Had a dream that I was a security guard again. Some kind of mayhem had transpired in Seattle in the night, wherein a gun had been discharged in public. We were all under suspicion, but one specific guy had done it, and copped to it before we got into real trouble. Even so, there was so much going on that I wasn’t aware of his confession until it had already transpired, and was running around trying to sort out defense evidence along with my home boy Clark. Some seagulls had been killed, and during the course of events I found their bodies floating in water, gelatinized and translucent…
None of this is particularly interesting, and putting it under the fold like this, I can hide the really interesting part from anybody who can’t stand hearing about other people’s dreams. I once worked with a guy who killed some Americans with guns before dying in sad ignominy. A veteran. A fan of guns.
Hey guns are cool, gotta love ’em. My coworkers decided to have a “gun party,” which set this whole chain of events in motion. These were actually my bosses – security middle management from the site I was working. They thought it would be a good time to get all their guns together to show off, fondle their pieces, throw back some cold ones, and maybe shoot at tree stumps. Not sure on the specifics; I was not on the guest list.
You ever see a nerd fight? Guys are feeling overstimulated, broing down, get into some really minor disagreement, and then it blows up into grabbing each others t-shirts and flailing around like kermit the frog. Apparently somebody was acting the fool and another guy said, maybe put down the loaded gun, and the guy doubled down, had to act tough.
That was not the late lamented killer. When the gunfoolery boy did something that was, in LLK’s estimation, too dangerous to trust, LLK shot him dead.
I didn’t get a lot of details, but a friend of these guys told me that this was, in context, a reasonable thing to do. Gunfool was up to no good and the veteran may have saved somebody’s life by ending his. However, whether due to PTSD or another cause, the veteran decided not to risk capture, and went full rambo.
If he’d stayed behind, everybody put all the guns down and went outside and called the cops, and his friends vouched for him, he might still be alive. Might not have suffered a single legal repercussion. But no, he had to pursue the wild survivalist dream of going up the mountain, living off the land, becoming the true lone wolf, free of all constraints of civilization. It felt like this was it, this had to be the way.
In the end, he shot a random lady park ranger, before getting lost in the woods and dying of exposure. He was face down in a creek and missing a shoe. The news illustrated the article with his second victim’s smiling face and an absurd pic of him posing topless with an assault rifle. In my imagination he had a rambo knife in the other hand and red eyeshine.
I remember his voice from barking orders on the radio at work. You know how some people sound … ugh. Ableism policy. He had sounded like a man lacking all wit and subtlety, for whom daily life was a confusing whirl that just made him angry all the time. The surviving attendees of the gun party, in the wake of this, all lost their jobs. My immediate supervisor was their friend, and only kept his because he had to skip the event due to illness or some other obligation.
If somebody invites you to the gun party, maybe give it a pass.
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this is the part where i resist the temptation to continue the streak by intentionally breaking it, and scheduling this post for tomorrow… wait, lol, technically bc ftb is on east coast time, my streak continues.
Great American Satan says
to be clear, nothing after the first paragraph was a dream. it really happened.
Alan G. Humphrey says
Thanks for adding that comment. When I stared reading I put my browser into immersive mode and the comment was hidden before I knew it was there. The story didn’t seem to be a dream because it wasn’t disjointed like most dreams, so I scrolled back to the top to look for clues. After the second paragraph mentioned dreams again, I decided the whole thing was just a dream and continued through to the end marveling at the beautiful continuity of it. Then I popped out of immersive to read the comments and awakened to reality.
Great American Satan says
i weaves a deadly spell