The two-tailed mermaid in an urban landscape; rambling, ranting, and rotating the verbal tires now and then.

Monday, March 07, 2005

You Are an Archery Geek and You Are Proud

A warm, sunny glorious Sunday in San Francisco is the shiznit (almost as good as the warm Oakland you just came from). Especially when you’ve got a sweet recurve bow in one hand and a quiver full of titanium arrows in the other. Oh yes, life is hella good.

You walk out onto the field with your long fatigues skirt and black high-heeled combat boots, sportin’ your-lots-of-black-Johnny-Cash look, as Irish likes to say, and the breeze is lifting your hair. Everybody is smiling, and Irish himself comes running at ya with a big bear hug. The guy is strange and wonderful. Certifiable. He's an old hippy guy who never stops talking. Crazy hearty passionate about archery and all of the people he encounters. He and his buddy drag a ton of gear out to the field every weekend and just play bows and arrows with friends and strangers all day. Doesn’t get much better than that.

They remind me to shoot Olympic style, so that the string rests against the tip of my nose. I gotta stop smiling cuz it’s lifting my sunglasses and messing up my target sighting. I am a dork. A happy archery dork of the old order who just drove an hour to spend the afternoon archering with my homies. The chick shooting next to me shares my name. We bond. She is good with the bow, and she has pretty, girly nails that are just a tiny bit long. They look good on the big butch bow. She questions each shot afterwards, trying to figure it all out and unravel why she is not an instant pro. No wonder we get along. An hour into archery, the newness of it all gives way to a relaxed joy and she is hooked. The bow has called her name in its quiet, careful voice, and she has said yes. And I got to watch. Oh, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee!

I guess I can understand why Irish is out there time and time again, lugging out all that equipment for the gazillionth time. Dude now brings out a solar panel to power his mp3 player and speakers. The musical selections of the day are strange and diverse. There are several tracks that would make Michael Flatley happy. I snicker and try not to make too many Lord of the Dance jokes. I fail. There are instrumentals from The Matrix that have a bit more life to them, but they make me feel like I should be driving really fast in a really sporty car. Then we go to some strange hybrid Irish Chinese thing that confuses me. I wanna like it, but it’s still too Lord of the Dance for my industrial goth sensibilities. I wanna do an archery play list and have it going while I am out there. It would be all about Prodigy-esque beats, lots of good spaghetti western songs, plenty of industrial pounding, some of the more riled up Cocteau Twins stuff (from Treasure, methinks), the Libertines here and there, and lots of random shit that kicks ass. That’s what we need out on the field: ass-kickin’ music! Might piss off some of the local populace though. Irish is probably playing to the right level.

I laugh when Eryk the Viking shows up on the field right after I arrive. He is, in fact, not a Viking. But that’s how I think of him, so there ya go. The first time I met Eric, he shot for 5 minutes then managed to split his own arrow, both in the bulls eye, a la Robin Hood. He was pissed, cuz they were new arrows. I was amazed, cuz damn! This guy goes out and actually hunts wild boar and elk with his bow. Holy crap. He is a force to be reckoned with, but he always has this strange calm about him. Very reserved. Makes ya wanna tickle him till he giggles like a school girl. But I'll just let that idea go, cuz if I startle him he might shoot me. You have to be calm around people holding weapons. Learned that the hard way last year when I goosed a guy holding a taser.

In the field next door are the guys who fight in full armor with shields and ball-tipped pipes (aka swords). This one guy keeps getting whacked in the leg, so he has to go down to his knees as he keeps fighting, to simulate his seriously-bad-naw-it’s-only-a-flesh-wound injury. I keep seeing the theoretical blood spurting out onto the grass. But it seems a natural segue: sword-fighting geeks in field ..1, then the archery geeks in field ..2. Next should be the Dungeons and Dragons hard-core crew, drinking, carousing, and throwing their weird-ass dice all over the place as they explore yet another cavern of unknown evilness. Bad asses! Those D&D guys will fuck your shit up, punk ass bitches! I used to be one, so I should know. You talkin’ to me?!

But here I am, back in the world of responsible workingness. If there is a god I will be back on the range next Sunday. So say a little prayer to the gods of archering and whatnot. Light a stick of incense and put out some oranges for me, will ya?

1 Comments:

Blogger Googlecash said...

HI i am manik, i have started a recurve bow personal website, i like your blog, So do you want to exchange links? You can put a link to my website and i will do the same, my website name is www.recurvebow.org , I will wait for you reply, take care!
My mail iD is manikauluck@gmail.com

10:28 PM

 

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