You wanna play games? All right, I'll play your fucking games.

So here we are on Saturday and I have successfully killed a pheasant. He and his compadres were trying to sneak back into a draw where we had scarred up a ton of birds earlier. We had come back a few hours later to see if the birds were back in the draw. My plan was to hike about two miles outside of the perimeter of the area we had initially seen the mass of pheasant. I hiked. It took awhile as the terrain bordering the Missouri River in this area is a bit rough: hills and valleys and most of it covered in heavy scrub. As I made my way through my giant semi-circle four roosters tried to break away from me on my left. Three popped up first and I dropped the big slow one. The fourth rooster broke farther to my left and I snapped my spine trying to get around and drop him. I failed. The bird I shot had dropped just over the top of a slight hill I had been walking over and as I got up to the top of the hill to grab what I assumed would be a dead pheasant, he tried to run away. He had just enough life in him that he actually got out far enough that I had to shoot him again and that still didn't kill him. No, this hardy South Dakota sonofabitch had the balls to make me have to wring his neck to finally finish him off. I salute that bird, he was bold and tough and wasn't going to make it easy.

After all of that work I still needed to get into position so we could trap the rest of the birds in the draw but no such luck. The birds I had ambushed had been in the process of getting back to their roosting area so by the time Pops and I got into the draw we were too early. A few hens popped out but the roosters, the wary and willy roosters, hadn't gotten back into the spot yet. At this point, I was still in high spirits from having finally dropped one of these big-ass prairie pheasant. My mood was about to head south.

As we were walking back up to the car, me and Ghost and Pop looking all Norman Rockwell-ish, some fat bastard and his ugly wife pulled up and started riding us about hunting "his" land. Turns out that even though the area we were in is marked as public, this cock sucking Midwestern lump of shit and his equally bland pals had built a road and decided to claim the area as theirs. Now I know I'm a man of patience and reason, normally, but this time I'd had enough. Pops talked to him because I was on the verge of murdering these motherfuckers. You know what got me? When Lard Lad had the temerity to tell us "If you want to hike in from ten miles out, I can't stop you." What? What the fuck did you just say, you jumbo sized dildo? I walked away. I walked away with my dog and my very large gun and decided that this was it, this was the moment where I had had enough of all things Midwestern: the crazy/frigid women, the plastic facade of morality, the uptightness, the provincialness of it all. I am done. I am never coming here or anywhere else in the Midwest unless I am paid a princely sum of money and am there for as little amount of time as humanly possible. These people and their bullshit are intolerable. Yeah, sure, there are some cool big cities in the Midwest and I love my Vikings and a few of the people we've met here were OK, but this generalization that the coasts are fucked up and the "real" America is in the heartland is crap. Clear cut fields, fake-ass hunting guides, no access to public land, speed traps, bad food, American cheese, giant pickup trucks, and cattle. I'm done.

Give me the West Coast any day. Surf, mountains, food, wine, art, music, and yes, we have our fair share of bullshit but at least there's no pretense about it. We're cunts and we all know it and if you can't hang then by all means move back to wherever the fuck it is you're from and grill yourself up a Wonderbread and American cheese sandwich and enjoy. 

Peace out, bitches!