Tom

I have known Tom for about 15 years and we used to hang out all the time. We would get together with a bunch of our friends and play Warhammer 40k or D&D (STFU and keep reading!) while drinking Coke and eating McD’s cheeseburgers. Remember when they were 39 cents each on Wednesday? Yeah! That was amazing for us then.

Anyway, over the years, we naturally spent less and less time as the group of friends we once were, but a few of us still stay in touch via email or whatever. Tom is the only one, who really has spent much time with me over the last few years. Although I still value the other guys, they are busy living their lives too, so I can wait. Tom stayed local for the most part and my oldest son calls him “Uncle Tom” which is a pretty badass title to be someone’s uncle and not be blood.

Well, we had a beer tasting a few weeks back and I never heard from old bald-ass and I was being pissy about it. The beer tasting came and went and finally I heard from him; he was all doped up on pain meds after having been in a pretty bad truck accident. Black ice into the median basically sums it up.

In a nutshell, Tom was sick of never having broke a bone, so he thought it would be great timing. Hit icy roads in the afternoon, careen into the median of I-90 in a full-size Chevy truck and not have the airbags deploy. His left leg was twisted all over the driver’s footwell and ended up being broken in several places. He then crawled from the truck onto the pavement in the twenty-something degree weather waiting for help to arrive.

Luckily for Tom, help did come and he did get treated. The cost of the hospital stay, treatment and ambulance ride (What a little pussy, he should have walked) are somewhere along the lines of the difference between his yearly wage and mine…. Basically, Tom has to live like poor man Jack for a bit to pay off those pins, plates and screws in his leg. They are pretty gnarly though.

This all happened the second week of December and I was happy to have spent the last couple days hanging out with him. We had dinner the 30^th, he came over to celebrate New Year’s Eve and then we went to brew some beer on New Year’s Day. All in all, it was substantially better than the previous few weeks. He has been going mad sleeping at his parents’ house and reading books drinking smuggled in whisky and vitamin water.

I tried to convince him to write a guest post about his hospital experience and the trippy ass dreams he had on all the pain meds. The ghost cat under the bed sheets was an especially interesting part of the story. We will see if he comes through with that or not. Anyway, here is a pic of Tom with the only facial hair I’ve ever seen on him. Give him a red hat and yellow ear muffs and he could be Yukon Cornelius from “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.

A Very Scary Hole in the Wall

I am taking this story from my friend’s recent experience at his house; it is all too familiar to many, including me. I’ll preface this with saying that the guy in the story is not a bad person, but rather just made a bad series of choices. No hard feelings.

If your friends are drinking and have guns, don’t let them handle them with ammo. We all know someone, somewhere who has seen or heard of someone making a mistake that hurt or killed someone being careless. I would hate to be responsible for the death of anyone unless it was purposeful; I could at least live with myself if it were. The events that unfolded the other night were foreshadowed early in the night, when the liquor and beer was just coming out.

We all were outside on the porch drinking beers and BBQing the most amazing burgers I’ve had in a while when another person, whom I had not met before, came outside. He noticed that I and three others had pistols on our hips in holsters. I say again: “IN HOLSTERS”. This guy tells us he has his gun and out from his winter coat he fishes a 9mm Smith and Wesson pistol. The first indicator of trouble was the guy’s nonchalance of weapons safety. He waves the muzzle around and crosses my friend’s chest with the bore. I fought off the urge to just cold cock the guy right there.

He had not even had the gun in hand for 2 seconds before he did something dangerous and lucky for him, we are all very comfortable. My friend who had just been muzzle swept calmly asked the guy to clear the pistol “just for a sanity check” as he put it. I may not have been so kind if it had been my flesh in front of the gun. We saw the pistol was unloaded, but did have a loaded magazine.

The rest of the night went on without incident as we all dined on cow flesh and beers; a little whisky visited our lips as well. After my meal, my family and I left the house for home. We wished everyone well and headed home.

A little while after we left, the remaining four men were inside the house talking while the aforementioned gentleman was showing off his 9mm. My friend’s two young daughters were winding down for the night and his wife and two female friends were chatting in the kitchen area. Suddenly, the guy slaps the loaded magazine into the pistol, which had been locked open, and chambers a round. He then proceeds to pull the trigger and a round fires, bounces off a nearby desk and buries itself into the exterior wall of the house.

Nobody was hurt. There is now a rule in the house that nobody other than myself and a select few others are allowed to have weapons. Just hearing what had happened makes me shudder and think of what all could happen. In the end, that guy learned an amazing lesson and only has a little shame and embarrassment to show for it; someone could have been killed.

Nobody, no matter how highly-skilled is immune to making stupid mistakes, so the best thing to do is reinforce safety often. As they say, you can’t call a bullet back.