PLEASE don't try this at home...

I'm a hypocrite, and I know it.

Since the layoffs at my company, we've all had to adjust to a new workload. I've been content to design Science Fiction catalogs, flyers and book jackets, but have now had to take on a hunting club. I'm quite possibly the most carnivorous human being on the planet. I like my pizza with pepperoni and sausage. I get excited if someone even mentions fried chicken in the car at lunch. My favorite pastime in college was barbecue. I've also harbored a childlike aversion to vegetables far longer than healthy. I think I was twenty before I broke down and left lettuce on my cheeseburger and called it “salad”; twenty-two before I actually HAD a salad. In college I once told a bemused Chinese waiter to bring me the chicken with broccoli, and “hold the broccoli.” Yet despite all this, if I were left in the woods to fend for myself I would either learn to eat greens or die. I swerve to avoid squirrels, rabbits and raccoons in the road. Though I squashed insects with sadistic glee as a little boy, I grew up to be a man who catches spiders in the house in a plastic container, and releases them on the back porch(unless I find one in my bed, in which case his @$$ is paste).

As long as I never have to meet the cow or chicken or think about my dinner once resembling a living thing, I have no problem with meat. I'd never get a “meat is murder” bumper sticker like I saw during my morning commute today. Still, I've been adjusting to the content of the new magazine I'm designing, and seeing pictures of guys with dead deer, or a nine year old proudly holding up a squirrel he shot with his first gun on his birthday, or reading how a woman likes to cook a certain kind of squirrel, and use it's tail for a fishing lure. My friend Curt is from Texas, and he chalked up my attitude to being a “yankee”. Perhaps it is an offshoot of a sheltered existence, of having processed food readily available, and not having to worry about killing for survival. I still have some issue with hunting for sport, and killing something just to hang it's head on your wall. Giving a nine-year-old a real pistol doesn't sit well with me either.

Last week a report flashed across the television in the gym, and I nearly stopped in my tracks. I remembered soon enough that I was on a moving treadmill however, and managed a recovery without anyone (hopefully) noticing. I watched people point and click from their computer, moving a cross hairs around their screen and shooting. But this wasn't the typical news report that blames the violence in the world on video games and paints a picture of a peaceful time, of a world without war that only existed before Pong. What was different I soon realized, was that the cross hairs was over a webcam feed, and somewhere in the wilderness a REAL rifle was mounted on a movable base remote controlled by web surfers. Say what you will about the violence of a first person shooter, but this is REAL. Right now, Live Shot only lets people shoot at balloons and cups, and not living targets. Not yet. The idea that somewhere a real gun is loaded and pointing out into the open, and that an animal or a human being could be hit by a stray bullet triggered by someone miles away, who might not even be aware of a click's consequences, is terrifying.

Who's crazy here, me or the world?