Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Opening Sally

I met the pheasant hunter for drinks in Adams Morgan.

We didn't appear to have anything in common -- I like running and cycling and drinking white wine, whereas he likes killing game birds and other small animals.  But there's a certain appeal to having someone show up at my door with pounds and pounds of free meat ("ooh, a brace of pheasant -- you shouldn't have!"), so I thought I'd give it a shot.

He also seemed decently witty. "On a scale of queen to lumberjack," he had asked, "how would you rate yourself?" 

I agreed to a date at a straight bar with a good beer selection, figuring I could drown myself in Dunkelweiss if he was horrible.

***

He did all the talking, and all we talked about was hunting. He got a little wistful about trailing his father in frigid temperatures searching for good duck blinds, and assured me that if I hadn't had freshly killed grouse cooked in cast iron, I hadn't lived.

He only came up occasionally for air, when he'd toss out things like, "I've talked about myself a lot -- tell me something about you." And then he'd look at me expectantly. It wasn't the best conversation tactic, and I kept going back to hunting.

"So, on a scale of one to ten," I asked, "can you evaluate for me the accuracy of Nintendo's Duck Hunter?"

"Oh, it was quite accurate," he said.

"So, do you have a bird dog that laughs at you when you miss the ducks?" I asked.

"Huh?" he said.

***

"To be honest with you, I don't think I could identify a pheasant OR a grouse," I told the pheasant hunter.

"It's easy," he said. "Pheasants have white feathers on their wings, whereas the grouse you can tell more by sound -- they sort of go 'GOBBLEGOB-BLLBLBLBLLLL.'"

"Oh," I said. "Well. That clears THAT up."

2 comments:

  1. Nothing makes me happier than you having a blog.

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  2. Oh god, nothing makes me more irritated than "Tell me something about yourself." I think you're a terrible conversationalist, does that count as "something about myself"?

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