The Axe and the Aftermath

June fifteenth. The thing about agreeing to axe throwing is that you don't really reckon with what you've agreed to until you are standing in a converted warehouse holding a small axe and a stranger in a branded t-shirt is explaining the correct stance with the patience of someone who has explained it four hundred times this month. Simone looked completely at home. I did not look completely at home.

She had been mentioning it for probably three weeks. There's a place, she said, as if that were a complete sentence, and eventually I said yes the way I sometimes agree to things before I've thought them through, which is, per the blog's entire record, apparently my primary mode of operating. We went on a Sunday afternoon, which felt like the right level of commitment: serious enough to count as a thing, casual enough that no one would feel bad if we were terrible. Only one of us was terrible, and it was me, and Simone handed someone her phone before my first throw expressly to document it. I noted that.

The axe went... elsewhere. Simone's face says it all.

For the record: the axe did not hit the target. It also did not hit anything else alarming, so I'm counting it as a draw between myself and the laws of physics. By the third round I had graduated from 'genuine safety concern' to 'reliably mediocre,' which felt like growth. Simone hit the target twice and reacted like it was obvious, which is very Simone. The pottery class has been on Wednesdays and this was a Sunday and I think we are slowly filling in the whole week. The open-studio date is still written on the back of my bus pass. One crisis at a time.

Between rounds. We look way more confident than we were.