The inconvenient part about sleeping with a weapon is the inevitability of it touching your skin. I’ve sang songs about sleeping with a .45 under my pillow, but the reality of such a thing only comes clear in one’s second week of doing it. Honestly, I can’t understand how dudes in militias do it. I’m two weeks into this motherfucker and it’s driving me batty. As one tosses and turns with the sorts of dreams that follow when having to sleep in a violated space, the cold steel will splash against an exposed thigh. The combination of visions of nightmare and the unexpected touch of a foot and a half long flashlight shove the stick of an already jittery nervous system into oh-shit-overdrive without the courtesy of a clutch. It grinds the gears that make one go. Only when trying to engage the effort to jump into the mental passing lane the next day is one aware that something is seriously off about one’s transmission. Everyday feels like I’m 5,000 miles past my oil change.

In the days after my home was burgled, I gave strong consideration to getting a handgun while I’m out here. It’d be my first sidearm, having shot a fair share of shotguns and rifles in my day but never really getting into pistols. It wasn’t that I was morally opposed to the idea; I just never owned one because I never needed one. I always reckoned that if the government went 1984 or Harrison Bergeron something like this blog would have me executed by the state well before I’d have the opportunity to hole up in a shack in Montana. Further, tt’s an easy notion to dismiss when you live in a city. Practicing at a range is time consuming and forces exposure to a decidedly weird crowd. Ammunition is only at lame ass sporting goods stores in the suburbs with poor selection or sketchy pawn shops in the Tenderloin. And, in the event something did happen, shitass California construction would not be able to guarantee where the rounds would be going.

With such considerations, as much as I would like to emulate the late great Carlton Heston, my sleeping partner settled on a police issue maglite. It serves the illusion of security well with a powerfully blinding light source, a solid length for capital fuck-you-up-ness, and an appropriately indelicate width should the opportunity apply vigorously into the cornhole of those who forced me to this state present itself.

The problem is sleeping with a weapon just doesn’t work. But, its a choice of not sleeping well with it or not sleeping at all with out it. One can’t feel in control of anything by way of reaction. But, one can’t feel out of control when taking action. It’s a twilight of normal this state I’m in, where home is the last place I want to be and the first place I want to go.

The Californians I talk to seem to have the solution all figured out. “You need a woman,” she declared butchly, while taking a drag off her third Parliament in the last fifteen minutes. Her statement carried all the conviction of a talk show host – just sincere enough for television. She and others think that a relationship is the way out of hard times; that frequent sex can do wonders for one’s sense of security.

What these fuckers can’t wrap their adolescent heads around is that I don’t need to sleep with some chick to feel better in the morning.

I need to stop sleeping with a maglite.