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For a year I lived on the ranch with my good buddy Charlie. Okay, it wasn’t a ranch, it was a 3-acre acreage but we lovingly called it the ranch. We were thinking of calling it other things too, like “El Rancho de la Muerte” and “Live Fire Test Range”, but none of them stuck.

It was an adjustment. I’d been evicted from my apartment as the result of a drunk and destructive roommate – evicted from the rush and livelihood of downtown Calgary. The unpredictability of life had wrenched my unwilling fingers off the pulse of big city night life and the Red Mile. So I packed all my toys and did what any city boy would do and moved to the middle of armpit-fuck-nowhere, to the ranch with Charlie. There, in the rolling hills of rural Alberta, no dwelling was in sight – and, luckily, .22 caliber range – of another. I used to gently fall asleep serenaded by the hum of the streets, the hush of traffic, the honking, pedestrians shouting, the occasional glass breaking, now I was laying in bed wide-eyed to the deafening sound of… absolutely nothing.

But it wasn’t long after that my neck got a little redder. I started to see the appeal of country living. I resigned to my current destiny and embraced being a billy of the hills. It wasn’t uncommon for Charlie to drive up the gravel road to the house to see me sitting on the porch in my straw hat with the rifle in one hand and a beer in the other. We both spent that summer unemployed, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Most of our days started like this:

Charlie wakes up off his couch.
I wake up off my couch, put on my straw hat.
Charlie: What do ya figure we git done today?
Me: Let’s done git drunk and blast things.
Charlie: I’ll done git the gun.
Me: I’ll done git the beer.

Give two miscreants enough time and alcohol and they will find other dangerous and nonsensical ways to entertain (and injure) themselves. For example, I don’t think there exists a type of molecule chain, natural or artificial, that we didn’t attempt to burn in a gasoline-assisted fire. In fact, I don’t think we had any fires that weren’t gasoline-assisted.

Then there were the more creative, beer-fueled, limb-endangering activities. If you've ever seen Cowboy Poker you'd know it's a ballsy rodeo event that involves cowboys playing poker at a table in the middle of the arena in which there is a loose, angry and unpredictable bull. The last one to flee the table wins the hand. We played Hillbilly Cowboy Poker in which you fire up the ride-a-mower and rig it to run full speed on its own with the steering wheel turned and tied off to one direction. Then set up the poker table in the middle of its turning circumference. The mower will jerkily deviate from its orbit and dive inwards toward the table. The last one to dive-roll out of its way wins.

But the piece de resistance, my friends, was a game we called Mailbox Roulette. See if you can guess how it’s played with this list of materials:
- 6 large size mailboxes and 6 fence posts on which to nail them (representing the 6 barrels in a six shooter)
- First aid kit (read: bottle of whiskey)
- 5 friends
- 1 pickup truck
- 1 baseball bat
- One die cube
- And one cindercrete block

Can you say STINGER? Forget connecting with an inside fastball just above the hands, trying hitting a mailbox with a cindercrete in it block at 60 kph. "Woo hoo! Ha ha! Fuck, that hurt. Pass me the first aid."

So next time you see a hillbilly with, say, a missing a finger, go ahead and ask him how he lost it. I guarantee it’s nothing Hasbro ever thought of.