Holy Pilgrimage to Mecca....err, Tulsa

If some pinko-commie Democrat would have set off a bomb at the Tulsa Fairgrounds Exhibition Hall this past weekend, they would have probably killed at least 40% of the conservative movement in the South in one fell swoop. You laugh, but I had visions of Janet Reno busting through a wall in an APC, torching everything she could see.

My dad and I made the holy pilgrimage to Tulsa, Oklahoma this last weekend, to witness the awesome spectacle of the Wannamaker Gun Show, which purports to be the largest gun show in the world.

I’m a believer. That thing was awesome.

In the past, the largest gun show that I’ve attended was the Dallas Market Hall show, which is held about once a quarter. It’s big. Wannamaker is 11 ACRES worth of gun goodness. It’s phenomenal.

Plus, it does not have the petty little knick-knack crap that fills up some gun shows. This was purely guns and gun-related stuff.

Rightly fearing a Communist President, gun buyers were grabbing AR’s by the truckload. Along with that, all sorts of AR add-ons were being sold. Also upper receivers, lower receivers, etc. Plenty of AK-47's, SKS’s, FN-FAL’s HK-90's, and other evil black rifle goodies were going like hotcakes.

It was a fun trip, to say the least. Tulsa is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. It’s very forest-y, and has lots of neat old homes. There’s a river running right through the city. It reminds me a bit of St. Louis and Portland rolled into one. Except there was a fairly low number of whacko liberals. This is still the South, after all. Even if Oklahoma wasn’t a state on the right side in the War of Northern Aggression. We’ll forgive them. They weren’t even a state at that point.

It was good to be out with my Dad. We haven’t spent any time together since my Mom passed away, a fact that tears both of us apart. The ordeal of my Mom’s illness has torn him up, physically and emotionally. He’s lost weight. His Parkinson’s is much worse. His breathing is awful, and he smokes more now than ever, despite the fact that lung cancer is what took his wife and my mother away from us. While I want to enjoy the time with him, it’s somewhat bittersweet, with the knowledge that his health declines each passing day, all because he cannot quit a habit that will kill him. What’s worse, he denies that smoking causes any problems, and gets angry when I ask him not to smoke around me, or in my car.

I guess God equips all of us with our own personal Achilles’ Heel that will cause our undoing. Lord knows I could stand to drop the Dr. Peppers.

It was still good to see him, and spend time with him doing something that we both love. It used to be that golf brought us together, and allowed us to spend time with one another. I’m thankful for the opportunities that I had to spend so much time with him on those occasions.