Bolo Tie, God and an AR-15

I was sitting outside my domicile writing a letter when a couple about my age approached. I’ve known them for several years and they both suffer from health issues and are on, I believe, disability of some kind. What she wore now escapes me, but he donned a bolo tie, Western shirt, sunglasses, cowboy boots and black motocross gloves. It was a very curious fashion ensemble for a coastal Oregon Saturday in March but he wore it without any irony whatsoever and I dug that. The man had invented his own fashion style without the assistance of any magazine, web site, celebrity, TV show or Influencer. I really dug that.

I hope someone out there sees me in my corduroy and beaver stencil shirt getups and thinks the same! Probably not.

We caught up on things and they informed me they’d recently returned to church, some Pentecostal speaking-in-tongues sect, even though they weren’t religious. He also told me he was building his own AR-15 assault rifle in his single wide trailer. Why I asked? He wanted to be ready. For what? When they come, he said.

He’d tried buying the rifle elsewhere but everything was sold out since Trump left office. I got the idea he was assembling one with a 3-D printer, which you can easily do. Don’t you just love the 2^nd Amendment, certainly the worst, most vaguely written sentence in American history? See where bad writing can take a country?

I asked him if he was one of those grocery store or school or movie theater or concert or disco or church or nail salon kind of angry guys. He said no. He said his dad had been a gun dealer and that he’d had his ass kicked by his gun dealer dad growing up and that made him learn the difference between right and wrong.

We said our goodbyes and I pondered his statement. Maybe there was something to it. I don’t know.