In 2013, the United States Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional Chicago's outright ban on handguns, which then opened the floodgates for the state of Illinois — begrudgingly — to legalize concealed carry, the last state in the union to do so.
Having purchased a handgun while I lived in Georgia, and having toted that handgun with me on my several moves since then, I was a little wiggy about trying to register it, concerned about the questions it might bring up, like when I purchased it or where. I was assured by one in the know that it was of no concern, so, also in 2013, I applied for and received my Illinois Firearm Owner's Identification (FOID) card.
Stuff I Should Have Blogged About
Then, some five years after Illinois adopted CCW, my brother, who was in possession of the small caliber revolver my father had owned (given to him by an old friend back in the early 1970s), asked me if I would be interested in going with him to a CCW certification class, which is mandatory in order to legally carry in Illinois. I had told him I was interested, but not at the moment.
With my eye on a handsome IRS refund in early 2018, I laid out my CCW plan. As the handgun I purchased in Georgia some 20 years earlier is just a bit too big for comfortable concealment, I opted to purchase a new, compact semi-automatic. I researched heavily and found the one I wanted, and the dealer from which I wanted to purchase it. That didn't go smoothly, however, as the person with whom I made the transaction (he presents himself online as a firearms shop, however he operates out of his home while he waits for the pieces to fall into place for an actual store) didn't follow through with the arrangement we had made for me to pick it up after the 72-hour waiting period, and he was neither answering his phone nor returning my calls. So I had to work through JPMorgan Chase to negate that purchase. I went instead with an established local shop.
Around the first of the year — Resolution time — I told my brother I was ready to go, and eager to take the class with him. He had just retired, however, and suddenly wasn't comfortable with the cost of the course.
So, in March, I signed up by my own self for the Illinois 16-hour CCW course. As a military veteran, I had the option of skipping the first eight-hour class covering handgun familiarization, but it had been more than 20 years since I had fired any kind of weapon, so I thought it best to take the full class. Despite a few ass-kicker test questions about weapons carry laws, the course was a piece of cake.
As a convenience, a local entrepreneur came in on the second day of class to offer his services in expediting the application procedure for the students. I paid the extra to allow him to do this; all he needed were copies of my driver's license and my FOID (it's pronounced as a word, "foyd.") card. I was told that, after submission of the application, I could expect the full three months' wait for the license to arrive in the mail.
On June 19, exactly three months after the class, I received a letter in the mail from the Illinois State Police Firearms Services Bureau stating that, due to a discrepancy in my application documents, processing of my CCW license is delayed, and if I didn't respond within 60 days, it would be disqualified. The discrepancy? Illinois State Police put the incorrect zip code on my FOID card back in 2013, when I applied for that (because I owned the handgun purchased in Georgia), and the dude expediting the applications used the address from my FOID card instead of my driver's license. I corrected the error on the ISPFSB website within — literally — seconds of reading the letter, and I wound up waiting another three whole months until the CCW license finally arrived in late September, followed two days later by an updated FOID card. Hmmm.
I should have made the whole ordeal a blog series. It would have helped maintain my sanity through the summer and, hey, someone might have read it.
Hypocrisy?
Now, one who stumbles upon this post (since my regular(?) readers have all but disappeared) may wonder, "Why do you, a librul own — not one but two — handguns?! Don't that make you a hypocrite?" (Sorry for the effected grammar ignorance. You just sound like that in my head.)
And no, that does not make me a hypocrite. I have never been anti-gun. I often refer to myself, when the topic comes up in discussion, as a Second Amendment liberal. What I am against is gun proliferation. I am one man. I have two hands. How many guns do I need, how many could I run at one time to defend myself? I am not a hunter, but, were I, I would likely possess a tool for the task. I don't know the number at which a limit should be placed, but I feel there should be a limit. I'm good with two.
Practice Makes Accurate ...er
After the purchase of the new handgun, I made it to a couple of the local ranges on an average of about once a month until I joined a defensive pistol league through the same organization through which I took the CCW course. I've learned through practice and the league that I'm a pretty good shot, but I'm lazy and impatient. Also, twenty years on, my vision ain't so great, any more. With my one good eye, corrective lens for nearsightedness and a reading magnification, the ends of my extended arms are the perfect length where I can't focus on the front sight of the weapon with my prescription glasses on. Fortunately, the target is supposed to be blurry beyond the front sight, as it's blurry regardless, without my glasses!
Feeling a little more secure in my abilities, these days I carry as often as I can outside of the myriad places Illinois law and individual business owners prohibit. It's a lifestyle that takes getting used to, and I'm working on getting used to it.
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Wednesday, December 04, 2019
Monday, December 02, 2019
Sharp Curves
It's funny how we humans relate to — and with — music. Some of us barely notice its presence; some of us have a few favorites within a genre or two. Others among us are fully immersed in it and some of us play or even write it.
Me? As with so much else in my life, I'm right in the middle there, somewhere. I can immerse myself in listening; I wish I could truly play beyond noodling around on a keyboard when I get the chance or — these days — the desire. That noodling has in the past resulted in a few tunes pleasing to my ears, though I have seldom shared it. Very seldom.
I got into music later than most people. It seemed my peers as early as junior high were banging their heads to some popular tune or another on the radio, whereas I kind of noticed a few songs I liked. I was also a dork, so, when I did start turning on to music, I didn't like most of what the other kids were into. I liked Billy Joel. I liked Journey. Rush. Cheap Trick. There were only a few others.
But I hated Van Halen.
I hated the smug, "I'm so sexy," self-fellating screech that the lead singer employed in just about every ...no, scratch that ...in every stupid song they got played on radio stations — which, I was certain, they achieved by providing chicks or drugs or money or all three to radio station executives in order to get their brand of shit on the airwaves.
It didn't help that, of my friends, my peers, who were the band's devotees, a good number of them drew, etched, or otherwise festooned their notebooks, jeans, jackets and the school's desks with the Van Halen logo.
And then I entered the Air Force, where I learned many, many important things, among them the sanity-saving practice of immersion into music. Lackland Air Force Base was the only installation that conducted Air Force basic training and, therefore, had a sizeable program for providing escape and places for new airmen to decompress. One avenue was the base library listening room, decked out with cassette and reel-to-reel tape machines, and a wide selection of music to sit and listen to, and even to record and make one's own mix tape. Through 18 weeks and three consecutive military training courses, I spent many hours disappearing between the cups of a pair of headphones exploring new music.
And I still hated Van Halen.
One Saturday morning, on the recreation bus from Camp Bullis, about a 30-minute ride to Lackland, in San Antonio, Texas, some douchebag was cranking the volume up on his boom-box with the unmistakable vocal preening of the lead singer of none other than Van Halen. I didn't have my Walkman with me for some reason, so I had no defense against the narcissism onslaught that none of the other young men on the bus that morning seemed to mind. Sometime later in the ride, I heard the welcome relief of a sort of ragtime jazz tune. I thought to myself that the kid with the boom box had an eclectic taste in music. But then I heard that voice. It was still Van Halen! But ...wait a minute! Acoustic guitar? Is that a clarinet playing on this tune?! And then another tune, this time a cover of "Happy Trails," sung a capella in four-part harmony?! Though done just a bit tongue-in-cheek, it sounded good!
I called over to the other kid. "Hey! What the hell is that?"
"Van Halen," he said. Duh. "Diver Down."
Three months later, now stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, among my selections for my first month of Columbia House Record and Tape Club membership was Van Halen's Diver Down album, their fifth release, and my first step toward broadening a horizon. I had dismissed the band as a loud, brainless, head-banging, three-chord hard rock band. They are those things a bit, but not so much of the brainless, as I learned through listening and research that the lead guitarist, Edward Van Halen, is a classically trained guitarist who, I came to realize as I listened to more and more of their music, is an amazingly versatile, agile, and innovative virtuoso master of his instrument. That clarinet I heard on the jazzy "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)" is played by Jan Van Halen, Edward's classically trained father, and the song, though a classic Milton Ager/Jack Yellen jazz tune originally written in 1924, was chosen and arranged by big-haired, big ego lead singer, David Lee Roth.
A new respect for the group opened my mind up to the rest of their music and, barely six months after that Texas bus ride, I was a fan of Van Halen.
Now, some 35 years after that fateful day, I find myself sitting once again next to a stereo turntable, spinning my vinyl LPs (Long Playing records) and pumping them into my computer to convert them to digital files. I had already once, years ago, recorded everything to cassette tape, but as that format faded from wide use and cassette players became scarce and proved themselves less reliable and versatile than digital, I have had to revisit the collection.
When I started, it occurred to me that it has been at least 20, maybe 25 years since I've heard most of this music. It has brought back to me the memories of many moments of escape, cruising the streets of downtown Great Falls, the green pastures of the Hunsrück in Germany, and the restless years after returning home from the Air Force and before embarking on my video production career.
And dropping into the band'sgrooves has brought back this memory of my 180 degree turn on Van Halen, and its lesson to me to always be willing to try the unfamiliar or the uncomfortable. You may come away from the experience with your mind unchanged, but you will nonetheless be changed, as you will have a new perspective, a deeper understanding, and some semblance of an inside knowledge of the thing about which you knew nothing before.
# # #
Me? As with so much else in my life, I'm right in the middle there, somewhere. I can immerse myself in listening; I wish I could truly play beyond noodling around on a keyboard when I get the chance or — these days — the desire. That noodling has in the past resulted in a few tunes pleasing to my ears, though I have seldom shared it. Very seldom.
I got into music later than most people. It seemed my peers as early as junior high were banging their heads to some popular tune or another on the radio, whereas I kind of noticed a few songs I liked. I was also a dork, so, when I did start turning on to music, I didn't like most of what the other kids were into. I liked Billy Joel. I liked Journey. Rush. Cheap Trick. There were only a few others.
But I hated Van Halen.
I hated the smug, "I'm so sexy," self-fellating screech that the lead singer employed in just about every ...no, scratch that ...in every stupid song they got played on radio stations — which, I was certain, they achieved by providing chicks or drugs or money or all three to radio station executives in order to get their brand of shit on the airwaves.
It didn't help that, of my friends, my peers, who were the band's devotees, a good number of them drew, etched, or otherwise festooned their notebooks, jeans, jackets and the school's desks with the Van Halen logo.
And then I entered the Air Force, where I learned many, many important things, among them the sanity-saving practice of immersion into music. Lackland Air Force Base was the only installation that conducted Air Force basic training and, therefore, had a sizeable program for providing escape and places for new airmen to decompress. One avenue was the base library listening room, decked out with cassette and reel-to-reel tape machines, and a wide selection of music to sit and listen to, and even to record and make one's own mix tape. Through 18 weeks and three consecutive military training courses, I spent many hours disappearing between the cups of a pair of headphones exploring new music.
And I still hated Van Halen.
One Saturday morning, on the recreation bus from Camp Bullis, about a 30-minute ride to Lackland, in San Antonio, Texas, some douchebag was cranking the volume up on his boom-box with the unmistakable vocal preening of the lead singer of none other than Van Halen. I didn't have my Walkman with me for some reason, so I had no defense against the narcissism onslaught that none of the other young men on the bus that morning seemed to mind. Sometime later in the ride, I heard the welcome relief of a sort of ragtime jazz tune. I thought to myself that the kid with the boom box had an eclectic taste in music. But then I heard that voice. It was still Van Halen! But ...wait a minute! Acoustic guitar? Is that a clarinet playing on this tune?! And then another tune, this time a cover of "Happy Trails," sung a capella in four-part harmony?! Though done just a bit tongue-in-cheek, it sounded good!
I called over to the other kid. "Hey! What the hell is that?"
"Van Halen," he said. Duh. "Diver Down."
Three months later, now stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, among my selections for my first month of Columbia House Record and Tape Club membership was Van Halen's Diver Down album, their fifth release, and my first step toward broadening a horizon. I had dismissed the band as a loud, brainless, head-banging, three-chord hard rock band. They are those things a bit, but not so much of the brainless, as I learned through listening and research that the lead guitarist, Edward Van Halen, is a classically trained guitarist who, I came to realize as I listened to more and more of their music, is an amazingly versatile, agile, and innovative virtuoso master of his instrument. That clarinet I heard on the jazzy "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)" is played by Jan Van Halen, Edward's classically trained father, and the song, though a classic Milton Ager/Jack Yellen jazz tune originally written in 1924, was chosen and arranged by big-haired, big ego lead singer, David Lee Roth.
A new respect for the group opened my mind up to the rest of their music and, barely six months after that Texas bus ride, I was a fan of Van Halen.
Now, some 35 years after that fateful day, I find myself sitting once again next to a stereo turntable, spinning my vinyl LPs (Long Playing records) and pumping them into my computer to convert them to digital files. I had already once, years ago, recorded everything to cassette tape, but as that format faded from wide use and cassette players became scarce and proved themselves less reliable and versatile than digital, I have had to revisit the collection.
When I started, it occurred to me that it has been at least 20, maybe 25 years since I've heard most of this music. It has brought back to me the memories of many moments of escape, cruising the streets of downtown Great Falls, the green pastures of the Hunsrück in Germany, and the restless years after returning home from the Air Force and before embarking on my video production career.
And dropping into the band'sgrooves has brought back this memory of my 180 degree turn on Van Halen, and its lesson to me to always be willing to try the unfamiliar or the uncomfortable. You may come away from the experience with your mind unchanged, but you will nonetheless be changed, as you will have a new perspective, a deeper understanding, and some semblance of an inside knowledge of the thing about which you knew nothing before.
# # #
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