Found Humor

There is nothing in the sign's appearance that suggests mirth or lightheartedness. It is a utilitarian structure, single-minded in its purpose. 

There are no frills, unless you count the coat of paint. Or the matching sandbags which anchor it.

Though mute, it declares its message twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Black letters on an orange background impart the following warning 'ROADWORK BEGINS 10-30-17 EXPECT DELAYS'.

To drivers exhausted by another summer of orange barrels and creeping traffic, it provokes a weary sigh. Suddenly, the Bible's notion of eternity seems less abstract.

But on a street which remains unsullied by men in hard hats and lime green vests (not to mention actual construction equipment) over a month after the sign's installation, it is quite funny. 

We aren't talking about traffic any more, are we? 

A government-issued punch line. Imagine.

Humor takes many forms.

Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

Embattled Alabama congressional candidate Roy Moore has vowed to "take off the gloves" as his struggling campaign heads into the home stretch.

Which is fine—as long as the accused pedophile doesn't remove anything else.

Only someone like Moore could make the current members of Congress look upstanding by comparison.

Best of luck, Mr. Jones.

Thanksgiving

Amid the actual and proposed wreckage of the Trump Administration, I'm finding it a bit hard to be thankful. After repeated exposure to the Trump-whore and the self-destructive lizard brains who, blinded by their anger, know no better than to support him, I am made unspeakably joyous by term limits.

Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, the world hasn't ended. Not yet.

There's still that sweet moment where we clock out of work and have yet to assume our domestic responsibilities. We are free. In that sweet, fleeting instant, we have both a job and unstructured time.

And in that time, we are able to enjoy this, the golden age of beer-making.

Owing to modern distribution channels, we have access to a world of fragrant nectars unimagined in my adolescence. Sam Adams' Summer Ale. Their Porch Rocker. New Belgium's 1554 and spectacular Trippel. Deschutes Black Butte Porter, Leinenkugel's reliable Sunset Wheat and Berry Weiss and Trader Joe's (!) PLZNR.

A special shout-out goes to Leinenkugel's and Trader Joe's for keeping their beers affordable—even for those of us not in the one-percent. 

Drink deeply but responsibly, my friends.

There is likewise a world of frozen food out there as flavorful as it is nutritious. Number-one are Sweet Earth's artisan bowls, meatless concoctions drawing their inspiration from points the world over. 

Best is the Moroccan Tagine. Twelveth-century traders likely dined on something very similar before they set out for India or the Far East, with the region's exotic spices (allspice, cinnamon and cloves) providing a singular mix of tang underlain with sweet.

Yes, it's vegetarian. But membership is not required for consumption.

Lastly, there is the consumable known as human companionship.

Having lost my father and mother and now shepherding my long-time mate through the ugliness of early-onset Alzheimer's, death is no longer something that happens to other people.

The death of a loved one lends a whole new meaning to words like permanent and void; one I never came close to understanding when I was young.

Those who remain take on special importance.

It might be the hoariset of clichés, but before you complain about another family gathering and the attendees bounty of annoying habits and irksome opinions, be thankful you have somewhere to go.

A group to belong to.

An invitation to answer.

It is not guaranteed to always be so.

The Exception

Mistake number-one was assuming I had outsmarted my fellow man by embarking on an early-morning trip to the supermarket the Sunday before Thanksgiving. If not packed, the store was aflutter with shoppers guilty of the same ill-considered thinking as I.

Long lines emanated from the few registers the store thought it suitable to open. And being twenty-first century Americans, we were, of course, suitably distressed.

With a miniature cart barely contaminated by groceries, I opted for the express check-out lanes, which were easy to find owing to the sizeable signs proclaiming 'Express Lane 15 Items Or Less'. In my naivete, I assumed that a line of small purchases would move faster than a line of large ones.

(At least my first mistake wouldn't be lonely.)

When it dawned on me that I had been eying the racks of impulse items and gossip magazines for an unduly long time, I looked to the front of the line.

There, a stylish middle-aged woman in black boots, sporting a modern, asymmetrical bob was stuffing the tiny counter with what seemed to be an approximation of the magician who pulls out unending yards of handkerchiefs from a breast pocket. Or the dozens of circus clowns who emerge from a single, tiny car.

The stream of groceries did not end.

I attempted to stare a hole in her, but my corneal lasers were in the shop undergoing recalibration. Unbelievably, her illiteracy (to be kind) was compounded by a desire to pay with a highly-unusual form of debit card which apparently originated in eastern Europe.

When the debit card problem was at last rectified, the harried cashier loaded three full-sized bags into her cart. With no acknowledgment that she had caused anyone any inconvenience whatsoever, the woman zipped up her tailored jacket, adjusted her scarf, pulled on her gloves and sauntered out of the store.

I issued a silent prayer, thankful that it wasn't Monday morning and this creature wouldn't be making me late for work. 

And that no one else felt the need to demonstrate their holiday shopping self-importance.

Drawing a Bead on the NRA

Ask an NRA member about mass killings, or going way out on a limb, impending gun control legislation and they'll invariably respond the way you or I do when confronted with a rate hike from our car insurer: but I didn't have any accidents! I didn't get any tickets!

There's a dynamic at work which effects a giant portion of our society: a careless or irresponsible minority can have a profound impact on the rest of us. It's just how it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

Because so many of us find it impossible to drive without texting, the rest of us pay higher insurance premiums based on the rising number of collisions and damage claims that are submitted.

Other examples stretch across the entire spectrum of consumerism.

Because some of us believe that immunizing our children actually harms them, the rest of us cough up more for health care as a result of higher rates of hospitalization and treatment.

Because some of us find it necessary to trash a rental property after the landlord refuses to fetch us mocha double-lattes every morning, the rest of us spring for larger security deposits when we decide to move in.

Because cold medicine contains pseudoephedrine and is easily re-purposed as an ingredient for methamphetamine, the rest of us encounter a raft of speed bumps en route to purchasing the formerly over-the-counter medicine that keeps our nose from running.

And on and on and on it goes. As the enlightened reader of The Square Peg, please say it again: the many pay for the few.

But in an occurrence almost as startling as the repeal of gravity, gun owners remain exempt from this dynamic. They are cloistered in a pretty little bubble because they're, well, special.

Despite the fact that a disturbing proportion of gun owners adhere to the production-for-use aesthetic and fire their guns as often as possible, there is never any blow-back for remaining owners in the manner of increased license fees, scrutiny, etc.

Like gun manufacturers, gun owners exist on a plane completely removed from the rest of us, immune to the rules, consequences and dynamics of our society.

And this is as accidental as sunrise.

The National Rifle Association has labored valiantly to protect all aspects of firearm manufacture, distribution, sale, ownership and use and keep them as consequence-free as fundraising ceilings and finite numbers of lobbyists will allow.

Which, come to think of it, is as it should be. Guns are rarely labeled as organic because they contain preservatives. The kind that ensures that through the purchase of said gun, you will remain a saintly individual for the duration of that ownership.

Because you own a gun, you will forever be immune to the indignities and stresses of life, be it impending homelessness, joblessness, divorce, custody battles or the detritus from a neighbor's tree which maddeningly and inexplicably falls on your side of the property line.

Gun ownership virtually guarantees you won't ever go off half-cocked (so to speak).

This also applies to any and all residents who share the address with the gun.

Your kids will never be tempted to kill you for some perceived social embarrassment you inflicted on them in front of their peers, or for actual social embarrassment in the manner of a week-long grounding or the denial of their cell phone privileges for a weekend.

Ditto your wife when she finds out that instead of looking for a job, you've been having extramarital sex with the twenty-nine year-old divorcee across the street for the past six months while she has been working two jobs to keep things together in the interim.

Kindly ignore statistics which confirm that the gun you keep at home is more likely to be used on you than by you. They're compiled by libtards who, for some unfathomable reason, want to keep you safe.

Let's be perfectly clear: no one should ever exonerate the likes of Adam Lanza or Stephen Paddock for their selfish and gruesome carnage. But taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, we shouldn't be greasing the skids to EZ gun ownership, either.

Which is exactly what the NRA seeks to do.

You are free to disagree or deny, but even in the wake of the recent mass shootings in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Congress has before it legislation which will make it easier for gun owners to buy silencers—ostensibly to protect a hunter's hearing.

You can look it up. It's House bill H.R. 367 The Hearing Protection Act of 2017.

(Like you, I wonder if these shitheads have ever tried their hand at stand-up.)

Another seeks to gift gun-owners residing in states with Concealed Carry laws with the ability to take that protection with them—even in states with no provision for Concealed Carry.

You can look that up, too. It's H.R. 38 The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017.

(Ironic coming from a Republican-led Congress renown for trumpeting state's rights, don't you think? Can a woman carry her reproductive rights across state lines, too? Oh—didn't think so.)

Saddest of all, there is a piece of legislation which seeks to protect schmucks like you and me. It's H.R. 4168 and is called the Closing the Bump-Stock Loophole Act.

Like its title, it reeks of common sense. Which is likely why in a Congress as obedient to the NRA as a sixteenth-century wife was to her husband, it is estimated to have but a six-percent chance of ever being enacted.

Now we know what the NRA does. We know what the NRA wants to do. And we know what the NRA doesn't want to do. In order to diminish them and shrink their poisonous influence, a new approach is called for.

Here's one idea:

Being that one of the most-powerful aspects of gun ownership is the implied machismo, we start by creating a public-awareness campaign that suggests that owning a gun is something less than the ultimate expression of manliness. We then mandate that guns be cast in pink.

We repeatedly reinforce the idea that only pussies use guns. That real men carry knives and engage in hand-to-hand combat when they get the urge to kill because their favorite cartoon got cancelled or they can't get laid.

That killing people with guns is just too easy. Any peevish, self-pitying slob can squeeze a trigger. The real shining lights of the mass murder community are constantly challenging themselves. Pushing the mass murder envelope. And they embrace the old-school aesthetic of mano a mano struggle.

Cutting-edge killers get blood on themselves. They hear the labored breathing of their victims. They feel the resistance of their cartilage and ligaments. They know when a knife encounters bone, forcing an on-the-spot rethink of strategy. 

None of this nonsense of spraying of automatic gun-fire from the upper stories of a luxury resort hotel!

In all seriousness, we did it with cigarettes. We did it with drunken driving. We can do it with guns.

Providing, of course, that we want to.

The United States of Stupid

So. Who's next?

You?

Me?

Our parents?

Our siblings?

Our spouses?

Our kids?

Who will be the next sacrifice to this thing, this out-moded idea that has been protected beyond any and all reason? Is Stephen Paddock's and Scott Ostrem's and Devin Kelley's right to keep and bear arms really worth the carnage that is quickly becoming our indelible national symbol?

While our freedom of speech must give voice to white supremacists and due process guarantees a fair trial and other legal protections even to the worst of us, neither of these require the slaughter of innocents to remain viable.

We have enough guns. The psychotic and the paranoid and the hateful are not the “well-regulated militia” the founding fathers envisioned when they drafted the second amendment.

We know what we must do. It starts with the entity holding open the doors to unfettered and unregulated gun ownership. In other words, the NRA.

We must dismantle it.

Now.