Not sure whether it is chilling or just pathetic.
How I Love My Gun
(A note inspired by Rachel Lucas.)
What does it take to sit around and abstract a form of metal -- arguably the most pervasive plastic in all techne? To ply the material to a form requires a purpose, if the form is to be useful beyond the mere glance, and this is the most important manifestation of the thing that sets mankind apart. Oh, I think it's cute that seals crack abalone shells with rocks, or that chimpanzees jam sticky weeds into termite holes. It's even more cute when some weeper calls it "technology" and jumps up & down with the raptures over "98% of DNA" with which I'm supposed to throb in sibling resonance, but I get over it just about as quick as it takes me to pick up the TV remote and flip to "American Movie Classics".
Editor's note. I have spared our reader a lot of orgasmic waffle by undertaking a substantial spot of slash and burn editing.
... that's where a nice pistol is just the thing.
I'd be interested to know if anyone could point out a machine with such power so precisely refined into such a tight little package. It's a two-way street, to me: a marvel in the way that the thing can deliver such a multiplied projection of human mind from such a resolved application of mind: the razor-sharp set of concepts from which it emerges into material form.
I prefer a semi-auto, and the comparison is striking to me: it's been little more than a century since the idea of an auto-loading pistol came into the world, and we're just coming up on a century of powered flight. Two machines meant to extend a person's physical limits beyond those known by untold billions of human beings for thousands of years.
What a swell time to be alive.
Forever, people who required physical force for sustenance or defense were limited to what they could throw with their arms (a word come down to us with undeniable provenance). Some unknown genius started the ball slowly rolling with a bit of yew strung with sinew in order to extend the primitive power, and everybody knows that projectiles explosively propelled go back centuries, but I can't help it: when I think about standing around pouring powder out of a horn and plunging lead balls for a rate of something like two rounds a minute, it just makes me sad for people who didn't live to feel the satisfying catch of a loaded magazine into place, ready for that first rack of the slide.
I keep a pistol on my desk. I keep a magazine loaded with dry-fire pads, and, at odd moments of the day, I'll reach over and pick it up, drop the mag, clear the chamber, put that round back on top of the magazine, and put it back in place, all just to feel the action of that slide: just in order to work the machine. It's the sound and feel of it. The measured tension of the return-spring, the simple orderly coordination of the magazine spring introducing the new round to the chamber... now & then, I'll just strip off the chambered round with a hard rack of the slide, in order to marvel at the precise grip of the extractor at the edge of the brass rim.
"Look how that thing works. What a cool little chunk of engineering."
I do this the way some people reach over and tap the little swinging balls that knock into each other when they're bemused or bored. Me? I play with a little machine. It just happens to be a pistol.
Editor's note ... also happens to sound like a penis substitute to me.
Now, some people are convinced that I'm a kook. Well, you know what? They can believe that if they want to. That's their business, in the way that this is my business. I don't really care what they think.
...except that they should bloody well leave me alone with it, that is.
It's true: that's a lot of the whole point of this particular machine power.
Otherwise, however, what could possibly be more elegant in design than this?
(My Beretta 92FS)
If you can be arsed there is another *fine* entry on this blog. "Ya gotta love a woman who knows what to do with her hands and stays clear of the trigger until she's ready to discharge the weapon." This entry has brought me down on the side of "pathetic" rather than "chilling".
Jesus wept!
