I value all experiences, both big and small. Not only can I use them for cannon fodder in my writing, experiences shape who and what we are as a human being.
Since this is a writing blog, we’re going to stick with the cannon fodder here (incoming pun intended).
I went to the gun show at the Mesa Convention Center last weekend with my parents, more out of curiosity because for most of my life, I’ve avoided guns like a man avoids the common cold (not the plague, that’s the important image here). It’s not that I don’t like deadly firearms, rather I rarely get to practice with them to fully transform whatever nonsense fear I have into proper respect. I went to the gun show to not fire a weapon (I’ll be taking safety classes for that) and not even to buy a weapon, but see the people who use them.
There’s a big controversy over guns going on in our country right now, and I’m sensing some real hostility over ‘violent gun owners with their ways.’
What I saw at that convention wasn’t what I hear or see in the news. I saw everyday people, people you pass by every day on the street, all shivering in the cold of the morning, form a line that started at the door and trailed a whole block down the street. The Mesa Convention Center is a dinky little place, and yet thousands upon thousands of people stood by one another, laughing, talking, buying and selling. All of them were sane, and I got the sense that all of them were well versed in every aspect of the term ‘safe.’
It’s such a strange feeling to hear one thing that the news says and see with my own eyes something completely different.
If that’s not story material, then I don’t know what is.
