Collateral Damage

Want to hear something funny?  February of 2014 was supposed to be all about me.  Well, me and The Last Prospector. I put a ton of work into creating a virtual blog tour for the book, from scratch mind you.  Finding the time to line up tour dates and create enough content to go around wasn’t easy in the spare moments in between my dad’s needs.

 

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My dad with his “grandchild”

 

But I did manage it and am pretty proud of all the guest posts that got banged out under pressure.  Hospice was supposed to be my ticket to ride.  Not that I was going to ignore my dad for the whole month, but I fully intended to let the professionals do their jobs so I could do mine.

Now, as the dust settles, it’s pretty easy to see that I let down everyone involved.  All those folks who opened their blogs to me, put in a lot of effort to promote my book and went 10 extra miles to accommodate my special needs life, were left with an absentee guest.  My apologies to them all, you all deserved a lot better from me.

It appears that apologizing is my life’s work lately.

Yesterday, I shared the story of the agonizing decision to remove the guns from my father’s house.  If only the agony was done with the removal, if only outsiders would have left bad enough alone.  That did not happen.

For the sake of family harmony, I won’t publicly identify the person who repeatedly threw gasoline on my bonfire.  Suffice it to say that it’s not a blood relation, but still part of the family.  I’ve assigned the person the alias of Loki, the Norse god of trickery and chaos.  

After we removed the guns from my father’s home into my brother’s care, I thought the worst was over.  My brother offered to facilitate the sale of the weapons.  Three of the guns had precarious legal repercussions and only a handful of people in the area could legally purchase them.  What I wanted most was for every gun and every bullet to be sold to a responsible THIRD party and out of my family for good.

But Loki had other plans.  Despite having no experience at all with any gun more lethal than a Nerf or a Super Soaker, he became obsessed with purchasing all of the guns and the ammo.  He made repeated calls to my dad making offers.  My dad has never liked Loki all that much, my dad was insulted by the offer, my dad gets confused easily and was still angry that his guns were stolen from him in the first place.

Loki would not leave my dad alone, nor me, nor my brother.  Despite my brother telling Loki that those guns were not for him, despite my stated preference that the guns go outside the family, despite the family member closest to him demanding Loki to stop.  Yes, despite all of those things, Loki just kept going.

The pressure put on me because of Loki’s actions are hard to measure.  Let’s just say the nuisance ache in my midsection is most likely a former bit of carbon that is now a tiny diamond.  We had to get those weapons sold, we had to do it quickly before Loki’s interference detonated a bomb that would incinerate my family.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to sell an armory in a heavily regulated state on the fly?  

Let me please take a moment to sarcastically thank Dick (not his real name either) at Sacramento Black Rifle (no backlink for you, Dick) for wasting an entire Friday afternoon for me.  Because, your selfish inactions added tremendous stress to my already grossly over-stressed day.

The hero of this piece is Don from River City Gun Exchange.  He came in on Saturday morning, he has a storefront and a business card, two things that made it easier for my dad to sell the weapons.  Not only did he make a very fair offer for the lot, he went a tiny bit higher to make my father feel like he negotiated especially well.

People like Don are heroes.

Within two hours after the deal was struck, all the proper paperwork was signed, the inventory removed from Dad’s house and it was over.  Blessedly over.  The guns are gone, Loki has been defused and I am profoundly grateful this situation is finally resolved.

You might think all this drama would make me actively anti-gun.  While I’ve never owned a gun and it’s highly doubtful I ever will, I’ve been surrounded by responsible gun owners most of my life.  For every one doofus like Loki, there are ten conscientious people like my dad and brother.  Unfortunately, it’s only the Lokis who make the evening news.

As for Loki, I’m too exhausted to hate him.  He’s not a bad person, he actually has a very big heart and many wonderful qualities.  His impulsive stubbornness is not one of them.  This too will pass.

Part 1:  Crumbling Of A Caregiver

Part 2:  Gun Control

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