NRA gun club: Join or be grounded, mister!

 

I dreamed I was living with my mom and Greg, in a condo in suburbia. I felt like I was a grown-up, maybe in my 20s, but it's entirely possible that I was my current ripe old age of 56. Whatever the case, the dynamic was that of a couple of parents trying to coerce a sullen teenager into doing something he didn't want to do, with the expected results of a whole lot of shouting and tension.

What was it that they were so fired up that I do? They wanted me to join a local gun club that was affiliated with the NRA. They had a whole plan for my social life that revolved around me getting this membership and spending all my time hanging around at the club and participating in the various programs and events that they sponsored. 

They were fixed in their position that I do this, like a couple of parents might be who wanted their kid to go to college or join the swim team. I was equally determined not to join because, well, that kind of shit didn't interest me. And this was a free country, and I had rights and so on. 

"We need to sit down and talk about this," said Greg, in an even tone. 

"There's nothing to talk about. I'm not joining, and that's that," I said. It may not have come out quite like that, though. It may have been something more like: 

"I'm not joining your fucking gun club, so you can both fuck the fuck off." I remember a lot of fucks being thrown around by me.

"You can't talk to your mother that way," Greg said, still not raising his voice.

My mom, on the other hand was livid, and her face began to turn red, starting at the neck and working its way up to her ears like a crimson and pink tequila sunrise.

"How about we just change your schedule?" she seethed through clenched teeth, her face now beet red with rage.

"Why would you need to do that?" I asked her, without the fucks this time.

"Well, you don't want to be seen with the NRA crowd, and they do their shooting in the daytime, so you can just switch everything around so you do it in the middle of the night, that way you won't see them and they won't see you," she reasoned tersely. Her logic was irrefutable, but only because it didn't appear to be present at all.

Apparently, living next to the shooting range like we did, appearances were everything. Either you were a member of this fine organization, or you were a damned commie, suited for only one thing: target practice. I guessed I'd rather be shot than join or change my schedule. I offered some kind of response indicating this, and it just pissed my mom off more. Things kind of escalated from there, and Greg had to intervene:

"Well, maybe Andrew has a point," he said, taking my side for once. 

He took me by the arm and gently led me back to my chair. I suddenly felt a wave of gratitude and regret for my mistreatment of him over the years. Perhaps I'd misjudged him. He wasn't so unreasonable after all. 

My mom was reading a brochure which had a page resembling a Little Caesar's pizza flyer, full of coupons offering discounts for the gun club's various membership options.

"Why won't you at least look over the brochure?" she demanded, and she began reading off some of the choices. 

I looked at the page of coupons, and in the fine print, the offers of "10% off membership" or "10 free shooting lessons" all required that the member purchase a condo from the organization.  I pointed this little requirement out to them, and it gave them pause. We weren't just ordering a pizza, and they didn't have an extra hundred grand to throw around. (The condos were in the $100,000 range, 1980s prices, to be sure, and probably indicative of the time period in which the dream was set.)

The dream ended with the two of them discussing whether they should ground me just on general principal for having a rebellious teenage attitude, or just forget the whole thing. I'm not certain what they decided. I woke up feeling a slight spike in adrenaline from fighting with my parents in my sleep.

Aaaand---

Just when I think I've got to get up, I remember this other tidbit: 

I was fishing with Bob Orrick and Morgan at a lake in the high mountains. There was a dock or a boat ramp on which it was necessary to be stationed during certain times of the day, due to rapidly rising lake levels. I had a feeling of unease, and wanted to get to the next fishing spot, but the fluctuations in the water level kept us near the platform. Bob was discussing the finer points of baiting hooks and netting fish and the like, while Morgan and me were scheming about how to get to the next the platform. 

Bob wanted to go home and get a pork roast out of the freezer to use as bait. I was against this idea, for one, because it would take too long to thaw, but also, I had a feeling of compassion for the pig. The pork roast in question was an entire piglet with eyes and snout and curly tail. Bob insisted that this was the natural order of things and that the giant predator fish that we were seeking would find this bait irresistible. 

I don't remember much more than that, and I'm sure I've gotten those few details mixed up or even fabricated them entirely. It was a fishing dream, and that's about it. I dreamed it first, but then my hard drive started getting full and my brain had to overwrite my next dream onto it using the same space, corrupting the original data.