. I wasn’t even there; I was in the final year of my undergraduate studies at the University of California, Riverside, living in my own apartment and diligently working on my senior thesis. I’ve struggled to tell it before, as fiction, in poetry, by inserting myself into the narrative as a character, but it felt disingenuous then, and it feels disingenuous now. I don’t even know most of the people involved, and what details I have stem from one or two eyewitness accounts and a brief glimpse at the police report. And yet, even though I wasn’t present for these events, I cannot deny they’ve had an effect on me.
I will try to tell it as best I can.
*****
What I know is this: Daniel and my sister had been broken up for a few weeks, and he was having so much trouble letting go she was forced to get a restraining order. He turned up at the house drunk, and very likely tweaking on crystal meth as well. Accounts conflict as to whether the gun was hidden in the waistband of his jeans or the back pocket, but whatever his intentions were when he let himself into the empty house, he came packing. He wandered through to the backyard, where twenty or so of my sister’s friends had been drinking cheap beer and doing cannonballs off our diving board for a few hours, and immediately got into a shouting match with my sister. I don’t know what was said exactly, but I do know that when Daniel refused to leave several of the guys at the party took it upon themselves to escort him back out front, using their presence as a crowd to shepherd him. At first it worked; he went willingly, if begrudgingly.
No one thought to call the police.
When they made it to the front yard things changed. Maybe someone said something to provoke him, maybe some faulty synapse in his little tweaker brain misfired, but whatever the reason Daniel went on the offensive, drawing the gun and threatening the crowd with it, even though he had a clear path of escape to his truck.
Alcohol and adrenaline combined create a potent brew for stupidity, and after a second or so of shocked paralysis, one of the partygoers decided to do an extremely brave and absolutely foolish thing: he launched himself forward in an attempt at a flying tackle, but being drunk, only managed to stumble and get Daniel around the ankles.
Daniel shot him four times at point-blank range, opening up angry red blossoms in his chest, stomach, pelvis and thigh. He then fired the last two rounds into the crowd, apparently at random. One shot struck someone in the forehead, but the thick bone deflected the bullet sideways instead of allowing it to pass through. It opened up the skin of his right temple like a seam, right down to the skull. He was concussed and bleeding badly, but alive. Before anyone could do anything else, the now-unarmed Daniel fled in his truck.
My sister’s girlfriends kept her hidden in the house while this went down, and I think it was one of them who finally decided that calling for emergency services might be a good idea.
The aftermath was—perhaps unavoidably—anticlimactic. Both victims survived their injuries, though the first one spent the better part of the week in the ICU. When the police searched Daniel’s apartment, they found no sign of his drug activities aside from a misdemeanor amount of marijuana (he likely went straight there after the shooting and cleaned everything out; I would’ve). After two days as a wanted man Daniel surrendered to the police, and because he’s half Mexican and a fluent Spanish speaker, he was considered a high flight risk and denied bail by the court. It was months before the case went to trial, and when it did Daniel got off with a slap on the wrist; since he plead guilty to a charge of attempted manslaughter, had been a model inmate in the county lockup, and hadn’t actually killed anyone, the judge sentenced him to a couple of year’s probation, with credit for time already served. He walked, though the restraining order remained in effect.
The blood of the two shooting victims left stains on the pavement of our porch and front walkway.
We never figured out where that sixth bullet went.
*****
I look at these words here, that I’ve written and rewritten, and I don’t know what to make of them. I do not know how to respond to the knowledge that this happened, that this violence brought itself to our very doorstep to further mar the home where I spent the majority of my childhood, even though by that point I was already gone, having deliberately distanced myself from the unhappiness that already resided there.
What they don’t tell you about a gunshot is that the impact doesn’t just strike in the here and now, it ripples backwards in time to damage the past. A bullet wounds not only flesh, but memory as well.
None of us live there anymore. Once her divorce from my stepfather was final my mother sold the house, and she and my sister found new places to live. I finished my degree in Riverside and moved to New Orleans for graduate school. But the karate studio I teach at now is in the same neighborhood, and from time to time I pass by the house. When I do this is always the first thing I think of.
It’s the damndest thing. As I say, I wasn’t there, and yet the mind is a tricky machine; it combines this information with the knowledge I already possess to create the synthesis of a memory, one that I can turn and walk through, moment by moment, room by room. I know the exact path Daniel walked from our front door to the back. Though I didn’t know any of my sister’s friends at the time (she and I have always sailed different social seas), I knew the kind of people she hung out with, and my imagination fills in the details: their baggy shorts and sideways ball caps, cans of Bud Lite and crumpled packets of Marlboros. I know the crack of the shots and the smell of cordite; I’ve seen gunshot wounds up close and personal, and will never again require my imagination to recreate them.
By happenstance, I was in town that weekend, taking a brief respite from the rigors of my thesis by attending a friend’s barbeque. I first learned about the shooting when the ten o’clock news ran a report on it. The reporter stood just down the street from our house, but out of the corner of the frame you could see the yellow police tape marking off our lawn. I remember feeling a riot of emotions when I saw that: fear, anger, worry, and even guilt that I hadn’t been there to do something about it.
But not surprise.
I think I’d been expecting something like this to happen for a long time.
I met Daniel once or twice, and wasn’t impressed. When we were in high school my sister’s taste in boyfriends always ran towards bad boys, the kinds of knuckle-dragging aggro meatheads who spent their spare time either in detention or on the lookout for things to stuff firecrackers into and watch explode, and Daniel was no exception. It was only a matter of time before one of these troglodytes engaged in some spectacular criminal violence.
No one knew about the drug dealing, though; my sister took pains to hide that from us, even after they’d broken up. She also hid his fondness for firearms. I’ve thought about that gun a lot during my attempts to write this. I cannot imagine what Daniel was planning on doing with it. It would be too easy to write it off as junky behavior, but I think that’s a fallacy. High or not, he had the foresight to load it, bring it, and to conceal it when he came inside. Was he intending to force my sister to take him back at gunpoint? Did he anticipate a shootout with some of the other people at the party? My sister had told him about my martial arts training–was one of those rounds meant for me, in case I was there and caused him trouble?
I don’t know. I doubt I ever will.
One thing I can say, though, is that this episode forever ended any infatuation I had with firearms. I’m not looking to overturn the Second Amendment or outlaw the NRA, but I sure as shit don’t want a gun anywhere near me. I refuse to allow them into my home, and any invitation to go down to a gun range and fire off a few rounds is met with a firm “no, thanks.” And I reject, whole cloth, the entire notion that they are in some way “for defense.” The act of penetrating a human body with explosively-propelled bits of metal is designed to be fatal, and there is nothing defensive about that. As far as I am concerned, a gun is the unearned power to take the life of another human being, available for purchase far, far too cheaply.
We’ve reached the end here, and I still don’t know what to make of this. I don’t know how to articulate the emotions this stirs up. I’m angry, and I want to be angry, I believe this anger is deserved, but I do not know where to direct it. My sister, for all her lapses in judgment, did everything in her power to push Daniel out of her life, and it isn’t her fault he clawed his way back in. Daniel has long since disappeared; if there’s any justice in the world he was picked up for another violation and is now doing time. I suppose this could be thought of as a warning, about how we sometimes invite those people most dangerous to us into the innermost areas of our lives, even though–because–we know they might very well cause us harm. We’re moths in a world of candle flames.
But that doesn’t really help. I’m still angry. Angry because, eight years on, those bloodstains are still there, enduring all of the effects of time and weather, of bleach and scrub brush.
And in my mind, they always will be.
Tags: Bad Choices, Gun Violence, Misplaced Heroism, Oh Look More About Blood, Time To Find A New Subject I Think, Way To Be So Fucking Cheerful Matt, Yet Another Tale of Violence
Quick note: “Daniel” is, of course, a pseudonym.
Man, I’m very sorry to hear/read of this, though your account is poignant. I especially like “the act of penetrating a human body with bits of metal is designed to be fatal, and there is nothing defensive about that” (god–yes) and the concept of certain actions forever damaging the past.
Sigh.
Thanks, Kristen.
Intense story Matt. Horrifying, really. Are the blood stains still on the pavement in front of the house? How did the guy who received four shots survive? Is he fully functioning?
Thanks, Jessica
1. I took a look last week. Yup, still there. They’ve faded, and don’t look like blood anymore, but there they are.
2. The bullets only hit soft tissue, and missed all of his vitals. Very very very very lucky.
3. I have no idea. We weren’t friends. I don’t think my sister is even friends with him anymore. Her friendships usually have a 2-year term limit.
And for more reading on various blood-related things:
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/mbaldwin/2009/10/blooded/
I’m such a whore.
Good work, Matt; I reckon telling it straight, in clean prose, as you have here, was the way to go. It must have been hard to do, but it’ll pay off; you’ve told the story using a medium in which you express yourself adeptly* and now (I hope) you won’t have to tell it again (if you don’t want to), or think about it as much.
*whereas I can’t formulate a single decent sentence right now
I think you’re doing just fine, Steve, powered wheelchair and massive tea burns or not. Thanks.
You know, I think your statement of struggling to tell this story made the telling that much more effective: about how the memory is a tricky beast, and would have been even had you been there. You might have other details, but this still feels faithful to the account. Perhaps because it’s so nearly objective, the paragraph describing the incident itself is rather extraordinary.
So well done. I dug this. In a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons.
Thanks, Will. This was a huge bitch to write. I’ve been working on it daily for about three and a half weeks. I’m glad it went over so well.
Well told, Matt. The ripple effect of events is tantamount to life itself. I live by the philosophy that we do not have to be present to be subject to the aftermath of other people’s actions. I wear a tattoo to remind me that many of the things in life I toil with are do to the overlapping ripples of so many dumbshits in the world. But it keeps me ever vigilant of my own actions for I know they will go out into the world with influence I will never know. Which brings me to the anger issue. It doesn’t matter where you place it. What matters is how. Because it will come back to bite you in the ass if you aren’t careful. Who knows what unfortunate ripple effects that man was dealing with to bring that gun that day. Judging serves no purpose and anger cures nothing. But if you can find a way to forgive, to forgive it all; your sister for diggin’ bad boys, the perp who fired in fear and rage, the blood that cannot be washed away, and even yourself for being elsewhere that day… then we have a chance at sending out some healing ripples.
Thanks for writing this story. It’s as much mine as it is yours. (It’s full of type-o’s tho. Go fix them - this story deserves it.) Big love, doll.
Yeah, it’s important to keep the Wheel of Karma well-oiled. Which is why I plant a tree for every asshole I have to punch out.
Man. Daniel’s some kind of asshole.
And I have to agree totally with Josie wholeheartedly on the issue of forgiveness and healing.
I know! It’s like, dude, you’re having trouble getting over my sister, OK fine, but you don’t have to be such a dick about it!
This is a great story, Matt. And, you told it with such honesty.
Who’s to say how one should feel in this type of situation, I think all of your feelings and pondering are accurate.
Thank you for sharing.
Thanks, Megan. It’s just strange to feel anything at all, given that this happened at several removes from me–and to feel it so intensely? Very weird. And still something, even years later, that I have difficulty wrapping my head around.
I don’t think it’s strange at all. This happened to people that you love, your family. The effects of these kinds of things can be long range.
I don’t think a lot of people realize. But you have just show us all that.
Hmmm.
Maybe it’s because my family has never been what we traditionally consider loving that I find this strange.
Matt,
Excuse me for getting into particulars here, but WHY do you know up-close and personal what a bullet wound looks like in a human body?
This is horrible. I understand why your mom and sister left the house with those awful memories.
I think there should be a listing in the Yellow Pages for “Hit Men.” Were I you, I would have hired one to take Daniel out. (Given I could get away with it.)
I’m sorry your natal home was sullied beyond cleansing.
Is your sister all right now?
Why do I know this? Irene, that’s just how I roll!
I worked as a civilian employee of a police department when I was an undergrad, and between that and my time in a hospital ER I’ve seen plenty of the gunshot wounds and stabbings and blunt force traumas. I’m kind of fascinated by it, actually. I would sometimes spend my off hours and lunch breaks in the observation rooms over the operating theaters, watching surgery performed.
The house itself was already for sale, as per a divorce agreement between my parents. It was a little bit out in the boonies, but a nice house. Would have been a great place to grow up if it wasn’t for all that abuse and passive-aggressive hostility.
No need for a mail-order hit man. The shooting took place on a Saturday; I spent Sunday looking for Daniel myself, including a quick jaunt down to Baja. I probably wouldn’t have killed him, but he wouldn’t have been the first person I’d put in the hospital.
Also, Irene, I love the video of you doing your reading in Chicago.
Well done, Matt.
I really like the line about ‘we are just moths in a world of candle flame.”
It does feel like that sometimes, huh?
Guns. Urgh. They scare me. People scare me.
Oh and I liked the tags!
Heh. After writing a couple of dark pieces back to back, I felt the need to stamp a little humor on this somehow.
People scare me more than guns do, I think, but when the two are put together, nothing good usually comes of it.
And thanks again for the encouragement.
Fiction, poetry, and then sometimes the plain old essay/CNF style is the best, as it is here. It’s a very nice piece, Matt. I especially liked what you wrote about memory synthesis. You’re aware of it, but probably happens silently more often than we realize. I know it happens to me.
I found out a couple of years ago (thanks to my participation in a neurology grad student buddy of mine’s project) that I have what he labeled a “low-grade eidetic memory”–what pop culture usually calls “photographic.” Not only do people like me tend to recall images in very vivid detail, we actually tend to process and store it that way as well (would explain why I’m so bad at math). Like film reels in the mind that can be replayed at will.
Of course, like actual film, there’s still the problem of image decomposition to deal with….
That’s an important way I remember, too.
So here’s a question, which is related to a piece I’m working on now: when you remember a series of events, do they appear as a slideshow, a series of still images (but in sequence), or as something resembling film or video, meaning continuous?
You did mention “film reels,” but you might not have meant that explicitly.
For me, it’s never film/video; it’s always a sequence of stills.
And even though as a researcher I did highly quantitative work, math has always been a struggle for me, too.
Oh, man, this is actually kind of difficult to articulate.
I would say it’s *mostly* stills, but some of the more important or extreme memories lean more towards the film/video thing, in short segments. But even with the stills, there’s certain amounts of interactivity, like that feature on some DVDs/CD-ROMs where you’re presented with a still image but can then manipulate the camera, zooming in on certain details, turning the lense to see the rest of the environment that’s outside of the frame, etc.
A couple of years ago I freaked my best friend out when I recited to him, in great detail, exactly what he was wearing when we first met, 10 years prior, right down to his shoes and the necklace he had on. I then verbally mapped out for him the layout of his new bedroom (it was a new place, and I had just walked through it for the first time a few moments before), detailing what books were on what shelves, how the furniture was arranged, which windows faced which directions. His eyes got kind of big.
Wow. That’s seriously eidetic (what you did with your friend).
Memory and perception are so amazingly interesting. If I were starting a research career over again, I think I’d do perception, but cross-culturally.
It was weird. I even remembered what band shirt he had on, right down to the colors of the fabric and the lettering. He went a pulled it out of the closet, and I was spot-on.
It was actually the first time anyone–including myself–realized I was doing this.
This is an interesting thread. My memory works in a similar way, with both a combination of pictures and film, if you can call it that. Audio is often included. I don’t think mine is as accurate as yours (what someone was wearing 10 years ago, unless it was the girl of your dreams on a first date), but I do remember, as a student in grade school, flipping through a textbook in my mind to find the passage that would answer a certain question on a test. Sometimes my understanding of a subject would suffer because I could recall the textbook so well, and thus I felt almost like I was cheating.
Also, the essay was very well-written and seems as objective as one could be in a terrible situation like that. Good job.
Richard, you just hit on something I also experienced. I was a terrible history student in high school, but I used to do well on the tests–especially those ones where it was quoting directly from the textbook. I wasn’t remembering what the correct answer was, I was remembering what the shape of the information looked like on the page.
I remember what every girl I’ve ever gone out with wore on our first date. And *achem* a few other details as well. Sometimes that’s cool. Other times, it really sucks.
Well told, Matt. Simple and straight and not trying to resolve things that really aren’t likely to be resolved.
I am shocked - again and again - every time I drive to work, that bloodstains do not go away. They persist.
No, they don’t. I’ve had to throw out many articles of clothing for that very reason.
Great piece, as usual.
If you still lived there, I’d say you need to reclaim the space. Have some sort of cleansing ritual. Smudge it with sage and so forth. It’s an odd relationship to the event, and it must be frustrating. But thank goodness your sister was unscathed and that everyone survived.
I’m with you with the guns. The rationale doesn’t justify the violence. We make people go to classes for weeks and have all this training to drive a car…a gun, nah. Just pick one up at the gun show, no hassle. Makes no sense.
G
Strangely enough, one of the first things the new owners did was uproot all the grass and trees in the front yard and install a cactus/rock garden. I’m not entirely sure if they’re aware of the specific details of what exactly went down, but I find it interesting that they felt the need to claim the space in that way. It looks pretty damn great, actually—though I did have a moment of “I mowed that lawn every Saturday for twelve years, and THIS is what happens to it?! DAMMIT!”
Yeah, the thing about gun shows is a damn travesty of justice. And speaking personally, I think there should be more than just a two-week waiting period before you can pick up your handgun. I know multiple different ways to kill a person with my bare hands, but I wasn’t just handed that knowledge as soon as I walked in the door; it was taught to me after I’d demonstrated the maturity and level-headedness to not use it impulsively, and that process took several years.
The thing I most dislike about guns is how they distance you–literally and figuratively–from the act of killing. The greater range you have from what you are killing, the easier it is to objectify it as an abstract concept, something seperate from yourself. Bombs and remote drones take this to an even further remove. It’s an entirely different thing to see someone die up close and personal, to be hands-on with it when it happens. I’ve never killed anyone, but the few times I’ve come close to using lethal force in self-defense have really fucked me up.
Konrad Lorenz writes about the distance phenomenon in On Aggression. Asher lectures about it in my book.
Which was something that really jumped out at me when I was reading it. One of several instances where I found myself thinking “This dude’s a total corporate yuppie bastard. But he’s kinda making sense.”
Thanks for calling my attention to this piece. I’m glad you wrote it. And it’s not disingenuous at all. Fictionalizing it might have been. Poetry, too. But this was right.
Matt, this was beautifully written and I understand your need to share. Your anger is understandable. I hope your sister is doing better. Making better choices. And I, for one, hope Daniel found God. Or a vocation. Or got clean. Healing is what makes the world a better place.
Personally, if he happend to OD on a bad batch, I won’t lose any sleep over it.
P.S. Next up, would you please write a story about the first time you fell in love? Or your favorite toy as a child? Or the trials and tribulations of masturbation? Something funny? Full of sunshine?
Just a request.
You know I’ll read either way.
I think the joys of masturbating are best left as an act of self-discovery, myself.
All of my childhood toys came from the dump, and we always had to clean them off and search them for disgarded hypodermics and things.
I am not familiar with the word you call “love.”
Oh, fine. Next time I’ll write a story about masturbating in the warm summer sunshine while thinking of unicorns. How does that work?
UNICORNS!!!
Yes. Unicorns.
But in my world, unicorns gore you on sight.
Well, I spoke to you when you were struggling to write this, and for what my opinion is worth, I think the finished piece is a great success. Every word seems carefully weighed and fitted, and as others have said, the searching quality — what finally can be extrapolated from it all? — works wonderfully.
This, by the way, rings very true: “[...] we sometimes invite those people most dangerous to us into the innermost areas of our lives, even though–because–we know they might very well cause us harm.” I’ve seen it again and again. It’s tempting to go to hell, apparently, and we get dragged along when others can’t or won’t resist.
Yeah, I still have lines on my head from all the time spent banging it on a brick wall, trying to get this bastard to work. I spent so much time trying to find some sort of meaning to what is really just impulsive, chaotic violence at work, that finally the only tactic that seemed to work was to pull a Charlie Kaufman-lite move and incorporate the difficulties I have writing about this into the story itself. I remain somewhat skeptical that it worked, but for better or worse, there it is.
“It’s tempting to go to hell, apparently, and we get dragged along when others can’t or won’t resist.”
Or worse, when they’re dead set on taking us down with them from the very start.
That’s terrifying, Matt. Terrifying. It’s hard to imagine a person actually carrying a loaded weapon… I mean, why would a civilised person do such a thing, and why would a civilised society allow it? People are naturally stupid and violence is always an inevitability when guns are permitted.
Yeah, that’s the kind of talk that gets you labled “Commie” or “un-American” ’round some of these parts. If those damned English had just let us be, and not forced us to have that whole armed revolution thing, maybe we wouldn’t feel the need to have our guns around to protect ourselves from those red-coated limey bastards…..
Sadly, though, I don’t think anyone who drives around drunk and high on meth exactly counts as “civilized” in anyone’s book.
Fair point.
Indeed.
Damn the English!!!
*fires pistol into the air*
Great piece, Matt. I can understand the struggle in the telling. You had it doubly hard. As writers, I think, we tend to distance ourselves from life, so that as the observer we can write about what we see once removed - twist it into fiction - twist it whatever way we want. It’s interesting then, that something so horrific, so violent, happened to your sister and in your home, but that you weren’t there to actually witness it. You had to rely on second hand accounts, the trauma your sister, her friends and your family suffered afterwards…. I think you honored the situation with your words. Without grandstanding, without histrionics, you wrote honestly and because of that you allowed the confusion, the anger, and the hurt to tell the story.
Thanks, Robin.
Normally, I prefer to let Bananas the Talking Monkey tell the story, but the little jerk is currently on strike, and confusion, hurt, and anger were the only understudies available.
This story is like the inversion of what happens when we replace actual memories with ones presented to us by photographs of an event. Like, the way that, over time, looking at photos of something you were present for, you start to map the photographed images over the experience and remember those moments foremost, or in place of the images you might’ve had, if the photos didn’t exist.
Instead, you have a series of images and a plausible chain of events created from a combination of (a) being so familiar with your home and its rooms, interior/ exterior, and what you know of the people who were there, and (b) the absence of directly witnessing what went down.
I think that combination of absent + familiar makes things so haunting.
As I told Don above, my brain tends to compose images of the details it’s fed, creating something like a mental photo album. I tend to remember everything in terms of images, even if I wasn’t there to see them.
And thank you.
Awful, horrible story.
Great piece though.
Guns are only cool in movies.
Thanks.
One my favorite bits of the TV show Leverage is how the biggest badass character hates guns, and will usually unload and disassemble one when he takes it off a bad guy.
A story about puppies and flowers and other nice things! Oh good!
Oh.
Oh no.
You tricked me to come here from Twitter. But what a well-written piece and terrifying tale. I’m glad everybody is okay physically, although I’m quite certain nobody was ever the same emotionally.
Now gimme my puppies and flowers. A unicorn or something sparkly would be great, too. xoxo.
Ummmm….I think the family labrador was actually at the house when this happened. Does that count?
I’m actually working on a piece–actually, make that two of them–about furry woodland creatures, if that makes you feel any better.
And what else is Twitter for, if not tricking people?
UNICORNS!!
Yes. Gigantic black Clydesdale-sized unicorns that snort fire and feed on fear instead of hay and will impale you on a horn like a hot steel rebar.
Damn, Matt. This was chilling. And very well written. Be well.
Thanks, Rich.
And again, Happy Birthday. Hope it was damn cool.
Terrific writing! Excellent control and good use of language. One thing I didn’t understand: “… because he’s half Mexican and a fluent Spanish speaker, he was considered a high flight risk and denied bail by the court.” I don’t get this.
Thanks, Alex.
San Diego is only about 15 minutes from the Mexican border by car, so if they’d let him out on bail he could have very well been out of the country in less than an hour. Which is not something they’re inclined to do, especially when the suspect still has family friends on that side of the fence.
Harrowing and powerful sir
I can tell you crafted the words carefully
It’s good when writing makes you feel something.
You were successful here.
(Sorry you had to follow a piece
featuring a bunch of dudes in skimpy women’s wear
waving their pieces around though)
Thanks!
Actually, I felt kind of bad about posting this one after that. It’s a pretty steep come-down from the mirth and merriment of the Bond Girls.
Your fellow, Daniel gives a bad name to troglodytes.
Doesn’t he just? I heard that, during the trial, Trog Local-192 organized a protest. Sadly, I was in New Orleans at the time, and couldn’t get any pictures.
I want to know what Greg’s reading of your chart says, because it seems that up till now, your stars must all be crossed for so much to happened to you thus far in your short life. Sheesh!
Great piece, tho’. You really know how to keep the tension alive, friend.
Something’s up, that’s for sure. But why can’t it be good things, like winning the lottery? Or forever earning the love of Olivia Wilde? Why must it all be muggings and violence and natural disasters? WHY MUST I BE SUCH A SHIT MAGNET, UNIVERSE?!
*shakes fist at sky*
Ah well. It’s not been a boring life, for sure. And we haven’t even gotten to my adventures backpacking or cage diving with sharks or hanging out with Willie Nelson….
“What they don’t tell you about a gunshot is that the impact doesn’t just strike in the here and now, it ripples backwards in time to damage the past. A bullet wounds not only flesh, but memory as well.”
I love this. Truth.
Even if it didn’t happen to you, it happened to you. Think about how all those people in Holcomb, Iowa felt. How they were all impacted by Clutter’s brutality, even though none were there. When violence roosts on your front porch, you’re unable to deny the horror that is our species. I think that’s what gets us the most. The reminder that we’re capable of so much insanity.
Ducky… Yer smart.
Only on Wednesdays.
I just wish people were more infatuated with rubber ducks than they are with guns. The world would be a better place.
I wish they were, too!
Memories are tricky things. They don’t seem to reside in our brains, but around us like an aura. We share them with people we’re close to, and of course places hold memories all their own.
You can remember something you weren’t there to witness, or have no memory of an event in which you were the primary focus. Memories are tricky like that.
I’m glad everyone survived, and I’m glad you’re writing about it, because this was an amazing piece to experience.
Thanks, Autumn.
Another great piece, Matt.
I love the way you speak of time and memory.
So true.
As for guns, I have one. Being from the South, I’m sure that doesn’t come as a surprise. Actually, my gun fits the description of the one Daniel had. Smith and Wesson .38 special (snub nose). I’m a deadly accurate shot. With that being said, I understand more than the most, the power of the beast and I respect it. Both my father and step father are hunters and gun collectors. (Maybe my mom likes bad boys, too.) I believe in the Second Ammendment wholeheartedly and think that any change would lead to more harm than good.
Before my son was born I carried my gun in my purse. Since his birth it stays hidden and locked. I like it in the house, just in case, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to get to it in time to actually use it’s power. It still makes me feel better.
I think people are the real danger. I’ve seen man do horrible and incredibly creative things with so many “regular” items. Point is, if someone wants to harm you, they will, whether they have the gun or not. I just like knowing that I have some power and accuracy behind my soft mommy hands. But like I said, I respect them and understand the possible devastation they cause.
I also respect your feelings about guns and am in now way trying to change your mind or ideals. I’m only defending mine.
*no way
Also, how has you sister dealt with these memories? I’m sure she still carries a ton of mixed emotions and could probably benefit from a chat.
I’m a pretty good shot, myself. As a Boy Scout, I earned my rifle, shotgun and archery merit badges (actually, I was a pretty wicked shot with a longbow). And I’ve been hunting as well. It’s just not my thing. If I do go hunting again, I’d rather it be with a bow than a gun.
What you’re talking about, the sense of power and comfort that comes with ownership, is the crux of why I don’t like them. As you say, the odds are very good a gun won’t actually be useful in one of those rare occasions when it might actually be necessary. So the only good it’s actually doing is providing a sense of power and comfort that is, basically, false. Too many people (admittedly more men than women) get hooked on that sense of power, get used to the idea of relying on it when conflict arises. And let’s face it, it’s a hugely different issue to shoot a live, moving human being (especially one that is being aggressive towards you) than it is a paper target.
Whenever a gun is introduced into a conflict, it immediately and irrevocably alters whatever the dynamic is, and usually not for the better. As I said in my post, the entire design and functionality of a gun is to cause fatal injury to a living body. It’s power over another person’s life, essentially, the entire purpose of which is to be destructive. And that, quite frankly, is something I do not think the fast majority of people have the maturity to handle. That kind of power has to be earned, and it saddens me that it can be so easily purchased.
There’s movements going around down here–and in a few other states–to create laws so that people can be out in public with unconcealed holsters. Which is just stupid. We’re not living in the wild fucking west anymore.
All the good comments have been taken ;), but I wanted to chime in that I really hate guns too. Could be because I almost had my head blown off when I was ten by a shotgun, but I don’t I’m that self centered. Maybe it’s because of JFK and RFK and MLK and John Lennon and Scott M. and Columbine and Va Tech and Ft. Hood and a zillion other reasons. If I’m given a choice of fighting for my life against a maniac with a knife and a maniac with a gun? I’ll take the knife any old day.
Very well written piece Matt. Loved the line about sailing on different social seas…