bring me the head of bambi garcia

it was a cake, but it was more.
with the addition of the hunter, and his prey,
it was a reflection of all that was good in birthdays,
and cakes, and killing badly outgunned prey.

"Fish," he said, "you are a friend of the old man and he kills you. It is love, this killing. I cannot knot. If you cannot knot, you cannot truly kill your love."

The young man thought that if only the old man were here, but he is not. He remembered the last words of the old man: "Cuidado los quitos!"

~hemingway's nephew

******************

he liked things to make sense.

but in those days, fewer things seemed to make sense, and more seemed to resemble a hemingway parody contest.

this was troublesome at a time when good sense was increasingly insensate, or insensitive, or in absentia, and the examples were marching, legion.

for one, there was the ongoing and inexplicable and chaotic combination of guns and children. could there have been any doubt that children + guns was among the worst ideas since, say, lindsay lohan + tequila?

there could not. but that was just one opinion, of course. other people, with differing opinions, believed kids + guns = a party.

"They have birthday parties with go-karts and trampolines -- with proper education before going into a gun range, why not a birthday party?" said Texas gun range owner David Prince.

early indoctrination teaches children to treat guns with respect, they said. it teaches them to be careful with firearms. they (and by 'they' he meant "idiotas de muerta") probably would not use the word 'indoctrination,' because it sounded subversive and socialistic. at a time when those words had lost all meaning.

regardless, a review revealed 30,000 gun deaths in his country each year~~over 17,000 by suicide. about 1,000 accidental fatalities. leaving 12,000 intentionally inflicted gun deaths in the land of the free and the home of the grievously wounded. every year. or, a thousand per month, he thought through a booze-soaked forest of half-thought calculations.

oh, yes, they were very careful with their guns.

but why speak of unpleasantries when once there was talk of parties?

Some parents are already expressing concern over the new party spot. "It makes me very nervous," Dawn McMullan told ABC News' Dallas affiliate WFAA. "I think eight-year-olds, developmentally, can't tell the difference between play and reality sometimes."

let's be straightforward here, he said, where we are among friends and can speak straightforwardly and forthrightly~~there are many, many adults who cannot tell the difference between play and reality. some of them carry guns, and some of them teach children that guns are good and american and manifest destiny.

we can say this here, to one another, he said, because we are bold, and not afraid to speak of such things.

no matter how maddening and tragic they may be.

no matter how little sense they make.

********************

He noticed them first by the sound. You always notice them first by the sound. When you hear the sound, the sound that they make, your insides go all moist and soft.

"Hijos of mothers!" he swore.

They came in a feeding frenzy, lusting for blood, biting, sticking, sucking, defecating. He fought them with the only weapons he had. Arms flailed in wild slashing cuts, hands slapped and splattered red tissue, feet stamped great gouges in the good black swamp mud.

They were too much for him. He was a mass of welts and corrupted flesh. He felt defeated. They had taken his blood but he was not destroyed.