%%diary-floodtide%% and I had the same kind of weekend- so full that it feels like an obscenity to try to describe it.

I'm reading The Human Stain, by Philip Roth. It's a book of such understanding and patience and bitterness that I don't know where to begin in quoting it...

Zuckerman on sex, my favorite lines so far:

"How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are."

That one I find comforting.

Anyway, I took Chris to Lime & Coconut on Friday night for an expensive (sorry, New Yorkers, $67 is expensive down here) dinner out. We do this every once in awhile. To my disappointment, the gorgeous waitress whose name I never learned has been replaced by a young girl with sticks for legs.

Chris is affected by loud noise (perhaps due to his crippling arthritis, or perhaps because of his quixotic search for equilibrium.) But we got seated in the back of the restaurant, right near the stage. The guy who was playing was named Atlanta Greg. Christopher sat and listened to him for four hours. I mostly fidgeted. I had seared tuna, he had grouper, and we both had sizable glasses of sangria. He didn't want to leave.

I slept at his place, and the next morning we watched a couple episodes of Alias while waiting for Danny to show up. Danny's my second cousin twice removed, meaning my mother's brother's wife's father's brother's son. (I think I've said that before, but I like it so I've said it again.) Carol brought me a hamburger for breakfast, and Danny and I hit the road after distributing the ammo by caliber amongst the three gun cases.

We drove back up to New Port Richey in separate cars. We had to rent goggles, earmuffs, and buy a little more .45 ammunition before entering the shooting range. It came to around $47, and Danny paid, on the understanding that I'd pay him back.

"Range" is a little bit of an exaggeration. More like lanes. There were eight or ten of them packed into a long, windowless room painted grey. There wasn't any air conditioning, and consequently the place was about 120 F, full of body odor and the thinnest smell of fire.

Danny showed me how to load and shoot the .38 first. I was shaking. I'd wanted him to take me, but having a gun in my hands- a loaded one- made me instantly nervous. I couldn't help flashing on the time a friend's father, drunk and stoned, and took out his revolver and started waving it around. That time I'd felt as though no matter what happened I would not get out of that room alive. It was the same at the firing lane. I wasn't so much nervous about shooting my own feet off as I was about the swaggering men a few rows down who kept appraising each others' pieces, and then shooting off eight rounds in quick succession.

After messing up the loading process a couple times- I was so nervous I'd tried to put the Makarov's clip in backwards, and Danny had a good laugh at my expense- I fired off two cartidges of five rounds each. The first couple shots I hit the paper target in the crotch. Another two hit to the left and right. It's harder than it looks. You don't just point and shoot if you're seriously trying to hit something. You really do have to use the sights, and even then there's no guarantee you're going to hit a man-sized target at seven yards.

I got the hang of it, though, and hit the target right in the 10 in the middle of the bullseye. Twice. Seriously. It was like Robin Hood, people.

So after that Danny decided I'd graduated to the .45s. He'd brought two. They were much harder to shoot, and no matter how carefully I'd aim I'd still miss the target entirely so I couldn't even tell how to correct my aim. We went through a hundred rounds each on those before I went back to the Makarov. By that time my hand had started to hurt a little.

Some guy walked into the booth next to mine with a massive, and I mean just ridiculously huge handgun, a Magnum of some kind that fired homemade rounds that were (he said) .38 bullets housed in a .45 cartridge, with more gunpowder behind them. That part I believe, because every time he shot at his apparently bulletproof target (with his Double Xtra Bonus Laser Sights) there'd be this shockwave that shook even the booth walls. I'd feel it in my bones, as if there weren't any walls between us at all. Supposedly the bullets discharged their powder more slowly, so that the Magnum had almost no recoil on it.

That guy messed up my aim. I tried shooting the Makarov with one hand, and couldn't even hit the target. Danny nailed it with his left, which he said he used not because he's left handed but because it makes it easier to hit the clip release with his left index finger.

Eventually we left. I still have the targets in my truck's cab. How strange, that after watching people use guns on television and in movies for decades, when I finally had a couple in my hands I felt absolutely nothing. It wasn't particularly enthralling or empowering. It was fun, and my arm felt like dead weight the next day, and I was even a little good at shooting the .38, but somehow the experience of shooting didn't live up to the mythology, didn't make me feel like John McClane. I suppose that's a good thing.

The clerk tried to get me to buy a Glock. In my hand, it felt topheavy and a little awkward. I was much more interested in the huge revolvers, which Danny said were dead accurate, had little recoil (I'm convinced that's what did me in with the .45s), were cheaper and more "sportsmanlike," though not intended for what the beefy clerk called "tactical" purposes. Tactical purposes like what? Like ambushing local geriatrics? I thought about buying one before it occurred to me that I'm broke. It'd be a fun hobby, and I can see getting into it, but not now.

Honestly- I'm not trying to be cheesy here- shooting all Saturday morning made me realize how easy it is for people to kill other people, and how miraculous and reassuring it is that even though we can do so at around $0.20 per victim and with minimal effort, most of us don't. There was an entire display's worth of weaponry, waiting for me to plunk $250 down on the counter. Everyone was so nonchalant. I suppose these things become obvious when you've been around guns for awhile.

After that Sean and I packed up the trucks with band equipment and drove down to Tarpon. We had an audience of at least 150 people, not the best we've done but not bad either. The playing, though. Everyone was into it. Our two drummers' rapport was like they were some four-handed creature, and the ease with which they traded licks- it was like they shared the same set of neurons. We were too loud, but the audience kept shouting (nice!) things at us and didn't make any requests. The bar's owner told Sean we were the best band he'd had come through in years, and he offered us a once-a-month gig for a generous portion of the cover charges that would amount to around $150 per band member.

The next day I went to Books-A-Million to pick up a copy of The New Yorker before going to Bob Evans for breakfast, and the clerk asked me if people ever told me I looked like someone else.

"Yeah," I said. "People're always telling me I look like their cousin, best friend, whatever."

"You look a lot like Tobey Maguire. You have the same- thing," she said, rubbing her jaw in a Fu Manchu-type gesture.

So after that I decided the weekend pretty much couldn't get any better.