This time last year I really wanted to get a BB gun so I could set up tin cans on the wall in my bike yard and shoot them. RU vetoed the idea for fear I’d shoot a cat or a bird or a squirrel or neighbor a kid; plus it’s illegal, she argued. At the time, I was sure she just didn’t understand that sitting on the deck and shooting shit was a perfectly reasonable way to express grief. But she’d been so accommodating on almost all the other ways I was dealing with grief that I didn’t begrudge her that veto.<\/p>\n
A year later I myself don’t exactly understand the sentiment to shoot shit except as expression of the futility one feels about life in the face dealing with such a crappy death. In fact, I’d forgotten how strong that sentiment was until last night when I was watching an episode form The Wire<\/em> and they showed a guy in the morgue in a white, plastic body bag with a zipper, which reminded me that we had to keep my dad’s body at the county morgue for at least a week while we were trying to figure out funeral arrangements. I imagine he was in a body bag too. As I was falling asleep I thought to myself “of course” I wanted to shoot crap with a BB gun.<\/p>\n These days I try to talk more casually about my dad dying, the way I talk about going to Paris or moving out here or a breakup, to convey it’s significant, but “hey I’m ok.” Or at least I feel like that’s how I’ve been trying to talk about it recently. Who knows? Maybe I’m not successful. I guess the only thing I can truly identify is that for the most part I don’t feel compelled to talk about his death, at least not at length, which seems about right for right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This time last year I really wanted to get a BB gun so I could set up tin cans on the wall in my bike yard and shoot them. RU vetoed the idea for fear I’d shoot a cat or a bird or a squirrel or neighbor a kid; plus it’s illegal, she argued. At […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}