Upon inquiry I told my kids, ‘I want a bb gun for Christmas. Gimme a bb gun and books.’ I never had a bb gun as a kid, undoubtedly ’cause ‘you’ll shoot yer eye out’, though the more likely victim would have been a sibling or cousin. But the clan just didn’t do guns, so it wasn’t ever much of an issue for me. I got an archery set once, with a 20-pound fiberglass bow and arrows that could maybe pierce an empty cardboard box from three feet away; sure enough, my brother shot a cousin in the back with it in one of those classic get-out-of-the-way-or-I’ll-shoot-you preadolescent power plays while he and I were skulking around looking for something to slay there on the wintry hillside at the grandparents’; she didn’t move, so, whap, he shot her in the back from about twenty yards, the arrow almost denting her woolen overcoat when it hit, though, natch, unleashing screams akin to those of a woman in childbirth, and my brother was in the shit house with the clan elders for the rest of the day, and then forever the example of why we don’t do bb guns: kids are insane.

But I’m a responsible adult, and I want a bb gun for Christmas so I can shoot cats in the ass. They’re disturbing the peaceable kingdom I’m creating in the back yard for the lion to lay with the lamb, doin’, as the darling calls it, my St. Francis routine with the birds and squirrels. The neighborhood cats claim the yard as a private hunting ground and latrine, killing birds, though apparently peacefully coexisting with the three rats I found drowned out there after the hurricane. They are, in the eyes of the lord of this kingdom, irredeemably dysfunctional and need to be forcefully driven off though not exterminated ’cause some family loves ‘em; hence, though, St. Francis with a gun preachin’ to the squirrelies and birdies and occasionally plunking a cat in the ass. Well, and maybe whoppin’ any bushy tail with the brains and chutzpah to make it past the squirrel guard on the birdie feeder, hummin’ ‘this is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings and ’round me rings the music of the spheres’ you fuckin’ squirrel your food is on the ground whap, thus enforcing my own pax Keeneana within my fences.

And maybe getting off a few shots at the dogs beyond my borders who break into a veritable orgy of cacophony every few hours—whap! whap! whapety whap! now shut the hell up, I want peace. ‘Course then you have the yard crews with their leaf blowers blastin’ through—everybody’s yard gets done on a different schedule—so that’d make another good whoppin’ target. Indeed, give me a bb gun for Christmas and there’ll be no end to the reign of pax Keeneana.

It’s Tuesday with The Queen—who sleeps—and we’re deep in the heart of suicide season, being my moniker for winter in Houston, where it is gray, mushy, and cold and darkness falls before the evening news; the netherworld of Hades. We’re enduring some kind of two-step crud down here that I laid out as beginning in the sinus and ending out the ass, but others have experienced it in the reverse order; a tag-team virus, the guy on his way out of the sinus high-fiving it with the guy on his way in to the stomach, and vice versa. It snowed here last week, a ‘freak’ as they say ’storm’, undoubtedly part of the whole two-step conspiracy.

This is weather most appropriate for Seattle, the land of Seattle (!) Suzanne, from whom I’m waiting to hear after her trip to Israel, and hence the cause of recalling a book of poems by Billy Collins she bought me on one of our infrequent get togethers called Sailing Alone Around the Room (cf Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World, who was the first to do it), amazed that I didn’t know he was America’s Poet Laureate (‘you know, like Robert Frost’ with a twang of superiority; I got even in the esoterica contest by knowing how to conduct a five-pattern musically). My bb gun musings of pax Keeneana elicited recollection of the first poem in Collins’ book:

Another Reason Why I Don’t
Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.