Mother Russia

My squeeze is outta town, and I spent most of last night dreaming about bad guys breaking into my house. I slept for shit.

In one dream, I fired a shotgun at an intruder. I always imagined in my waking day that shooting someone with a shotgun would be an easy thing, it being a shotgun and all. But in my dream the truth was revealed. Firing a shotgun indoors, in the dark, was not at all what I expected. First there’s the fearsome report of a gun fired inside an enclosed space, and then there’s the blinding flash of the muzzle in the dark. Let’s not forget the sucker also kicks like a mule. Under such realistic circumstances, it’s not at all certain that you’ve hit your mark, and that you’ve neutralized the danger.

But it tells me I don’t need to have a shotgun at the ready for home assaults. If a bad guy wants to break into my house I think I’ll just let him and my German Shepherd work it out between them, and keep the guns outta play.

On a completely different note, I know that some of you and I are of the same cohort - Baby Boomers, we're called. We grew up in Cold War America. The only significant difference from most of you as I see it is that I grew up in the Washington, D. C. area, and residents of that city learned to become fast friends with THE BOMB in the 1950s and 1960s. I remember air raid exercises during the ’62 Cuban Missile Crisis – better Red than dead, if you ask me.

A student of mine, from Moscow, not long ago was bragging about how the Russians were NOT going to allow the Nazis to conquer them in World War II, even though it meant the deaths of 20 million Soviet soldiers and citizens. In her thick accent she told me "Don't fuck with Mother Russia." It gave me chills then, it gives me chills now.

Do you remember the Red Army Men’s Choir from that Cold War era? They always scared the bajezus outta me: Those dour looks, those dark Russian songs of sacrifice and angst. I’d watch them on TV and think, “One day we may have to go up against those ************* (sons of a gun) , and they look pretty tough.”

Now prepare yourself for the surreal –

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