When I sent Haywood Fudd a copy of my collected essays of 2024, it included one titled Hunting, Or Lack Thereof. It was about my attempts at competitive trapshooting and the time my dad shot a deer and gave me credit for it. That essay was split into parts and became a running storyline in my memoir about high school and growing up in Grand Island, Nebraska.
Writing is a feedback loop. You observe something, and then you think about it. Then you think about it, and your brain tells you what you think about it—but not all the way. So you attempt to vomit that primordial soup of words out of your head in the hopes that they’ll form on the page and reach the next stage of evolution—but the first draft is usually just a slug with one arm, three eyes, and an overbite. So you put those words back into your brain, microwave them in your subconscious, and vomit again. If you’re lucky, the creature will sprout another arm.
But as any parent knows, at a certain point, you get sick of your child. So, very, very, fucking sick of them. You need a break. You’ve exhausted your patience of their bed wetting and constant bitching about the injustice of their ice cream portions in comparison to those ice cream portions of their sibling. You’re convinced that whatever beast is crawling around in your living room isn’t anything resembling a sentient being worthy of your pride and respect. They are just some offspring that bastardized all your hard work and best intentions. Your masterpiece is not before you. You don’t know what that thing is, really.
So, out of ideas of your own, you push the amorphous blob onto someone else. You can’t just give up on it, whatever the end state of this experiment is, you have to see it through. But you need someone else to watch it for a little bit, while you go off and question your worth as a creative and wonder why you ever thought you were worthy of attempting to make a meaningful creation.
But sometimes, when the babysitter reports back, you get a little bit of encouragement. They kind of enjoyed their time with your child. All those traits that drive you nuts because you spend so much time living with them without any break—well when this other person interacted with them for the first time, they thought they were kind of fun. It wasn’t a bad way to spend their afternoon.
And then you realize, you kind of missed your creature.
And you get back to work, hoping it sprouts a leg this time.
January 18th, 2025
Dear Mr. Beaty,
Having slayed some other books first, I have begun slaying your book. My first book report regarding your inviting tome:
I’m a hunter, too (or was), though I hunted with my trusty bow and arrows instead of scatter gun and, like you, I froze and froze—for decades. I recall being perched up in a tree one particularly wicked December morning and began wondering what all the sane people in Nebraska were doing. Though I’m not smart and you can’t make me, I arrived at the conclusion that all the sane people in Nebraska were tucked in their warm beds while I was freezing 15 feet up in a tree with the north wind howling in my face and questioning my limited sanity.
One time a large buck walked by me at 10 yards. I was much too cold to draw my bow and just barely sane enough to realize that if I killed him I would have to clean him which required getting my hands wet with his blood. I thought the best of it and let him live. He sauntered away as though he was enjoying the clobbering northwest wind that was busy lashing, punishing, and freezing me.
Those were the good old days of freezing. Now I’m old and can’t do cold like I used to be able to do when I was a much younger and much dumber guy who convinced my dumb self that if I dressed warm enough that I could conquer the bitter cold, the biting northwest wind. I, of course, was dumber than an old cedar fence post when I was a younger man. One does not ever conquer the Nebraska cold; conquers you.
Lady luck shone on me a few times and I let the air out of a couple large box whose stuffed heads adored my living room walls. When I stare at them like I’m doing right now (and typing blindly), I’m reminded how lucky I was and am: I have an understanding wife who permits those heads to stare down at her while she plays solitaire on her Googler-enabled device. Think of it this way: how many homes have you been in with deer heads perched on the living room wall and not perched on the garage wall?
Sadly, I lost my deer hunting honey hole a few years ago. Some guy pays thousands and thousands of dollars each year to hunt my old stomping grounds. When I think about him, I hope he’s getting every freezing dollar bill worth of enjoyment. While he’s freezing and hoping a giant buck will saunter by looking for a hot doe, I’m home tucked snugly in a warm bed. When I wake up, I pour myself a hot cup of coffee, sit in my recliner, and then watch YouTube videos of other guys sitting in freezing in trees. That’s what old people do: live vicariously through young dumb people.
Much obliged,
Haywood
