One of the coolest things about growing up on a large plot of land in the middle of a forest surrounded by other forest dwellers, besides treating my parents going grocery shopping as the worst thing in the world, was the fact that my father worked over seas. Weird, right? That the best part would be that my father would be gone over seas for one month gone and one month back because wouldn’t that lead to some type of daddy abandonment issues that may or may not show up later in life in the form of an internet blog where there may or may not have been a post about having sex on something your parents had sex on? In reality it was mostly awesome. While my father was away it was six kids against one mom. The kids fucking ruled the place. Except, for like, when my father came back and it was a month of punishment to make up for all the horrible things we did while we were gone.
One of the things my father liked doing when he was around for the month was teach us all manners of awesome stuff to make it easier for him to babysit us because he had a life too, ya know? And who wants stupid, stinky kids running around like a bunch of frenzied pack animals looking for love and approval. Like the time he taught me how to knock the wind out of my older brother when I complained too much that he was a bully, or how he taught was that it’s fucking impossible to catch a cat on an acreage for two dollars. He was the master of showing kids cool stuff to do and if that stuff just happened to distract us and make us leave him alone, who cares because they were awesome.
Except for the time he taught my older brother and sister that it was possible to make darts at home because all you need to do is take your mothers sewing needles and thread and tie them to tooth picks, cut up some cards to make the end and holy crap you’ve created a death machine for your younger children but who cares because guess what? Month is up, time to go back to Kyrgyzstan!
I’m not sure what he was thinking when he taught a bored older kid how to make homemade weapons because you just know they weren’t going to use a dart board when they’ve got three younger moving targets and a toddler who thought everything was hilarious.
One of the crueller games that came out of Weapon Craft Time With Daddy was sort of like dodge ball but instead of a ball you had darts and instead of playing in a gym you played in a basement with no windows with the lights off as the walls and younger siblings where covered in glow in the dark stars and it was up to older brother to play a game called “Let’s just convince the little ones this is awesome because it involves stickers and I’ll just randomly throw the darts until I hit someone in the face or something.”. And of course when you are little you think these things are awesome as you are hiding amongst the other stickers and you hear your little sister start freaking out because she got hit with a dart and you don’t think your giggling will make you next , because it totally does, and then the game fucking sucks because you just got a dart in the face.
Another game my older siblings like to play with these darts was to drag Womb Mate and I out of bed in the middle of the night to go down into the basement and pretend that it was some type of shoddy bar downtown where all the patrons drink beer and smoke cigarettes. And when I mean “patrons drink beer” I totally mean “drink pop” and if you replace “smoke cigarettes” with “make the younger two kids stand against the wall and have a dart free for all to see how close you can get the dart to them without actually hurting them but it’s a lot more fun if you actually hit them with it”.
I couldn’t ever figure out why they had such shitty aim during this game and I was sometimes left with several darts sticking out of my arms until I was eventually forced to pull them out to give them back just so the game could start over again.
