Guns Are Cool

I once asked a kid on my school bus what it means to be cool. Specifically, what makes one person cool and another person not cool? The kid thought about it for a few seconds and than told me, "If you have to ask, then you probably wouldn't understand." Of course I know what "cool" means, but I don't think I could put it into words any better than that kid on the bus. Guns are just cool, that's all. They're cool to own, they're cool to look at, and some of them are even cool to shoot. Of course you don't think guns are cool, but there must be something that you think is cool. Maybe it's not a material thing, which would be even harder to put into words, but you must think that something is cool, not because it's useful, not because it's valuable, it's just cool in and of itself. I've heard you say that smoking is cool, but I never thought of it that way, it's just something I do because I like to. I never thought of my beard as being cool, I just got tired of shaving every day in the army and resolved to quit once I got out. I didn't care if anybody thought it was cool or not. Well, if a girl thought it was cool, I wouldn't argue with her about it, but I didn't grow a beard to impress the ladies or anybody else. I don't keep my old guns around to impress other people either, but that's different. Guns are just cool because they're cool, that's all.
 
I don't remember ever wearing Hippy clothes, unless blue jeans and work shirts were considered Hippy clothes. I didn't think of them as Hippy clothes, I thought of them as work and leisure clothes. I had some other clothes too, some perma-press cotton pants that I think were left over from high school but, when they wore out, I replaced them with jeans. I had one suit for weddings and funerals, and a sport coat for less formal affairs. I still have them, but I'm sure they don't fit anymore. It's funny how clothes can shrink when they hang in the closet for a few years. We don't use moth balls or anything like that, so it must have something to do with the humidity, or lack of it. The last wedding I attended, back in the 1990s, was an informal outdoor affair, and everybody just wore what they had on at the time. The last funeral was my mother's in 2002. The suit fit me then, but I haven't had occasion to wear it since, and I'm sure the shrinking gremlins that inhabit my closet have gotten to it by now.

I never thought of myself as a Hippy, although I knew some people who were, and I got along with them okay. Looking back on it, though, I must have been part of some kind of counter culture. I never went to any meetings, so I don't know who else was in it. I suppose it had something to do with my age. All us war babies were growing up at the same time, and that must have made the old timers nervous. Maybe that's why they tried to keep us being kids for as long as they could. If it wasn't for the Vietnam War splitting us up like it did, we might have been a force to be reckoned with. For a long time I believed that was the main reason they had that war, and I'm still not so sure that it wasn't. Who knows what we might have accomplished if we had all stuck together?