saltymactavish.bsky.social
I wear eye black when skeeting
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Here’s our wicked cool Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/KitchenTableWorks
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Sam…💚
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And the last light of the weekend scurried brazenly over the harbor through the open rear windows of Jake’s speeding Beetle, nibbling ravenously at Mt. Ranier as if to remind us kids that this may indeed be as good as it gets, and we damn well better say please and thank you.
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The old bug lumbered and squeaked off into the sunset unfazed by the hot arc of time, before brain cancer took Jake at not much more than my age, before my father lost his best friend and his little brother and the use of his legs, the baddest mother in the prison yard gone free.
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Somewhere around the four hour mark, myself now inexplicably surrounded by Cape Cod chips and caffeine-free Diet Coke, the film cut to Jake and Janie piling us kids in the back of their prehistoric green VW to go cruise around the Space Needle and down to the wharf for ice cream.
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A long way down the road, boxing up memories when my parents sold the old farmhouse, I came across a dusty tape of footage labeled “mousetrap failure,” the evidence that finally broke the case and my mother’s resolve. I grabbed an oak-handled conductor’s baton, provenance unknown
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Months later, my father had yet again parted with a princely sum, this time given to a local handyman in exchange for resealing the foundation of the old farmhouse with fresh concrete and replacing Mr. Death’s one confirmed kill, the Victorian-era breaker panel.
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The massive rodent had entered the can with such force that the current had merely arced across its fur on its way to shorting out half of the circuits in the house, which fear math told me would likely take much more than the cost of ten dozen cruelty-free mousetraps to rectify.
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One breezy afternoon many days later, the air thick with mystery, a field mouse I swore was the size of a housecat sauntered across the floor with burn marks like teardrop tattoos on its flanks, the baddest mother in the prison yard gone free.
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“SON OF A BITCH!” I shouted, punting the burned and melted wreckage of my grand illusion into a smoldering lump in the corner with the force and zeal of a championship player in the fourth quarter of a hotly-contested rivalry.
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I ran down the stairs like Christmas morning, flipping every dead light switch in the house on my way to the living room. The receptacle was scorched, the circuit violently broken, and the peanut butter… absent. Nary a trace remained to betray whatever had absconded with it.
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That night, I loaded the peanut butter chamber, set the can on the living room floor, and plugged it into the nearest receptacle. Awake in my eager anticipation, I would have heard a pin drop in the driveway, but the sound at 5:00 a.m. could have been a dozen firecrackers.
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Mom reluctantly agreed to a real-life trial; my father would by this point have consented to me wearing camouflage and hiding in the basement with a napalm cannon, so his reaction to my prototype had amounted to smiling and nodding with his eyes narrowed like a James Bond villain.
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The best we could do, in my estimation, was to make damn sure that the enemy met with a swift and definite end, leaving little to no odds of suffering nor survival. The can, branded in a hand-drawn Mr. Coffee font as “Mr. Death,” left little argument in that regard.
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By now mom had accepted that there was no warm and fuzzy solution to this particular problem, but neither of us could stomach the thought of inflicting gruesome pain and anguish, even on those who would, without batting an eye, take a crap in our respective breakfast cereals.
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Next up in the process was a test of the prototype, and sure enough, rolling a greased Titleist through the electrified doors confirmed a closed circuit, a functional assessment I took no lack of pride in executing with one putt. All that remained was making the sale.
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Using an old coffee can as the body, the contraption welcomed rodents into the peanut butter chamber between a set of spring-loaded metal doors through which, courtesy of an old, frayed lamp cord, flowed 110 volts of raw, pure American justice.
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I began sketching out a crude blueprint for an electrified version of the luxurious lucite boxes my father had so recently shown to be, as he said to my mother, woefully defective. Rather than aim to harmlessly constrain offenders, my device took a more permanent route.
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If there was to be minimal barbarism about the whole affair, I reckoned, we should take a lesson from the U.S. judicial system, the sort of straightforward logic that only a nine-year-old should be expected to emulate. And so, I reasoned, we should give these bastards the chair.
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Though there was no denying the evidence at hand, my mother would not be swayed to submit to unthinkable suffering a foe that was simply too great of scale to be felled with one stroke of a tiny spring. And thus came my opening to make a case for good old-fashioned ingenuity.
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His case cemented, dad summoned my mother to the living room to replay the footage again and again, pointing at the 19” color television that surely weighed as much as mom’s late-model Nissan with an oak-handled orchestra conductor’s baton, provenance unknown.
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“SON OF A BITCH!” my father shouted, jumping with joy and punting the PETA-endorsed Rube Goldberg assemblage of misplaced plasticine ethics into a million overpriced shards with the force and zeal of a championship player in the fourth quarter of a hotly-contested rivalry.
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Staring intently at the makeshift night vision footage, dad watched with laser focus as the first mouse scurried into the trap and ate the peanut butter - and as the second mouse came to open the trap, the first simply shoved it aside on its mad dash towards freedom.
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Finally, somewhere around the four hour mark, my father surrounded by countless empty bags of Cape Cod potato chips and crushed cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke, a flicker from the far right corner of the screen threatened to give the miscreants away.
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Poring over every blank second like a Monday morning quarterback, he stared intently at the static, palpably anticipating the moment he could finally pinpoint the fatal design flaws of the overpriced hippie bullshit mousetraps and make his airtight case for corporal punishment.
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The next morning, dad was first in line at the coffee pot for the first time in my nine long years. And instead of reading the paper with my mother while I watched my usual reruns, he took to the VCR while I was banished to the dining room with the travel and leisure section.
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And so despite my mother’s pragmatic protestations, the game was afoot. Night fell, a scoop of peanut butter was carefully placed in the far end of the the trap, and just before retiring for the evening, my father set the blank cassette fluttering with an impish gleam in his eye.
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The plan was simple: set up the camcorder under the amber glow of a nightlight, turn it on at bedtime across the living room floor from a set trap, and let the perpetrators document the weaknesses of their ingenuity for my father to later exploit.
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For months now, the cruelty-free traps, purchased at my mother’s insistence, had been emptied overnight, visited by rodents as capable of being implicated in a daringly brazen jewel heist as of nibbling peanut butter. And dad had reached the breaking point of his sanity.
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Looking good Nick. Now eat more pasta