Entry 104 - Guns and Brothers

Guns and Brothers

I'm not a huge fan of guns, but I don't dismiss them as some sort of evil talisman either. I know a couple of people who a.) I call friends and b.) who do the whole gun thing, and besides secretly thinking that they are a little wacked and perhaps covering for some other subconcious deficiency, I don't give them too much hell about it.

My brother Stan has always been a bit of a “scrappy fellow”; exactly the kind of guy you want over your shoulder in a bar fight. Yes, I think he has always cultivated that sort of image, but truth be told, he is a very good man in every sense of the word: a good father, a good brother, and, as it happens, a good cop.

Being that I spent a good portion of my twenties ensconced in an artifactual social group – the “modern hippies” – I always felt a sort of wry satisfaction when I got to tell an assembled group of pseudo-intellectuals that my brother was “a pig”. I always made sure to mention that he lived 1500 miles away, so as not to be labeled a “narc”, which would surely cost me any measure of appeal I had to the hippy chicks; lord knows I needed all the help I could get.

Well, I can happily say that those days have passed, but my brother is still a cop. Yes, at family gatherings we still drink lots of beer together and laugh about the fact that I am a “computer dork” and he is a “pork product of some nature”.

Which is what makes this picture so amusing to me. Anyone else might see a guy with a bigassed shotgun; I see my big brother. ◊