From Lileks today recounting a previous communal living arrangement:
One night my roommate, a very normal fellow who was also an absolute weed fiend and once put the phone books in a trash can, put a target on the can, and stood in his closet at the far end of the dorm room and fired his rifle at the target, was making tea, and put one of those immerser coils into water.
Not the weed fiend part, but:
One summer weekend when we were visiting from Missouri, my father wanted to take us shooting, probably down at the quarry where we would some other time go. But: His wife had taken the checkbook, perhaps to thwart his plans. This was in the days before ATMs were common (in Milwaukee, they were called Tyme machines, and to have access to one cost a touch of money itself). The way to get cash on the weekends would be to go to a store where they knew you, in his case West Side Liquor, and write a check to CASH, and they would give you money out of the till. But you had to be a really good customer, and my father was.
So: He took an old cardboard Tide laundry detergent box, stuffed it with newspaper, and got out an old .22 rifle–the bent one? Perhaps. Perhaps it was not bent yet. At any rate, he moved some furniture from the wall in the room in the refinished basement which would later become my bedroom during my college years, took position at the bar all the short way across the small house, and told us we would aim for the dot over the i in the brand name. He fired one round and then went to look at the Tide box. He’d hit that tittle, all right, and the bullet had passed through the Tide box completely and embedded in the wood paneling of the wall behind. It was the only round fired that day.
Man, the past was a different place, ainna? Growing up in the working class and with a father who was rather fond of his beer. I mean, I was there, and I can hardly recount it because…. Who does that? Well, not me, not now.
