As the title says, today’s duties included less than pleasant activities.

We had this brown mutt we got from the pound back in June. He was probably seven months old. He was hit by a car today, and it was pretty ugly, no chance of living, but not dead yet. I won’t go into details. Just take my word for it. I was going to use the rifle, but I couldn’t find the clip, so I used the .45.

I didn’t want this duty. I was just the one who had to do it. I tried to aim, but it’s hard to shoot straight when you really don’t want to look at what you’re shooting. First shot was a clean miss. Second shot was worse. It brought new misery to the creature. He howled in pain. That got to me. I was half a mind to shoot my damned self in the foot for that one, to even things up. I was freaked pretty hard, basically, “Oh, shit, you stupid fuck, look what you’ve done.”

And what I’d done, not to put to fine a point on it, was to be a pussy about it,  which just made things worse. It had to be done no matter how much I disliked it. Because of me shirking my duty, the animal was suffering much more than it should.

Third shot I aimed, and I watched what I didn’t want to have to see, and my shot went true.

I’m writing this down now for my sons. Not right now. They don’t need to know the ugly parts. Gilbert is heart broken enough as it is. But later, I want them to know something that I guess I knew in theory, but that was brought into pretty sharp focus for me today: a man needs to be resolved to do what he has to do, ugly or not. If he shirks it, or tries to get out of it,  it usually makes things worse.

Thus endeth the lesson.