Editor’s note: People are chasing the astonishing amount of newly printed money flying about. Some perfectly reasonable people have tried to find a path forward through the current dislocation. This is Point Loma’s take.

-Vic

Taking Things off the Table – and The New Normal

Taking things off the table is another way of stating the old cliché of “bait and switch.” We’ve all been victims of that game, just depends on your circumstances. So I am going to dredge the past 60 or so years for some insights for today, and how it is never too late to grow up. In these desperate times, we’ve all got to dig deep, and it may be a little astonishing at what you find out about who you really are. I’ve managed to rock my own world.

I grew up with guns. My step-dad was a hunter and we learned how to shoot handguns and shotguns; we went deer, quail, and duck hunting every year, not matter how cold it got. We shot hand-thrown skeet off the end of our beach off Mobile Bay in Montrose, Alabama, along with our gun nut neighbors. We had a whole screened in pavilion down there full of duck decoys and a kitchen for cooking birds and sea food. Unfortunately, it did not survive Hurricane Camille, which struck shortly after we had moved from there to bigger digs in downtown Fairhope in the Fruit and Nut district – shop that neighborhood for over-priced real estate these days. Then we moved further up the social scale but down more south to our waterfront paradise in Point Clear. We had guns around all of the time – hell, my dad’s pickup truck had a gun rack in the back with a .22 rifle and a 410 shotgun hanging – try driving around like that in Maryland these days; and I had an ice chest usually full of cold Bud when I was home on leave. Life was good growing up as a semi-educated redneck and life guard in Lower Alabama.

My step-dad before he died gave me two guns – an elegant French-made hexagon barrel hunting rifle in a rosewood case, the kind you had to assemble a la a James Bond assassination rifle. The second was a silver chrome 1906 Colt 44 Peacemaker revolver with ivory handles, the same gun that General George S. Patton used to wear. He had just had it re-finished and presented it to me in a well-worn brown calf-hide holster about a month before I left home to join the Navy where, even though I qualified for pistol and rifle medals, we had way more interesting ordnance to consider dropping; and we did do that on Midway in pretty incredible ways about ten years later; yes we watched ourselves do that.

For obvious reasons, I couldn’t take my personal weapons with me to OCS, and then on the ship, and then later on to Europe. By that time, my step-dad had passed, and my mother not knowing his wishes sold my guns to some bull-shit collector. I was pretty fucking pissed off, but what the hell, she was a still grieving widow and not cognizant of all family drug deals. And besides, we didn’t need guns then, in all of the places where we have lived, but maybe now we do.

This has not been a snap decision, as I have been thinking about it for a long time. My concern about having home weapons is that my kids would find them and then try to figure out how to use them like in a real game of Doom. They are smart kids, but total fucking idiots – Autism has its limits and common sense ain’t part and parcel of that package deal. However, biometric gun safes do work, as I am finding out. But before it bought that little bit of a final life insurance policy, I did invest (via USAA) in a security service which you will recognize:

So, this was the first move. I looked at the Wi-Fi offerings that were available on Amazon and at Best Buy which were quick to set up, and cheap. My soon-to-be NSA hacker son did his own research and demonstrated to me how easily those systems could be defeated by a handheld cellphone jamming signal. ADT is hardwired and can’t be spoofed, and I had them install an outside siren that will singe the hair off of your gonads (we tested it) so that gets rid of the rookie looters – it is the hard core that I am more concerned with. My next door neighbors are great people but in their 70s and trusting in the “system” to protect them. The day I had my alarm system installed, I asked if they had one and any home weapons. They didn’t, but I had two yard signs so it told them “well, you’ve got one now – where would you like me to pound in your sign.” But I knew that it wasn’t enough. So, I went and exercised what is left of my 2nd Amendment rights in the People’s Republic of Maryland, and bought myself The Governor.

It’s a pretty bad-ass piece of gear – it fires .45 Long Colt, ACP rounds, and .410 shotgun shells all at once; like something out of the Wild, Wild West. The problem is that even though our Governor and otherwise good guy Larry is a Republican, he shut down all public and private gun ranges as non-essential functional businesses and thereby kowtowing to the anti-gun commies and the voting looter class and other rent-seekers so we can’t engage in target practice. Really?

We have a few Maryland State Delegates who live in or near our neighborhood tucked into our semi-hidden and otherwise non-descript left-handed crook off the Severn River; Pat Sajak has a big house further up the river but he also has his own body guards. There is usually an Anne Arundel County Sheriff SUV angling around here to respond to any calls for assistance.

We realize that the Charm City bad guys know where we live – we’ve had our share of Saturday afternoon scouts over the past few years sniffing out alarm systems and bad dogs. I’ve run a few of them off, and even called 911 one Saturday night on some asshole who knocked on my door at 2030, after evading my video alarm, and entertained me with a weak minstrel show on how he was collecting money for inner-city kids up in Baltimore. I convinced him in my finest Marine Corps Command Voice that I learned from my best-man Dale that it would be a good idea for him to leave NOW. The cops showed up about five minutes later and jacked his ass up – turns out he had been harassing people in neighborhoods up and down Route 2 and had a four-page rap sheet. The lead Anne Arundel County Deputy Sheriff came down and thanked me for calling them in, since the guy had been threatening anyone who turned him in to further un-named retribution if they didn’t give him any money.

When I had confronted the guy he told me that he had a civil right to be on my property – that was when I first really realized that I needed something like The Governor. I fervently hope that I never have to really use it, but otherwise, I could be dead for at least four minutes before the cops showed up to catch the bad guy raping my wife – which that option is now off the table.

Taking lots of things off the table is a great way to equalize an otherwise unequal playing field. I learned early on from my good bud B’wana that having a clean haircut, driving a quiet car and wearing conservative preppy clothes were a great shield for all kinds of minor discretions – no one suspects you of harboring ill-motives, much less those that involve a debutante’s virginity – and alcohol may or may not have been involved. Go to church on Sunday, and get down on your knees to confess your sins – it’s actually a great system. Moms love you, and you get to meet new chicks. People thought that we were fine upstanding young men, even though we were life guards, much less senior naval officers later on. It was something of a misnomer I suppose all around. But it is a philosophical approach that has served me well for more than 40 years. The logic is impeccable – if you don’t put it on the table, then it doesn’t exist.

The other thing I learned to take off the table was to be well-dressed. I did pay attention and read a few of those self-help retirement things during TAP and saw how little attention people (and I mean men here) paid homage to how to dress for success. It is really not hard, just be aware of your choices, assuming we still have the option of wearing power suits, and understand how to dress appropriately for whatever the hell the situation is that you are getting into. I spent extra money buying bespoke suits, shirts, shoes, and ties, to make sure that I was ALWAYS the best-dressed guy in the room. When I showed up, you looked like a slob, while I looked like a million (actually at JIEDDO, it was a billion bucks), so now we are going to do business – and I’m not in any way concerned about how I look, but now you are. The only guy who I could not consistently out-class was General Meigs – he used to eye what I was wearing when I entered his office or a meeting and always gave me a once over, a wry grin and a head nod as if – you’ve got it son. The world has not manufactured many individuals who can communicate with and command you with looks that speak volumes – Meigs was all that. He hooked me on a phone call, confided in me since I was a Navy guy and he couldn’t trust all of the Army guys around us, but after a whirlwind year then he took his wisdom off the table and left.it.up.to.me. Yikes.

A few other things that we as a society take off the table, or inoculate ourselves against, are simple but manifold things that you may not notice. It’s like teaching everyone basic first aid, CPR, fire-fighting in the Navy, and getting all of the childhood good habits and later vaccinations that we are required to get in order to survive at least the bad shit out there we can still conquer. I’m not sure what the COVID-19 scar is going to be, but I imagine it could be something like the small-pox scar – do you have one?

Almost everyone on the planet at one point back in the 1960-80s shared that until it was eradicated. You know if you have one, since it is usually a pock-marked patch of skin on your upper left shoulder – I still remember getting mine something like 60 years ago, which was renewed when I got in the Navy back in 1980, and I could see it on the people in other countries that I visited over the years that were in the tropics and the kids didn’t wear T-Shirts. It was weird at the time when I got the first one – the nurse smeared some creamy substance on my shoulder, then applied this stippling gun which chewed up my skin like it was so much hamburger, and then applied a big wad of a cotton ball, taped on a bandage, and admonished me to not to scratch it. The resulting festering scab was one itchy leaky son-of-a-bitch that hung around for over a week. But we all got over it.

That was one thing that everyone on the planet shared at some point in time. I imagine the COVID-19 vaccine will be something similar, at least burned somehow into our collective psyches. However, in the meantime and trusting no one that I don’t know for bad intent or is it just diseased, just assume that I am no further than a few feet away from a loaded weapon to defend myself and my own. Fucking with me is no longer on the table – enough goddamn it.
So to be legal, I have bought three gun safes – one for under the bed, one for ammo in the basement, and one for my car and my new CC pistol. Don’t worry, I have signed up for the proper training and licensing, so I’m just going back to my roots. It’s not the same world we have gotten used to over the past 40-50 years, and the bad guys don’t give a fuck, anyway. These days, I’m beginning to believe that only a fool doesn’t go around anywhere unarmed. I’ve learned to face it as the new normal and I refuse to be a victim of someone else’s emotions or fetishes, so I’m taking that off the table. Wearing an NH-95 mask and carrying a big gun, it’s like being the COVID-19 Lone Ranger – Hi-Ho Silver Away…

I remain your faithful servant.

Copyright 2020 Pt Loma
http://www.vicsocotra.com