I went to a conference in Dallas last week, and as I was driving to my hotel, I passed a billboard for the convention center, which was breathlessly promoting the upcoming GUN AND KNIFE SHOW.

This couldn’t have made me prouder, of course, since I’m all for killing things for no better reason than the thrill of it, or for the feeling of complete and utter control over the life of another living being.

That’s just good fun.

But as a longtime aficionado of the standard GUN SHOW, where one can purchase enough firepower and ammo to blow up a BET convention or the parking lot of a Home Depot – often without the inconvenience of either a license or a waiting period – I had to nonetheless congratulate the sensitive, self-aware individual whose idea was it to add knives to the mix.

I mean, it only makes sense. We live in a crazy world where technology is splintering our connections with others. We text rather than talk, email instead of visit, and “check in” at glamorous locales for no other reason than to make others jealous.

These are not real connections. Clearly, people are longing for a true sense of community and oneness. What better way to re-establish a sense of actual, physical connection than by killing things in an up close and personal way? And what accomplishes this better than a blunt knife?

Sure, some might argue that Texas is a state where the mascot is a bullet wound. And that the only reason they’ve added knives to the gun show is because once you own a rifle, a shotgun, a semi-automatic pistol and an AK-47, you go looking for a new high.

But I believe that this is about the all-too-human need to connect with someone or something else; to see the terror in the eyes of the person or animal you’re offing. Shooting something from a secure location a hundred yards away does not give one the sense of attachment and kinship that plunging a hunting knife into its jugular does.

And in support of this mission to bring souls closer, I encourage the creators of the GUN AND KNIFE SHOW to go one step further, and add even simpler items to their line-up of murder weapons – things we all have lying around the house. Things that will make it a snap to just up and kill and thus, commune.

I would suggest ice tongs.

Or a garden rake.

Or maybe some pinking shears. 

Items like these would not only invoke that simpler, more connected time, they would insure the necessity of real hand-to-hand combat, mere inches apart, often for impossibly long and uncomfortable and messy periods of time.

Which would provide you, the compassionate and deeply connected human being, the opportunity to come away from this event a changed person; made just a little bit better by having to kill that deer, or that guy who cut you off, or that neighbor who plays the drums at 2 a.m. by ripping open their intestines, painstakingly and personally, with a plaque scraper.

It is, quite simply, a killing that says, “I care.”

A friend of mine at work just announced that he is leaving his job at the TV network we work for and moving with his partner to Palm Springs.

Who DOES that at our age? Who just quits their job and moves to a retirement community like Palm Springs? It’s like a driven, fortyish New York Jew moving to Boca. Is he also planning to start driving a ’72 land yacht and eating dinner at 4:15?

Don’t get me wrong – Palm Springs is awesome. In fact, it’s the ultimate goal for lots of us gay folk. It is often portrayed as nothing more than a hot, desert wasteland with a little taste, a sort of Hell with Architecture. But it’s actually a spectacularly beautiful resort community with small-town quaintness and an overlay of swank sophistication. I call it Gayberry (like the old Andy Griffith town of Mayberry, but with a lot more homos).

The thing is, it shouldn’t be someone’s ultimate goal in their early 40’s.

In our 40’s, we should all be working our way up the ladder, accumulating cars and houses and stuff to put in those cars and houses. We should all be stressed because we have to work insane hours in order to afford all those cars and houses and stuff to put in those cars and houses. We should live in large cities and require constant stimulation and wake up each morning wondering whether any of this has any meaning.

We should NOT be uprooting ourselves and moving to a quieter existence in a town where we actually have time to think. Nor should we be downscaling our monetary ambitions and finding ourselves satisfied with less. That is, as far as I’m concerned, just crazy talk.

What good can possibly come of such a life? He’ll be disconnected from the glamorous life in LA, where you can go to dinner at any one of a hundred five-star restaurants, assuming the traffic isn’t bad enough that you go on a shooting rampage (that often delays dinner). He won’t get invited to glitzy premiere parties, where you can eat artichoke-stuffed dates while you’re bum-rushed off the red carpet in favor of the latest hair-pulling reality star. He won’t have easy access to the beach that no one goes to unless they can’t afford air conditioning or they live on it.

In Palm Springs, he’ll be forced to go to the same restaurants over and over, where people will learn his name, which is clearly an invasion of privacy. He’ll have to deal with CostCo lines which, although quicker because there’s about 5% as many residents, will be filled with walker-laden geezers complaining about their bursitis while they fumble for coupons for what feels like minutes. And he’ll have to sit by his pool, where the sounds of nothing but the breeze and the spa waterfall will force him to think – really think about what he’s done.

And I hope that, when he realizes exactly what he’s done, he feels absolutely, unforgivably terrible – that he didn’t take me with him. Thoughtless bastard.