Bringing bloated textbooks to justice
Posted By Ing on June 22, 2010
A follow-up to my “Roots” post…
The hefty lit-studies compendium that defeated my newly acquired .22 rifle, stopping the bullet just short of halfway through, has been vanquished.
My even more newly acquired 30/30 (or is it .30-.30?) blew 3 hefty holes right through it at about 60 yards. That book is about as thick as the average metro phone book, give or take a bit, so I’m feeling pretty good about my newfound firepower. (Grin.)
Man, that thing is fun to shoot. Makes a powerful big bang, kicks enough to let you know you’ve fired a real gun , and handles real nice. I know, it’s not in the same league as those super-velocity 400+ yard death dealers. But it could still take down a deer at 200 yards (if I had a scope, which I don’t…and if I wanted to kill one, which I don’t).
Plus, it’s hard to beat the old-west cachet and the sound — that distinctive chock-chink — of a lever-action rifle. Now that’s a sound that means business.
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And a clarification of that “roots” thing…
I’m not really serious about that whole deal. Well, not entirely serious, anyway.
True, where I grew up, there is a pretty hefty element of God-and-guns and anti-intellectual fervor — though in fairness, I have to say the majority are simple, decent people, some of them uncommonly kind. Unfortunately, there’s also a hard minority of the aggressively ignorant. Fortunately, however, my roots are more in the tradition of the country schoolteacher/educated farmer than anything else.
Still, the tiny town I call my childhood home is the kind of place where nearly everybody has a varmint gun, if not a deer rifle, and to this day people can and do walk 2 minutes outside their back door and limber up the ol’ rifle for a bit of practice. That’s where I’m coming from with this “roots” thing.
The part where I’m gleefully shooting my old college textbooks full of holes?
Not exaggerated.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved college. I even enjoyed grad school. Well, parts of it. The good parts were AWESOME, and I wouldn’t want to trade them for anything. But the bad parts were fucking awful. I think they took years off my life. (And I’m not kidding, either.) If you know anything about me, you know that I love to read and write more than just about anything — and 18 months into that grad program, there was no joy left.
The exact books I’m shooting aren’t the ultimate emblems of the soul-destroying part of grad school — they’re just the last ones left. My lamentable tendency to hoard books is the only reason I still had them when I went searching for satisfying targets.
Not only do those books make great targets, they make great irony: I’m using them more now, and writing more about it, than I ever did when I was only reading them.
Poetic justice.
Hey, I wouldn’t say your tendency to hoard books is lamentable. Well, it might be lamentable to your wife, or your housecleaner, or your movers.
I don’t think I’ve held a gun since I was in Scouts. Even then I didn’t really enjoy it. I only did it because of peer pressure and the whole education necessity. But hey, blow them books away. It sounds more fun to me now than it would have back then.
It’s lamentable to me because I am our mover. It took a whole day to box them up and half a U-Haul to carry them last summer when we moved. The wife is almost as much into the whole book thing as I am, so at least they’re not a source of domestic conflict. :)
Feels kind of sacrilegious to even talk about willfully destroying books, but this whole shooting-them-full-of-holes thing has been surprisingly cathartic. And fun. I only wish I’d been able to do the same things to the books and papers that *really* had the bad juju — but the negative associations with those were stronger than my book-hoarding compulsion, so they went to the landfill a long time ago.
I probably had more fun with the Boy Scout hunter’s education and marksmanship stuff than you did — but still, even though I’ve never been much of a gun person, I’ve been wanting to have one (or two, as the case may be) for a while.
They make great toys. :) And I’m justifying the whole thing with the home-defense and what-if-armageddon-struck-and-we-had-to-protect-our-food-storage-from-all-the-people-who-don’t-have-any and what-if-we-had-to-hunt-for-food arguments. (Yeah, those arguments totally don’t hold water; how many times has Armageddon struck in…oh…say, the last 2,000 years?)
Well, I love books just as much as you do. But in my defense of having to dust and move books…..most of mine are on my Kindle now. I think I have read about 58 books on it since I got it. I don’t mind the books at all honey!
Some textbooks were just made for demolition.
R.