Sunday, November 05, 2006

The Girls' Guide To Disemboweling Large Cute Mammals


The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. - Henry David Thoreau

This weekend is Deer Opener in Minnesota. For those of you who don't know what that means, it is the first weekend you can legally (i. e. with a license) hunt deer with firearms in this state.

But Deer Opener is ever so much more than that. This is the weekend that seemingly every woman's husband or boyfriend (or both) are gone for the weekend trying to put a hollow-point into Bambi's mom. What that means to opportunists and bottom-feeders like me is that the bars are full of women who have a free weekend and are by God going to enjoy it. So of course last night I went out briefly with my friend Lu (her boyfriend was off hunting) then went home early and discussed the morals of killing for sport with my cat. (She's for it, by the way.)

Good Lord. I am getting old.

There was a day, by golly, when I would walk 5 miles in the driving snow to a sports bar for the chance to see a Hunting Widow's petticoats....

Yeah right. While I could regale you with tales of getting lucky on this annual event (which would all be lies), I will instead let you in on a secret: guys will have their revenge.

I intend to let all my fellow opportunists and bottom-feeders in on a great idea at our next Man Meeting. The idea is a simple one – buy your girlfriend and/or wife a rifle and a deer license and a 12-pack, and you too can have one precious free weekend a year.

This hint is of value only to those men who are currently in a Relationship, of course. Single men have every weekend free. R-guys have shit to do every weekend. Many of these things involve just going along with the Significant Other to pick out paint chips or stock up on toilet paper at Target. However, if the wife or live-in girlfriend should have solo tasks to perform, she invariably makes sure that the male involved has enough on his to-do list to last well into the next millennium. God forbid he should be able to have a beer with Hulles on Sunday....

So the deer thing is the answer, guys. Laurie Listmaker and her pals will absolutely fall for this ploy, especially this year. This is because they have heard of the recent popularity of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Just look at all the women who have this book listed in their blog profile. All the trendy ones do. So give 'em what they want, I say. We'll have us a weekend where we can make utter asses out of ourselves, just like we used to in the good old days. And in the process, we'll give cocktail waitress with cute asses and New York publicists something to bitch about on their blogs for the rest of the year. Everybody wins.

Except your spouses et. al. who went deer hunting. If they are somehow able to throw down on a 6-point buck, they are quickly going to come face to face with a rule every male learns at a tender age, at least in the Midwest: you kill it, you clean it. It's one thing to clean a walleye – and not precisely a task to relish, at that – but it's another thing entirely to disembowel a large mammal that has many organs similar to your own. This is not a task for the faint-hearted, and it certainly isn't something your sweet little dream rabbit is going to want to do. She makes you kill the spider in the kitchen, for God's sake. And imagine her horror when her female hunting pals tell her she also has to drink some of the blood of her first kill. "No way in hell" seems a pretty safe bet.

But if I'm wrong in this part of it, your woman will be coming home with new skills with a bowie knife and a taste for killing. And when she gets home, she will no doubt find out that you made an ass of yourself this weekend instead of cleaning the garage like you promised. She will find out, because remember, you gave your cell phone number to the waitress with the cute ass.

Maybe this isn't such a good idea after all. I take it back.

-- Hulles

No comments: