It is time for me to finish reading Amerika. After starting it in January and putting it down for a short rest in February and then March, I must now pick it up again and finish it. My pride depends on it. It is not that it is a difficult book to read or boring, it is just that I find it incredibly unsettling. It is what I imagine a game of snakes and ladders would be like if it was ever turned into a novel, but without the fun or the snakes.
I don't remember playing much snakes and ladders as a child. My family was not one for board games. We had a Monopoly set and that was it. I suppose we were ahead of our time, because looking at the TV nobody really plays board games any more. I mean if they did there would be more advertisements for them wouldn't there? I was always filled with envy and wonder when I would see the stacks of board games some of my friends had. They always came from larger families though, this I suppose gave their parents a longer time span to purchase and collect the games. Also the fact that their children probably got on better than my sister and I did growing up meant that they could play games together without them descending into some kind of … farce.
Apart from a BB Gun what I wanted most as a kid was an Uno deck but Uno with two people kind of sucks. I miss my BB Gun. I only had it for 15 days but that was long enough to get attached to it. If we had got out as far as Wyoming I was going to buy a shot gun. It was probably best we didn't get out that far. It would have been the most scary $300 I had ever spent.
I remember being afraid of the BB Gun, I even bought safety glasses which I wore for the first day. After that, as the familiarity bred contempt, we gradually lost our fear and started wondering out loud what kind of damage it could really do. We, because for this I had a partner in crime, wanted to know if the instruction booklet was lying to us. Somehow it had gone from trusted Bible to a scandalous lie filled rag in the space of 10 days and we no longer believed the dire warnings of serious injury or death if it was used incorrectly. It was decided that one of us would shoot the other from a distance of 30 feet, what is sad, is that alcohol or drugs were involved in no way in this decision. The hypothesis was that the ball bearing would not break the skin – we could only use a ball bearing because I was refused the more dangerous pellet – and that at worse which ever one of us who was shot would end up with nothing worse than a bruise.
So being partially college educated and casual fans of the CSI franchise it was decided that preliminary test were required. It was decided that a some coke cans would be filled with water and placed into the sealed off legs of some jeans which would then be hung from a tree. Ballistics gel is expensive (I believe) and difficult to come by in semi-rural Minnesota (I know for a fact). The results of the test convinced us that the instruction book wasn't lying to us and it was probably a good idea not to agree to being shot with one. The ball bearing had managed not only to punch through the denim of the jeans but but through the can and out the other side. This story while lacking hilarity and a punch line does however convince me and hopefully you, that had I bought a shot gun I would have been a responsible gun owner.
It was still a let down wasn't it?
