And kittens, lots of fluffy kittens. And carbohydrates, preferable of the baked potato variety.

Good god, I had the worst weekend and need to vent.

I went to visit my father -- a man who left when I was an infant and I have seen exactly two times prior. During our first visit I had discovered he really liked guns and, as I left that day, he had attempted to press one on me. I strongly dislike guns, have no desire to own one and told him as much at the time, in as polite and neutral way as I could.

The second visit revealed he in fact not only liked guns, but had what can only be described as an arsenal of weapons. They were everywhere. In multiple huge safes, in the closets, in the garage, leaning in the corners of rooms, in trunks next to the bed, and loaded in a holster on the bed headboard. Still, I tried to get beyond my dislike of his weaponry and just try to connect with him as a person who was my father. I held onto the faint hope he was a a liberal who just really liked his guns -- hey, he had been a beatnik, listened to NPR, and liked Peta! We spoke a bit about politics and it quickly became clear we had different ideologies, with me being a liberal and he leaning GOPer/Libertarian/Bagger. During our political conversations I voiced my (slightly couched) views while remaining pleasant and nonjudgmental of his. At the end of the visit he, once again, he tried to get me to accept a gun as a means to protect myself in the neighborhood I lived in for 40+ years he deemed to be unsafe. (A neighborhood I adore, btw.)

Third visit was this weekend. And it went from pleasant to bad to worse.

I pretty studiously avoided politics for a while, but the revolution in Egypt came up from a newspaper article and a discussion began. Stupid, stupid me. Over the course of many hours I learned:

- blacks voted overwhelmingly for Obama because he was black and no other reason (I pointed out that they tended to vote "D" overwhelmingly every election but he brushed it off)
- our country was better off when each ethnic group had its own neighborhood, but the damned liberals wanted us to mix and that's when all the trouble started
- the reasoning ability of Arabs is so convoluted that Western doctors would consider them mentally ill
- Unions are a scourge filled with lazy bums who cheat and produce inferior workmanship
- liberalism is a sign of a weak mind
- the handyman who walked out on my Mom with a job half-finished must have not spoken English - when informed he did indeed speak English and was white, the next repsonse was he must have been a Union member
- Fox News is the only news organization worth anything

There were also numerous, oblique references to blacks and Mexicans being prone to criminality. And don't get him started on Unionized teachers. On those notes, I decided it was time to retire. He came into the bedroom I stayed in to share a few motorcycle gadgets he had for me, and, as I was unloading my overnight bag to get my jammies, he opened a footlocker next to the bed and began to retrieve an object.

The object was a Chinese submachine gun called a burp gun.

He unfolded the stock and began to show me the various parts and how it was held. At one point the muzzle briefly moved towards me. He then pointed the stock end towards me and tried to get me to hold the gun. I declined politely. He responded that he was just attempting to get me past my gun antipathy. I replied that I was very familiar with guns, had grown up with them in my family, and just was not interested in them. He tried to convince me of how much fun it was shooting them. Again, as polite as I could be under the circumstances, I said no thank you.

I did not sleep well that night, to say the least. Morning came and I stayed in bed as long as I could and decided to leave earlier then I had planned on.

I found him fixing breakfast. It was clear he had been stewing about the day/night before and was not pleased. He was cooler and quieter towards me. I decided to talk about the beautiful wildlife out the window, but he quickly resumed the conversation from the night before.

As he prepared breakfast and waved his spatula around I learned that the stockade, chain gangs, and forced prison labor out to be brought back (like some of that is not still with us??) Malaysia has it right -- drug dealers/addicts should just be killed, in fact it would be better if any repeat criminal should just be killed because they are a cancer that must be eradicated from society. Mexicans are being sent here to this country to breed so that they can repopulate CA/AZ/NM and return them to Mexican control. The problem with Mexico isn't our drug use or guns coming in from the US it is that there are not ENOUGH guns -- we need to export weapons to the average Mexican so they can take out the drug cartels, the police, and their government. There are thousands of patriotic Americans, including him, ready to take up arms against Washington right now because our country is in the greatest peril it has ever faced. Everything wrong with our country now, in fact, much of the world, is a direct result of Leftist/liberals/communists/Unions/environmenalists and that really needed to be taken care of. In fact, Evil had been ruining our country for far too long and it was past time that it be eradicated by force to create a better country. By this time his pancake were burning, he was ranting, and I was getting a bit freaked out.

And he ended with a lovely story about taking personal responsibility for creating a better country. It seems there was a young man in some town who was a repeat offender of some sort, would not straighten out, and was creating a whole lot of problems for his community. The father decided to take the matter into his own hands and killed him. My Dad agreed this was the right thing to do and should be done more often.

I had pretty much stopped talking entirely a few minutes into the whole thing. There was clearly no point in me saying anything all, except that it was time for me to go and thank him for the visit.

As I tried to go to sleep last night, all I could see was his face and hear his ranting.

Wanna hear the absolute KICKER from him?

All the hatefully rhetoric is coming strictly from liberals and the liberal media. They had taken the Tea Party and done a hachette job on it, demonized it, tried to make Patriotic Americans who simply wanted to save their country look like bigoted, dangerous, crazy people obssessed with guns.

No, Dad, you don't need the "liberal media" for that, you're doing a mighty fine job of that yourself.