Okay, sure.

Clocks weren’t melting and I didn’t wake up with a skinny, long and somewhat disturbing mustache.

But the point is I could have. Seriously.

To fit in, I may even change my name (I might hyphenate, as Lisa Dingle-Dali has a certain ring to it).

So, turns out the surrealist movement in twenty-first century Maine starts out with gunshots.

No, really.

You wake up on… let me see… September 15th to two shots (which could also have been called blasts and maybe a salvo, or a detonation, or a cannonade if it was a cannon but that’s debatable), and then I heard two more.

And then five.

Followed by two more.

Twice.

Which is four.

So ya, there’s math.

I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from, but the death knell-er-ship of the sounds was a bit unsettling. Luckily I had been reading my Boothbay Register (‘The Regist-ah’) on-line yesterday and the Southport Column said something about hunting season coming up so I calmed myself because I have learned a thing or two about fitting into my new surroundings over the years and rule number one is “act like you’ve been here before” so that was my plan, and I started searching frantically for all things fluorescent orange.

Orange vest, orange hat, orange dog collars and dog parkas (because you want to cover your whole dog).

This of course made me think of Grampa, the Old Yankee Man, who stockpiled rusty half-filled cans of orange spray paint – squirreled away in odd places – always at the ready in case he needed to mark a shadowy roadside rock, plow-attracting mailbox post, or top of a coffee can holding cash or treasures that he buried in the yard (so he could find it easily. (Yes, that is a true story)).

Welp. I had nothing in orange. So I had to head out into the yard, with the ShepHerds unprotected.

The shots/blasts/salvos/detonations/cannonade-ing had ceased by this time so we threw things and retrieved things and generally ran around and got tired and then came back inside because Blaze agreed that we needed to Google, STAT.

Marshal didn’t care.

Marshal would have stripped naked (from his orange parka), tossed antlers on his head and done the boogey-woogey into the woods if he thought the hunters had a ball, or a frisbee.

Nah, it wouldn’t have mattered, he would have done it all just to do it. He’s just that type of ShepHerd.

He’s naked right now, actually.

So Blaze and I sat down to Google hunting season, just to rule out mass murder.

And do you know that there is a whole schedule for hunting season in a state? Well there is and, on the surface, it looks totally organized but it got confusing really fast.

For instance, Deer hunting season starts October 31st this year.

But if you are a Maine resident, you can have a head start on all the other hunters flocking to get Maine deer and you can start hiding and shooting/blasting/salvo-ing/detonating/cannonading on October 29th.

And there is also something called Youth Deer Day and that is October 22nd. My guess is that is because all the youth deer are smaller, and therefore better hiders, and are probably all totally unfindable by the time all the hunters flood the woods the following week.

But then things started to get disturbing.

There is a category under firearms that says, “Muzzleloader statewide (all WMDs).

I know, that’s what I thought too.

I am moving to a state that allows Weapons of Mass Destruction.

They were right here the whole time!

If you ask me, WMDs for deer hunting is a bit of overkill (like, literally).

Bear maybe, but Bambi?

Well, as near as I can tell from looking down the entire schedule, WMDs can only be used for deer, moose, turkeys, and crows.

Bear, ruffled grouse, bobwhite quail, pheasant, woodcock, common snipe, ducks, geese, seaducks, sora, virginia rails, gray squirrels, snowshoe hairs, bobcats, foxes, raccoons, skunks, oppossums, coyotes, woodchucks, porcupines, red squirrels, spruce grouse, geese, and cottontail rabbits all get to avoid the WMD horror.

Also… did you see that porcupines were on that list? That means that, though you can’t use WMDs on porcupines, you can hunt them…

SPIKE!

I know. I’m going to go out and spray paint him orange as soon as I finish typing.

Actually, now I don’t think the sounds I heard this morning were WMDs.

I know this because I searched on ‘soundsnap.com’, where you can find lots of sounds to use in your movies and stuff and I think what I heard was either a ‘308 caliber Sig Sauer SSG 3000 bolt-action rifle, single shot, distant perspective’, the ‘Distant perspective shot of a pump-action shot gun’ or maybe ‘A cartoon western gunshot and ricochet’.

On second thought, now that I have had time to play the sounds over and over in my brain, it could have been a WMD I heard…

Wait.

Blaze just came in with her own research and handed me the printout.

Huh.

The first page points out that lobsters are not on the list. Blaze seems to think this is odd because this is, in fact, Maine.  I told her she might want to go and see if lobsters leave the water for extended periods of time in the fall, and also if they blow up when shot.

The second page says… oh.

The second page implies that WMD could refer to ‘Wildlife Management District’… which is a bit of a game changer for what I’ve already written.

Huh.  Let’s all channel Gilda Radner’s Emily Latilla shall we?

Good.

Never mind.

Thanks for readin’.

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